A Mother of a Day

As some of you already know, I have this love/hate relationship with Mothers Day.

On one hand I'm thinking: "Hell yeah...I spent 596 hours popping you out; you damn well better bring me weak coffee, burnt toast and a wilted flower in bed this morning."

On the other hand I'm thinking this is a sort of life style choice and no one else gets an entire day to honor their lifestyle choice (except, you know...fathers). You know who deserves a day? People who clean public toilets in bus stations. Now those are people who deserve a free dinner.

I am of the firm belief that no one's job is more important than anyone else's and income in certainly no reflections of a task's function to society; otherwise those annoying Kardashian people would be living in a van down by the river. (Why are those Kardashian people creeping out of the sewer of inane cable television into places like the Washington Correspondents Dinner? Shouldn't someone set out traps or something to prevent such infestation?)

That being said, I never feel entitled to too much hoopla when it comes to Mothers Day because I'm a little reluctant to celebrate merely doing my job. Mothers Day is like saying: "Hooray! The human relegated to your care isn't dead! Good job!"

So, I'm always happy with whatever is planned in my honor on Mothers Day, lest someone find out I'm not quite as saintly as Hallmark would have you believe. So I have a few confessions to make:

• My kids always had a consistent bedtime, not because I was a good mother, but because I was tired.
• I listened to audio books and knitted during Little League games.
• If we were in the pediatrician's office, there had to be a limb dangling or someone's brains seeping out of their ear; I couldn't see paying a doctor to tell me "it's a virus that's going around."
• All while my kids were growing up I told them that Disney World was a huge, poorly-run amusement park where people stand in line all day long for a thrill lasting a cumulative half-hour; I told them Disney spends all it's money on marketing, which is why everyone thinks it's this great place to go. (In short -- I told them the truth.) Consequently, they not only have no desire to go to Disney World -- they have an active dislike of anything related to it. That's right -- I stole Mickey Mouse from my children.
• I ate some of their Teddy Grahams. Okay, I ate a lot of their Teddy Grahams. Okay, so a few times I ate so many of their Teddy Grahams that they were forced to have toast for a snack (hey -- I put cinnamon and sugar on it...).

So there you have it. And through it all, I still received this yesterday from Heir 1 (it's good to have a kid who works for Panera):



And this from Dirtman (this is one of six):



And was treated to dinner and a movie by Heir 2 (accompanied by Caisee, who was treating her mom, Carol, too!) and a trip to The State Arboretum at Blandy Farm by Dirtman.

Lunch

All this in spite of everything.

So I'm not even angry that I woke up this morning to a sink full of dirty dishes. Well, not too angry...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation*

I stared out at this*2:



Tried to ignore this (not for the faint of heart or stomach).

Did this:

Read these:

Came home to this*3:



(Sigh)

*Summer vacation generously supplied by Mr. and Mrs. Dark Garden, to whom we are eternally grateful, but not so much as to adopt their TV viewing habit (Oh, yes. I saw you two watching wrestling and I tried to convince myself that you were doing it so I would comment on it until I actually heard you discussing the program like you watch this on a regular basis at which point I immediately took up smoking, binge drinking and hard drugs because now I realize there is absolutely no hope for the world and I might as well die young {ish}.)

*2 Believe it or not, we were at Outerbanks -- nice North Carolina beaches. I will not take my camera to the beach. But you all know what a beach looks like, right?

*3 Our neighbor IH across the street naively took a dozen. She told Dirtman, "no more for awhile," not realizing that her acceptance of said cucumbers has automatically contractually obligated her to receive cucumbers every day until the end of the growing season -- unless, of course, she sends back the card we mail her to opt out for a days' worth, which I have a feeling will probably get lost in the mail. IH suggest we put out a table with the extra produce, but I have a feeling that's a good way to lose a table and not much else.

*4 We would also like to acknowledge Heir 1 for staying home and taking care of all the animals and plants without making me feel guilty about it, even though Zsa Zsa was on one of her yogurt and farina diets, Topper gets the runs whenever I leave, Abbey was finishing being in heat and Salt continuously slipped off to peruse the neighborhood. Miraculously, dogs and cats are all happy and healthy and one, in particular, still qualifies to enter a convent (were she not canine, I guess...).

Cucumber-some II

Hello and welcome to the cucumber blog -- all cucumbers, all the time...

So I managed to get this done today:



This is a gallon of garlic dills that will have to ultimately be refrigerated since I don't have a canner.

I would be rejoicing, only this is what is left:



Sigh. I can't devote any more refrigerator space to pickles. As pickles go, these are my favorite (everyone else likes the ubiquitous bread and butter pickle, but I don't have the ingredients on hand for those). But how many pickles can one eat? And, in terms of popularity, cheese, yogurt, milk, lunch meat and leftovers far outweigh pickles which are sort of an afterthought -- a spare link, if you will -- in the Linguini food chain.

Cucumber - some

The past four days have revolved around our kennel club's dog show. The result of this is that we are now awash in cucumbers, in spite of having given some away (not easy when many of your neighbors also are awash in cucumbers), eaten as many as possible, and have even more on the vine that will be ready by the end of the week.

So I am preparing refrigerator pickles out of the canning pickles that somehow got planted (the motives of which are called into question because we have no means to properly can). Every meal is accompanied by cucumber salad. I even made a cucumber sandwich for lunch today, even though a really good cucumber sandwich require white bread and all I had was whole grain. In perusing other recipes, I found several suggesting we eat cooked cucumbers and, while I'm game for anything, I can't see the other residents getting that adventuresome in their cucumber consumption.



In January we will miss the cucumbers since I can't bring myself to pay ridiculous prices for those things in the grocery store. But, for now, they decorate the entire house.

I have a feeling the cukes will be the least of our problems in a few day -- Dirtman brought in the first of the zucchini this morning.

Your produce alone has been worth the trip

There is nothing I would like better than to take credit for our first basket of vegetables pulled from the garden, but I can't. Other than my expressing a few opinions, choosing the seeds and doing some weeding and thinning, Dirtman is the one responsible for tonight's salad.

Oh, I cleaned it all and sliced the green onions. But he did all the digging and planting, not to mention the watering (when needed) and obsessing. And he's the one who's been out there tying up all the tomato and pepper plants with my old pantyhose (as the thing he's tying with, I mean -- he's not just out there with my pantyhose because that would be creepy).

It's not a lot, but it's rather impressive for a garden that was dug for the first time this year.

Oh! I am responsible for the basket, which is a $1 thrift store find. Take that over-priced, over-produced Longaberger.

I love work. I could watch it for hours...well, a half hour...

Pretty barren, huh?

Such is the plight of trying to establish a new garden area. First it has to be plowed, then disked a few times, all done when the ground is relatively dry and all done by a third party whose schedule understandably does not revolve around us. It's been so wet lately, today was the first day we could plant anything.

Rumor had it that even today's weather could not be relied upon and we almost scrapped plans to get all the plants in. But the sky stayed clear and we went ahead.

We.

Actually, it was more like Dirtman getting the plants in and Zsa Zsa and I sitting in the shade watching. I'm still a little shaky after two days in bed and, while the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak (and flabby and white). As for Zsa Zsa -- well, you don't expect The Zsa Zsa to work, do you?

And I must confess that after awhile I went into the house, did dishes and then sat in my happy place and knit. Yeah. I did. While Dirtman sweated away in the field, I sat in the shade with a tall glass of ice water and knit (a project I will share some other day).

I offered real meat for dinner, but he was too hot and tired to digest anything so heavy. So tomorrow is real meat. Tonight features the last of this area's asparagus crop, hard boiled eggs and this conversation with Heir 1:

Me: Asparagus and eggs for dinner tonight.

Heir 1: Uhhhh....(Makes a face)

Me: It's perfect for a hot day.

Heir 1: That's not a dinner. It's a salad -- heated up. It's almost as bad as Spud Night.

Me: Other people have Spud Night.

Heir 1: Other people have Spud Lunch.

Me: Think of Spud Night as Chili Night with a potato under it.

Heir 1: (Makes another face).

Me: Oh, dear.

Heir 1: What?

Me: I think you need to find a new restaurant.