Dear Diary: Catching Up on a Few Days

After five straight days of mostly staying home, I feel like I am almost caught up.

I spent Thursday pricing and packing things for our booths, putting away the summer's program materials, and putting up pickles. And enjoying the first day at home for a week.

Larry picked these for me the other day. We planted sunflowers with birdseed (black oil sunflower seed, and they did great)

Friday was more pickles and preparations for Saturday's all-day storytelling for Museum Day. And Saturday, of course, I was gone all day, presenting stories at the Campus Martius Museum in Marietta.

Set up and ready for stories Saturday morning.

It was a good day; I was positioned in a space with about 20 chairs at the entrance to the hourly tour entrance to the historic house under the museum's roof. So people gathered in my area to await the tour, and almost all of them sat down and listened, participated, sang and played with me. There were lots of children there so my puppets got a workout, and the adults were fascinated by the coal mining artifacts I brought with me. Groups came and went all day; I took a short break for lunch but mostly I stayed at it, telling story after story.

Best, I think, was the group of about nince boys and few girls, all in the 10-12 year-old age group. For them I told one of my favorites, Jack and Old Fire Dragaman. It's a little longer than some stories but perfect for this age and they loved it. Later two of the boys came back with their grandmother and asked for more stories about that boy named Jack. So I told a few more as well as few fractured fairytales. Each time I finished, one of the boys said, "Tell another one." Music to a storyteller's ears!

I stopped by our booth in Marietta briefly to do a tidy-up and was happy to find sales had been brisk. I was one tired storyteller by the time I got home, but it was a really good day all around. Then Sunday was time to re-group yet again. I made more pickles--and that is the last I will make this year!--and stir-fried a big batch of squash, onions and peppers for the freezer. This mix is so good in mid-winter, mixed with cooked pork or chicken and put over rice or noodles with a little sauce to spice it up.

Monday was back in the kitchen to fix the batch of pasta Larry made. This pasta is a story in itself. It started back in June when we were at writing camp. It was my day to cook dinner but another guy offered to make spaghetti. All I had to do was cook the noodles and make salad. Easy! He made a hot and spicy sauce that was delicious, and there was a LOT of it. He didn't use the jar of store-bought sauce I'd bought either, so I brought the leftover sauces home. I put his in the freezer and figured we'd use it some day when we were too busy too cook. That day came, and I tasted his sauce again--it was even hotter, if possible, so I added the store-bought pasta sauce along with some of my homemade and some of my canned tomatoes and some sausage. Once again, there was a lot left over. So we froze it again. While I was gone Saturday Larry decided to use the sauce with some penne pasta. He went to add salt, and the lid came off the salt caontainer and dumped a bunch into the pot. Rather than scoop it out, he just stirred it in--and the result was inedible. Back to the freezer the whole mess went. Monday I cooked MORE penne pasta, added tomatoes and cut up squash and the pasta was fantastic. But then we had this huge pot, enough to feed a dozen people. So it's back in the freezer, divided into freezer bags of meal-size proportions. I am beginning to think we will never see the end of that camp spaghetti! Nutrition-wise--probably none left. Ah well.

I worked on paperwork Monday, too, getting my kitchen desk cleaned up and catching up on all sorts of things that I'd left hanging over the summer. I got birthday cards ready to mail, renewed some memberships, found the title to the van--it's finally paid off!, and was rewarded with a clean desk top.

Today was town day. And the day to pay our taxes. We had several stops to make but the most important one was getting all of our taxes paid up. What a good feeling that is. It was nice to find out we got the West Virginia Homestead Exemption on our property taxes too, which saved us a couple hundred dollars. We met some friends for lunch and had a nice chat, stopped at acouple thrift stores and found some good things for our booths and to sell on ebay. And that was today.

Tomorrow I pick up from a couple pickers, and also pick up some old metal lawn furniture. Then it will be time to knuckle down on plans for next Tuesday's performance for More Than Words in Hurricane, WV. I am so happy that musician Paul Gartner will join me for that, adding fiddle and banjo music to the evening.

For now, it's time to stop and watch this storm that's rolling in, and just enjoy the rest of the evening.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.