Staying Positive

72 this morning. Partly sunny, humid, but no rain since the wee hours.

The Naked Ladies are in bloom! I love these lilies, also called Surprise Lilies because the leaves come up and die away completely in the spring,  and then around this time the flowers come up with no leaves at all.

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.

Covid Journal, Day 333: Waiting for the Storm

28 again this morning, cloudy, with an icy rain. Rain at 28F? Apparently so, even though the temperature is below freezing.

We're in wait mode now, as the storm approaches us from the southwest. This is a rare direction for us in winter, although it happens often enough in summer. I am so sorry for all of you in Texas, Arkansas and other states that are currently feeling the effects of this storm. Our turn is coming, although it may be ice and not snow here.

So while we wait, there is this lady in the living room who is seriously under-dressed for wintry weather.

I acquired the dress form a few weeks ago, and have put it to work to model for eBay listings. I detest listing clothing, but silly me bought some things a few years ago that have been hanging in my workroom, waiting for me to bite the bullet. Now that I have this dress form, I have absolutely no excuse not to list them. Except that I hate doing it. Clothing requires such care, examining closely for even the smallest damage, cleaning, measuring...the list goes on and on, Measuring is a particularly onerous task--across the shoulders, across the chest, waist, hips. Length of sleeves, length from shoulder to hem, and waist to hem. I don't necessarily have to do all of those for every piece, but each requires at least 3 measurements. And then there are buyers who ask for measurements I'd never have thought of.

So today I have been listing vintage nightgowns and negligee sets. They sell well, which is the only up side to this--and I've told Larry to drag me right out of a story if I look like I'm considering buying any more of them. Still, I've sold fur and faux fur coats this winter, along with a variety of jackets. And already 3 or 4 of the gowns and bed jackets have sold. So I should quit bellyaching and get on with it.

That's really all that's on my plate for today. I need to get back to my tax returns, and that will probably be tomorrow's work. Larry on the other hand has been busy as can be, which always means he's happy. The man loves to work, especially outside, even in bad weather. Today he did his usual outdoor rounds--starting the vehicles and  cleaning ice off them and the steps to the house, caring for the chickens and pets, getting wood for tonight's fire. Then he tackled the dryer. We've had so much trouble with dust, and it can only be the dryer. So he cleaned out the long vent line, and let's hope that solved the problem.

I finished the BBC series I've been watching, The House of Eliott. It was excellent--and so disappointing in that the series was never finished, and so we are left with several cliffhangers in the last episode. It wasn't lack of viewership that canceled the series, but the fact that the sets were destroyed in a fire and replacing them was prohibitively expensive. It's just a shame, as the series covered the fascinating world of high fashion and haute couture. The costumes were gorgeous, the storylines compelling, and the acting top-rate. I will have to buy the book on which the series was based, I suppose, to find out how it all ended. I do recommend it, though, as long as you know up front that it's not a finished story. The book, by the way, is by Jean Marsh.

I also finished my last Maeve Binchy book, A Week in Winter, and tried and failed to get interested in the book about Tuscany and another title, A Walk on the Beach, which was another nonfiction personal narrative that seemed just too...I don't know, too full of wise life lessons? At my age I'm pretty good with life lessons,having had rather too many myself, and am not seeking inner wisdom from someone else's experiences. That sounds wrong, but I'm not sure how to say it better. So I have settled into a Mary Stewart omnibus of 4 novels. I read Mary Stewart in the 60's and 70's and it's fun to re-visit these stories. Her writing is superb, although the story is a bit on the predictable side. I've started in with The Moonspinners; the title is based on an old Greek myth of the naiads. Here is an excerpt from the book that explains:

‘Moonspinners. They’re naiads — you know, water-nymphs. Sometimes, when you’re deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and onto these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don’t carry a distaff. They’re not Fates, or anything terrible; they don’t affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grows on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest, and the creatures of the hillsides are safe from the hunter and the tides are still . . .’

‘Then, on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles, into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising from the sea, just a thin curved thread, reappearing in the sky. Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moonspinners start their work once more, to make the night safe for hunted things . . .’

There is magic in these words, isn't there? Such an interesting legend. Yet, I can find no mention in my quick research of naiads spinning anything, let alone the moon. They were river nymphs and there were many of them, but spinners of the moon? I wonder where Mary Stewart came upon this myth, or if she simply spun it herself to weave into her story? I'll keep digging, though, because it just fascinates me. And I don't mind if it was after all just Stewart's imagination. 

Off to cook dinner tonight, a simple task since it will be last night's leftover pasta, green beans, and rolls.

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