72 this morning. Partly sunny, humid, but no rain since the wee hours.
I am still testing positive for Covid, after 12 days with this unwelcome guest. The good news is that Larry now tests negative and is back to his usual busy self.
I don't feel that bad, but still run the occasional low fever, and I am more tired than usual. If this is all the effects of the virus, I feel lucky. Larry had it before me, so it's no surprise he got well first.
It is so nice to see the sun again after so many days of rain. There were terrible storms last night, all of which thankfully went north and south of us. My sleep was pretty disturbed by all the lightning-- the sky stayed lit up almost all night and I could hear the distant rumble of thunder. We had more rain but at least no damaging winds. My son said it sounded like a fast train going through at his house, and his yard is littered with broken branches.
I was in the kitchen all day yesterday. You remember the big bag of bones I thought I found in the freezer? Turns out it was a large chunk of pork from the hog we raised in 2019! It was still in good condition, so I cooked it up, then shredded it and cooked it slowly with barbecue sauce. I ended up with 5 big freezer bags of pork barbecue, not made in the traditional way, perhaps, but delicious. I also thawed 5 bags of deer burger and cooked that with barbecue sauce too, making sloppy Joe mix for the freezer. Can you tell I had a big jug of Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce on hand? It's not something we eat very often, but I had bought it when I thought we would be doing a lot of cooking out earlier in the summer. The rain in July kinda squelched that idea, but now we have plenty of ready to eat goodness in the freezer.
I saw a recipe last year that I meant to try but never got around to it. It was on The Spruce Eats website, a site where I have found many excellent recipes. This one was for Lemon yellow squash bread. It was fairly simple to make, and oh my is it delicious, very like a lemon pound cake.
Today, I seem to be good for nothing, just too tired to get into much. I did slice up all those bananas that were getting over-ripe, and put two cookie sheets full in the freezer to flash freeze.
Tomorrow I will bag and seal them and, according to Google, they should keep well for later use. We shall see.
Larry dug--well, mostly he pulled--up the potatoes today after some gardeners reported theirs were rotting in the ground because of so much rain. Larry said he could just grab the old vines and pull and then some of the potatoes would just come right up, the ground is that wet. He said it was the easiest harvest he'd ever had. He did find a few that had started to rot but most were fine. He ended up with 6 five-gallon buckets full, more than we will ever use, I am pretty sure. He rinsed the mud off them and is spreading them out on pallets in the woodshed to dry out of direct sunlight.
One thing about not feeling well is I have time to blog and even read a little, although I find it hard to concentrate. I am reading another older novel, written in 1942, called Winter Wheat, by Mildred Walker. I am enjoying the details of the life of wheat farmers in Montana back in those days. No electricity, a very simple lifestyle but one with plenty of hard work. It is evident that the author must have either grown up or lived on such a ranch. I was surprised to learn that after WWI a person could claim land in Montana for homesteading; I suppose the government was trying to get more people onto those western lands. But I have to wonder why they didn't just let the Native Americans have it. Our history certainly has a lot of questionable actions by our government.
We are still watching the series A French Village, from Netflix by Mail. It is hard to watch sometimes, as I am not one who can watch violence, torture, and cruelty. So sometimes I have to fast forward through some scenes, but the treatment of the Jews is appalling. This is just an ordinary little village under Nazi Occupation, and the story follows the lives of people there who try to live as normally as possible while trying to appease the Nazis and not cause problems that would bring repercussions for everyone. But even these French citizens still looked at Jews with contempt and most did not try to help any of the Jews, who lived in their village and were part of their community. This is part of the war we seldom hear about--I took a whole semester course on WWII but all we focused on were causes of the war, battles, generals, politicians, and the aftermath. There was never any mention of how ordinary people who were not in battles, etc, lived and managed to somehow still keep homes and businesses open. I know a bit about it of course because my mother lived through the war in England, but this series provides a wider and deeper perspective.
Enough rambling for today!
Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.
