The sweetness of fruit

Have you ever noticed that fruit seems to be sweeter at the bottom?  I’ve been eating a lot of fruit lately and I’ve noticed this is not only peaches but plums, oranges and pears.  Apples seem to be sweet all over and so do bananas but softer fruit isn’t.  It’s like all the sugar in the fruit has run to the bottom!

My fruit cube has had quite the variety of fruits in it the past few weeks – a welcome change from the winter where it was mostly apples and oranges with 2 bananas every week.  Now we have fewer apples and oranges + plums, cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots and of course the 2 bananas.  I really am not a plum fan I’ve discovered.  I’ll eat them but lately they have been too sour.  I eat the bottom half and throw away the rest because the only part that’s sweet is the bottom.  And I don’t like the skin – it is too thick and tart.  I have learned to eat the fuzzy skin of the peaches and apricots though – I used to peal them.  Well, I used to peal just about everything but lately I’ve been eating that too!

At home Erik and I have been going through a watermelon about every other day!  They are in season and we both LOVE watermelon.  Last weekend Bill and I found a vendor that had Black Diamond watermelons from SE Missouri – yummy!  If you’ve ever eaten one of these, you won’t want the striped ones.  Black Diamonds are solid dark green and very red inside.  The red seems to go deeper into the rind that other melons and so you get more to eat.  And Sweet!  Oh MY!

Bill used to ‘pitch melons’ back in the day and every once in a while they would ‘drop’ one and it would bust open.  They would eat the heart out.  What a great treat when working out in the hot sun – a cool melon!  And so full of juice – I have to eat it outside or over the sink!

Ah summer.  It’s hot outside but cool and sweet in fruit!

A rant

I’m finding all sorts of folks over here on BlogSpot that I know – apparently some had already jumped ship on the live journal side a while ago.  I am here because of the outage of 4+ days now on that server.  I’ve had short outages in the past but usually by the next day I could log back in but this time I’ve not been able to log in all week. I have not seen any of my LJ blogs since last Friday!  That’s a little much in my opinion and so I came here.

I like this place.  J  Blogs are easy to enter and I don’t have to mess with html code here like it did on LJ to format my posts.  The editor works very much like Word so it’s great!  Usually I write everything in word first anyway so that I can spell check and such so this will be one less step in the process possibly.

I miss my friends on LJ too.  I can’t even log in to tell them where I went and if I could post there is the possibility that they won’t see it anyway since they are probably all having the same issues I am!  In the past year this has happened several times – like I said, usually for a short period of time – this is the longest it’s ever been and I had just had enough. 

So here I am and IF I can ever log back into LJ I will direct all my friends here.  I am hopeful that I will be able to pull my posts from LJ and get them all over here eventually but I don’t know if that will happen or not. 

What’s cookin?

For those of you new to this blog (and those joining me here from LJ), this is a regular feature of my blog now.  Usually on Monday or Tuesday I post what the menu is for dinner that week.  This helps me plan ahead which saves money, helps me stay on program (weight watchers), and helps me remember what I planned! 

At my work we have a service from the Bellville Farmer’s Market every week called Fruit my Cube.  We get a box of fruit – usually about 18 pieces – delivered to our office on Tuesdays.  Recently they have started doing a veggie cube as well.  So while the fruit usually stays on my desk all week for me to snack on at work, the veggie cube goes home and gets incorporated into meals that week.

This week we have 8 ears of corn and 6 tomatoes – all home grown right there within sight of the St. Louis Arch!  The corn is great but this is like the 4rth or 5^th week of corn every week and they keep sending us more each week!  I can only fix so many corn recipes.  So if you have a great recipe that you would like to share – please do!  Otherwise, I’m going to have to start cutting it off the cob and freezing it until this winter when I don’t have fresh corn and want some.  BTW, did you know that when you cut corn off the cob with a dull knife it goes everywhere?  I found this out last week.  J

Tuesday:     we had breakfast for dinner.  A friend of mine here at work traded me eggs for blackberries.  I was expecting a dozen – I got 2!  Bill had already given me a dozen this past weekend as he wanted farm fresh eggs as well.  So we had bacon and eggs and English muffins with juice and milk – the kids said I was the best mom!  ;)

Wednesday:  Smothered Steaks – this is a favorite recipe of a friend of mine who recently moved to Colorado.  I am going to mix up my Salisbury steak recipe for the steak part and then follow hers from there.  Mushrooms, onions, stewed tomatoes (I’ll be using fresh) and cream of mushroom soup – yummy!

Thursday:     Tuna casserole – my kids favorite

Friday:          Hamburger Mac Skillet – basically what ever veggies you have on hand, stir into some browned hamburger and add pasta – I still have some veggies left from last weeks foray into my friend Cheri’s garden – I’m going to use those.

Saturday:      Stir fry – sounds a lot like Friday’s meal but this will be at Bill’s house and we will use up the rest of those veggies with chicken over rice.

Sunday:         Grilled Salmon with grilled corn on the cob and assorted veggies

Monday:       I haven’t really gotten this far yet – probably leftovers.  This will be the last night we are home before we leave for SC but Bill will be at the house all week to watch the critters so he will need leftovers too… I’ll have to think on this one.

One week and counting

Tom graduates from basic training on August 4^th and we are all going to go to South Carolina to watch.  I checked my airline tickets today and was about to check my hotel reservation when I couldn’t find it!  OH NO!  Panic ensued for about 15 minutes while I frantically searched all the places I usually put this stuff in my cubicle here at work.  Finally I thought to look in my email box and there it was.  Phewww!

So, I got on Google maps and mapped out from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the base, from the hotel to Wal-Mart (priorities you know), and from the hotel to the zoo (graduates get free tickets to the zoo when in uniform and we need something to do off base).  So now I have my travel plans all printed out, maps in hand, reservations checked, just need to pack our clothes and catch our flight next Tuesday.

I’ve been busy watching videos of their Victory Concert that they attended over the weekend.  Tom was on the floor by the stage where there were filming so he is on camera lots of times!  He looks good – course they all look pretty much alike with their hair cut off and all in the same uniform but I look for the receding hairline and found him right off!  LOL.  I wish I knew how to capture the vid to post it here but I have been trying for two days to do that and can’t figure it out yet.

We were hoping to be able to spend the day with him on Friday after graduation so our flight doesn’t take off till after 5:00pm – unfortunately, he will be on a bus to Virginia for AIT on Friday morning so we have all day Friday in Columbia SC to spend… so I checked and it’s only 2 hours to Charlotte and the ocean!  My kids haven’t seen the Atlantic so I think we’ll make a day trip out of it – as long as we are back at the airport by 4:00pm we should be good.

I don’t know if I can take pictures on base – military has strange rules you know – but if I can, I’ll take some.  I am disappointed that he won’t be able to wear his dress blues.  They have to wear their everyday uniform for graduation because ‘during wartime ‘(When did we declare war?) ‘they have to be ready at all times on base to answer the call to duty’.  I also found out that the picture of them in their dress blues is photo shopped!  Imagine that.  So, I’ll get a pic of him in dress uniform but it won’t be HIS dress uniform it will be the same one that they all get… seems sort of dirty in a way. 

I can’t wait to see my boy – in a week!

Hello and weekend update

I've come from Live Journal.  They have been down for 3 days and that's just not acceptable!  So here I am.  I'll try to get all my old posts from there over to here soon but until then - here I am!  :) 

This weekend really had some ups and downs.  Friday night seemed like everything that could happen did but it all turned out good. 

(bear with me - on LJ I would have put a cut here so that you didn't have to see everything unless you wanted too - but I don't know how to do that here yet so until then you get it all!  *smile* )

Friday afternoon – stopped by my friend Cheri's house and plundered her garden while I was there.  On the way to Farmington from her house I saw a momma turkey and one chick cross the road in front of me.  They jumped into the verge on the other side and disappeared into the woods.

Friday night – after stopping in Farmington to have dinner with Bill and a trip to Wal-Mart for some groceries, on the way to his house I hit a deer.  Yes, it jumped right out in front of me and I couldn’t do anything about it.  I thought I had killed it but Bill said it jumped up and ran like the wind off into the woods.  I don’t know if it went off and died later or if it was just bruised but it certainly did damage to my Escape. 

I took these pictures on Saturday morning since it was dark and we couldn’t really see what the total damage was yet. 

Of course I was upset at hitting the deer and I couldn’t drive very fast on the way home because we didn’t know if the hood would pop up so when I had a small raccoon run out in front of me on the drive back to Bill’s, I was able to swerve around him and miss him.  What was it with animals trying to commit suicide in front of me!

Then we went into Fredericktown to try to find some of the things on my grocery list that they didn’t have at Wal-Mart the night before – nothing.  This is a small town and I realize that they aren’t quite in the 20^th century yet but pita bread?  They had never heard of it before!  (OMG where am I moving to?)  I wasn’t surprised then that they didn’t have the meat either.  I can get it frozen in my grocery story (they don’t have fresh) and it’s acceptable.  They also didn’t have shallots or swish chard.  *sigh*

So, my meal plans got all re-arranged this weekend but I did manage to stay within my points (weight watchers) and was able to have pizza when I got home last night.

Bill had the trench dug for the electric wire coming from the pole to the house on Friday.

So we picked went to get the wire and a breaker box on Saturday while we were in town but we couldn’t pick up the wire because the owner of the hardware store had to move the fork lift and in order to move that he had to move his pickup truck – which had a flat.  So, they changed the flat on the truck and delivered the wire about 3:00.  There are some advantages to living in a small community – one they trust you to take the wire home, cut what you want and bring back the roll – that is unless they have a flat on the pickup truck!  LOL  But the kid that brought it out helped Bill get it rolled out into the trench – we gave him a Gatorade and sat in the shade for a few minutes (Bill and he talking as men do when they have a few minutes in the shade) and the he was on his way.

(Here Bill is tieing the wire to the mule so that he can pull it with the mule the rest of the way - that wire is heavy!)

It was so hot that we took a break for dinner after they got the wire laid – besides it looked (and sounded) like it was going to rain.   So I went back to the house and cooked dinner.  After dinner and by the time it cooled off enough to think about working on the wire it was dark. 

Sunday we went out to hook up the box and the wire to the pole.  Bill had to cut the floor so that he could run the wire under the shop and up to the box.

As we were driving the mule up to the property we were noticing the sky was getting dark and there were some rumbles off in the distance.  The day before when it had looked like that we got maybe a half dozen drops and that was it so we didn’t think much about the impending rain…. Until it started to sprinkle and the wind picked up.  We had opened all the windows in the shop to let the breeze blow through and as Bill stood up and looked out one of the windows he commented that we probably should think about going back up to the house.  I looked out said window and saw the rain coming across the field and said if we were going we better go now.

So we closed all the windows and jumped on the mule as big fat wet drops started to fall and the wind really picked up.  Strangely as we drove madly down the road toward Bill’s house the rain let up a bit and the wind dyed down but not enough that it actually stopped so we kept going.  We put the mule away, closed the doors and ran into the house just as the storm broke.  Big booms, trees blowing over sideways, rain so hard you could hardly see – yeah, we made it just in time!

The rain was certainly needed and it brought in much cooler air but once it was over and we went back up to the property – the trench was full of water and there would be no working on electricity that day! 

Bill called me later last night when I got home and told me that the rain soaked in very fast – the trench was still a little muddy but the water had gone down so he was working last night at putting the breaker box up and snaking the wire through the conduit into the shop.  By this afternoon, we should have power!    Woo Hoo!

He’s going to call the well guys this week to have them come out and check the well.  Maybe by this weekend we can have water in the shop too!

Oh and I almost forgot – I finally got to try fried green tomatoes.

I like them!