A Homemade Day

This morning I made myself a quiche with a whole bunch of stuff from the garden: onion, lamb’s quarters, kale, bok choy, sunflower leaves, nasturtium leaves, and basil. The peppers and tomatoes in the garden aren’t ripe yet, so those were store-bought, but theoretically in a few weeks I should be able to make it all from the garden except the mushrooms and, of course, the eggs. If I could just have chickens, I could do the whole thing from scratch, really. I threw in some store-bought cheese too, but if I took the time, that could have been homemade also. I had a slice of homemade bread with the quiche, with homemade grape jelly.

This afternoon I’ll be cleaning the cured garlic, readying it for storage. Last night I cleaned the dried lavender and froze a bag of it, enough for hundreds of cookies to come.

Yogurt is now percolating gently in the slow cooker. There’s the prospect of lettuce/spinach/kale salad with strawberries for lunch. My husband is in the kitchen pre-making dinner with home-bottled tomatoes and zucchini fresh from the yard (the good Italian grey kind, not the dark-green baseball bat kind). And I have a glass to hand of homemade grape juice, bottled last year.

Life doesn’t get better than this.

A crazy week, with more to come

We've been up at the church we're renovating, finishing drywall so that the painters can come back to finish the remaining bits. I've never enjoyed drywalling, but it saves money to do it ourselves. I'm also scared of heights. Airplanes and cliffs, no problem, but chairs and stepladders make me feel woozy. So picture me standing on top on a scaffold, dust mask and protective glasses suffocating and blinding me, while I mud and sand the ceiling overhead. Dust raining down on my head, coating me completely. No air conditioning, of course, and it was about 28 celsius in the room I was working in. Completely mud-soaked by the time I finished. I still have one more sanding to do next week. I turned on the Bee Gees to distract myself, though, and at one point found myself dancing on the scaffold, so it was okay and --maybe-- a little fun.  

Meanwhile my long-suffering husband was downstairs drywalling and framing out bulkheads and doing all kinds of complicated math, and running back to Mississauga for band events before coming back up. Then we took a day to steam-clean the carpet the tradespeople had messed up downstairs, so we don't have to replace it right away. Bodies aching now.

Came home tonight, mowed the lawn and did three batches of laundry. Tomorrow I will visit with my niece, who is in town for a conference, which will be lovely. Then the next day it's back up to the church to finish the drywalling and start moving furniture downstairs to allow the painters to complete the upstairs in August.

I look at people sitting on their porches in the cool of the evening, and I wonder how on earth they find the time to sit down.

Visible progress at last!