I need to make Charles' belated birthday cake today! I also want to roast a chicken and make hot chicken sandwiches for dinner. And because our bag of cod loins from Sam's thawed thoroughly while we were in Meijer, I have three pounds of cod to use up quickly. Half of that will go into a fish lasagna (no, I swear, it's made with white sauce, it's good) for dinner tomorrow and probably the remainder will be split into thinner pieces to fry or grill. Because of course we just had fish for dinner on Friday.

I also need to get outside to clear enough of the garden to plant all those tomatoes I bought last weekend. This will be made more difficult by the fact that the outdoors is now inimical to me again. Benadryl coma, here I come.

I currently have fourteen pounds of white furry fury in my lap making it difficult to do my exchange.

Burpee doesn't currently have Brandywine plants available, and they don't say if they're just backordered or what. Guess I might as well just buy the seeds at Lowe's then.

While Charles mowed the lawn for the first time this season (after starting the mower using the trick Bob taught us) I filled the window box with potting soil and planted some lettuce and spinach seeds. In the process I turned on the water to the outdoor spigot and learned that something's wrong with it (probably the gasket, Charles thinks) because it's leaking water everywhere. Time for a trip to Menard's. Maybe as part of this process we can haul out of the cellar the giant useless pipe that leads to the defunct sump. Maybe even as part of this project we can replace the pipe leading to the outside (it just runs along the top of the staircase and then through the wall) and have it actually come out from the wall a wee bit so it's easier to reach. Not that Tom and his father jury-rigged EVERYTHING they did or anything.

Then I pulled up/cut off all the fake blackberries taking over the edge of the garden (they look like blackberry vines to me, but they haven't produced so much as much as a blossom since we moved in... they've had their chance) and pulled some of the largest stuff out of the garden. Next to rake up the dry stuff, pull up the world's largest dandelion, and turn the soil over. I think this year I'm just going to buy plants from Burpee, and stick to tomatoes (Brandywine!) and peppers.

THEN I decided since I had the pruning shears out already, I might as well try taking care of the rosebush next to the house. I cut a bunch of dead branches out and now look like I picked up an unwilling cat. (Did I mention I can't find any of my gloves?) I'm not sure how you tell a climbing rose from a bush rose, or if there's a way to train a bush rose other than just cutting off the branches going in the direction you don't want. Time to do research.

Also we programmed the Prius to open the garage door (not that there's room for a car inside, mind) and are trying to figure out how to program the keypad on the garage since that's one piece of info that wasn't left for us.

Something trampled, pulled up, and ate my corn last night. We assume it was either raccoons or possums.

My sinuses are trying to kill me.

Greatly enjoying the Anansi Boys audiobook read by Lenny Henry. I was a little dubious at first about a Gaiman book that was not read by Gaiman, but Lenny Henry does excellent old Jamaican woman voices.0

Off to attempt to drug myself into oblivion.

I have potato plants showing above the ground! I'm so excited! I first saw them yesterday when I got home--they weren't there the day before! I also have beans, corn, and possibly carrots showing. I need to get in and pull the obvious weeds, like the plants with the blue-purple chevrons on the leaves. I don't like weeding when the plants are still seedlings because sometimes I can't tell what's a plant and what's a weed.

Need to drop off the kitchen knives at Jo-Ann's today to get sharpened.

My hot dog roll pan (and pasta flour) arrived yesterday. Now I just need to get some potato flour or instant mashed potato flakes (so that's why the rolls are so soft compared to regular bread) and I can try making a batch. Again, I'm so excited!

Planning on also making a batch of whoopie pies (the recipe without Marshmallow Fluff) and a recipe of marykosher's spaghetti sauce this weekend.

If we're going down to Noblesville to go to Home Depot I might also stop at the little cemetery near the highway at exit 14 to have a look and maybe take some photos.

August is getting disturbingly close. I need to schedule my dental clearance exam.

Got a clean bill of health at clinic today, including the news that my parathyroid hormone has dropped almost 50%, from about 790 to 350; this is good news, and the drop wasn't so severe that it became an entirely new source of concern.

Charles bought Dean's cinnamon stick ice cream yesterday. It's cinnamon-flavoured ice cream with cinnamon-graham swirls, and it's heavenly. I never eat sweet snacks, but I just had a bowl as dessert.

My Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog is here. This means I can plan my garden and daydream about spring, not that we've had much of a winter. I think this year I'm going to grow things that don't look like they usually do, like the little lemon-looking cucumbers, the purple-black tomatoes, and Ruby Queen sweet corn, which I'll have to buy somewhere else, as Johnny's doesn't carry it. I'd kind of like to try growing potatoes, but what am I going to do with 5 pounds of seed potatoes? Can you eat them? Can I just use supermarket potatoes? The red and the blue potatoes look interesting, as well as the regular old Kennebecs, which you cannot buy in Indiana. (Stupid Idaho.)

I have in my possession a copy of Plum Lovin', the Valentine's day Plum novella. (Novelette? I forget the difference.) This is actually kind of a cautiously-happy thing, as I learned enough from Twelve Sharp to just get on the library's wait list for this one. I hope it's less inappropriately surreal than the Christmas novella and contains more Joe. I think Janet's really lost the plot and she needs to sit down and have a good talk with Carole Nelson Douglas, who is currently on book... twenty-two?... of a really excellent love-triangle-based (a triangle containing NO SLEAZEBALLS! IMAGINE!) series. (Which I've just reread, and have finished the next-to-last book but had to put it on hold to read some library books that came up. I'm eagerly awaiting the next book, due in April.)

I'm going home Friday morning, which is kind of a neutral thing because I'm going there to say goodbye to my grandfather. Also I'm flying out at the asscrack of dawn (6:30) which means getting up at like 2:30 in the morning. Ugh.

We have some very interesting drama of various kinds going on at work. This could be good. It certainly won't be boring.

Dinner tonight is homemade fish chowder (funny time of year for it, but cod was ridiculously cheap at Meijer the other day), which I haven't yet sampled, and homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers, which are both OMFG awesome. Even the veggies from the farmstand last year weren't this good. I haven't had cucumbers and tomatoes this good since I left home, since marykosher always had a garden.

I'm still gonna be drowning in tomatoes, though.

Anybody have some good recipes using fresh tomatoes? I'm going to be up to my arse in them shortly.

Also my one rather runty purple pepper is ripe and beautiful, with more blossoms opening on the plant.

And apparently I got rid of the blender I hated when we moved, so we have to go buy a food processor to make this soup. Which means the blender will turn up in two weeks.

Despite going to bed early, at 9:00, I still wanted no part of getting up this morning.

This was not improved by the fact that I pissed off my lower back somehow. I'll assume it's from bending and stooping to file paperwork yesterday--otherwise I have no clue.

I also spent yesterday with a sore throat, but I'm hoping that it's just allergies and not something more virulent.

Dinner with Jenn tonight at Food King. Yay!

Next year I'm going to grow some red sweet corn! We saw some in Trader Joe's once and it's really cool-looking. You could grow a whole garden of red things--corn, carrots, peppers, tomatoes.

I now have two big-ass Moskovich tomatoes on my kitchen counter. The bigger one is about one and a third pounds. Another is starting to pinken on the vine. So far plans include tomato-basil soup, tomato and fresh mozzarella with balsamic vinaigrette, and just plain old sliced tomatoes.

Boy, those of us with day jobs are at a real social disadavantage.

I have two tomatoes ripening in the garden, despite the humungous tomato plants having collapsed under their own weights in one of the recent storms. The tomato cages are too frail to prevent it. Guess next year I'll need to tie the plants to actual stakes.

I also need to go hunting for cucumbers. I know there's at least one under all that foliage somewhere.

Dear Chadwicks, the fifties called and they want their suit back.

I wish they had tops in tall. I'm not proportioned to really need tall pants, but I seem to have a longer torso than average because I have trouble finding tops that are long enough. I have no interest in showing my midsection, kthxbye.

We rented the new The Hills have Eyes last night because Charles made the mistake of telling me that Billy Drago was in it. Boy, was that a mistake. It sucks just as much as the first movie, only in different ways, and Papa Jupiter got like NO screen time AT ALL. I feel cheated. :P

We ate at the Lemon Drop tonight, this cool little (tiny!) diner that hasn't changed much since it was opened in 1954. Except they're non-smoking! which is a wonderful thing out here in the howling wilderness. The food was good too--the standard burgers, fish sandwiches, chili, etc. Doesn't take credit cards, but they're cheap. And they have a train traveling around near the ceiling.

When we came home I unexpectedly spotted a good-size cucumber hanging on the outside of the fence where the cucumber vines have crawled through. Wow! I've been looking for cucumbers periodically, but the ones I know about are still tiny. I picked that one and found another one in the main garden itself under the leaves. Cool! The tomatoes are growing like crazy but haven't begun to blush yet. I didn't realize tomato plants got so big--these are nearly the same height as the cornstalks. And there are tiny little blossoms on one of the pepper plants.

There are two ears of corn roasting in the oven right now. They came from my own garden which is so INCREDIBLY COOL given my luck with the rock-filled, depleted soil at Bennett Drive and my container gardening attempts.

Back at home. Rocket and Gloria were happy to see me. Chyna didn't materialize at first, apparently afraid that I was big scary Auntie Lisa. My tomatoes are nearly as high as my corn.

First order of business: do an exchange. Then dinner, and some time sitting with my feet up to counteract a day of sitting down driving. (Not good for your circulation, even if you're healthy.) Then another exchange, and then bed. And tomorrow empty out the van, do the laundry, run some errands, and catch up, and prepare for a whole day at work on Friday.

This is the source of my last two weeks' obsession. Yay!! Does this mean the books will come back into print?

And my rosebush has finally bloomed, and turns out to be a pale, pale pink rugosa.

Wednesday, the middle of the week, and an unscheduled weekend coming up. Good thing, as we're pretty much flat broke again.

Got my filling replaced yesterday; it was much less traumatic than I expected. The dentist and his assistants are very reassuring and personable. Since the office is relatively close to work I might stick with them since I hate trying to find a new dentist. I didn't even feel the needle this time (last time I had dental work done the topical anaesthetic apparently didn't work real well), and the numbness was minor and passed pretty quickly. And now I have a nice new filling, and some reassurance that maybe my baby teeth won't fall out any time in the near future.

We went up to Michigan this weekend, only to find out the demo had been canceled because the site was one big morass. We also discovered that the occ med place they were sending me to was only open on weekdays, but they hadn't bothered to check, so it was a big-ass waste of time and money. Great. The demo has been rescheduled for June 3rd.

Rocket knows that it's the alarm clock that makes me get up, but he can't figure out how to make it do that, and it's not for lack of trying. He was on the bed at 3 AM this morning trying to get me up, both by bugging the hell out of me and by pawing at the alarm clock, trying to make it go off. He finally went away again until the alarm actually went off at 5. I knew their food dish had to be totally empty when I heard Chyna's collar jingling in the hallway--she almost never comes upstairs.

Despite the sudden cold and excessive rain my garden seems happy; the tomatoes are looking much more robust, and are all taller than their cutworm collars now. I even have at least two lupines growing! I should plant some more spinach.