Worth the wait

So yesterday I had a hankering for a good beef and onion panini. I finally ate it for dinner tonight.

First I needed beef, but mine was frozen. I pulled out a hunk to thaw in the fridge. This was one of those times where a microwave would have come in handy, but anything worthwhile is worth waiting for, right?

Since I had to wait for the beef to thaw, plenty of time to make good bread. A panini without good bread is not worth eating. Baguette normal from Local Breads fit the bill, and I made that yesterday.

I came home from the office to thawed beef, so I sliced it up. Some got cooked for a future batch of fried rice, some for stir fry, and a couple of thin slices for my sandwich*.

Out to the garden for a sweetly acidic pear tomato, an onion and three basil leaves. Caramelize some onion, slice up the tomato.

Spread a little mayo on the bread. Stack the beef, onion, tomato and basil, top with a thin slice of good Swiss from Alp and Dell. Grill lightly on the panini press.

Mmmmm, dinner is served. A meal worth waiting for.

*Yes, I made this only for me. The rest of the family had other food, nothing that I had to slave over. I can be selfish that way sometimes.

Handwritten note received in the mailbox today:

Isabella, Abigail and Vincent!

You are invited to a water ballon (sic) fight.

Where (last name of kids on the corner)
When Today July 27 @ 1:30 PM
RVSP come to our house to help fill water balloon

Apparently we are formal enough around here that written invitations are de rigueur for water balloon fights!

I read this tonight and it resonated, especially as I keep getting distracted by glimpses of fireflies out the window to my right. Life is passing like those flashes, faster every second.

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

~ Crowfoot, Siksika Nation chief

I was inspired by Trey to try my hand at making peach butter this year. I am so glad I did. It is incredibly yummy! All the other peach butters I have ever tasted have been spiced and not my cup of tea. Trey's recipe is just pure peachy goodness.

And so this year's peach preserving season draws to a close. Peaches in syrup, peach salsa, frozen peach slices for smoothies, peach pie filling and peach butter. It is supposed to last until next year's peaches, but I give it all until mid-February at the latest. I lurve me some peaches.

Randomness on a Friday evening:

~ Hot fudge sauce should not be so easy to make. I am tempted to eat far too much of it when I know I can have a batch made in a mere 5 minutes.

~ Surely I cannot be the only person who seems incapable of reading those verification words that are all over nowadays thanks to smart bots crawling the net? It always takes me two or three tries to get the ones on yahoo because they run the words through a fun house mirror before posting them.

~ I vow to be really, really nice to my sister in order to get some fresh Michigan blueberries when she travels there.

~ Summer cooking is not my thing. I am a definite fall and winter cook. I look forward to hearty soups and pasta dishes again in a few months. The only shining star of summer for me is bruschetta. As the tomatoes grow even larger, I am counting the days until I can make this again.

~ iGoogle is da bomb, so handy for keeping links and newsfeeds right there. I love my iGoogle home page. I hadn't checked out themes for a few months and wow, are there lots of new ones! Pages and pages of themes that were not there last time I looked. My iGoogle is so pretty now.

~ I am knitting a chullo for Abigail for winter with some Cascade 220 Quattro in a variegated orange I picked up with Joan and Lisa recently. I made it slightly pointy on purpose, and the thing looks like a traffic cone. Seriously. The only thing that saves it is the natural stripes I put in. Abigail loves it, but we have already started calling it the traffic cone.

My kitchen is about nine hundred degrees and I probably stink of sweat right now, but I am happy. Why? The fruit guy offered me a killer deal on Missouri peaches (yes, Amy, as good of a deal as the fruit people coming on Friday). I took thirty pounds off his hands late this afternoon.

Peach pie filling is now in the freezer, and seven quarts of peaches in heavy syrup are pinging as they seal on my counter right now. I still have eight pounds of peaches left. The question is do I turn them all into peach butter tomorrow or do I make a peach cobbler and leave the rest for fresh eating?

Such a delicious dilemma.

I was reminded today of how privileged we are and how precarious our life is here. The city is working on the road the runs perpendicular to ours, and they hit something they should not have. Suddenly and without warning, we had no water. It was the middle of a hot summer day, and I had no water for my children. We do not buy bottled water, so there was nothing. I had just started a load of wash, but the water stopped before the tub filled. I had also just spilled a lot of espresso, but I had no water with which to wet the cloth I was using to wipe it up.

Fortunately for us, our dear neighbors still had water, so I filled two pitchers there for us. Those two pitchers instantly became precious. I have always been one to harp on the kids about only taking what they can drink and not dumping out full glasses of water, but if they did not finish their water and no one else drank it, it went to the plants. Suddenly, those partial glasses had to be hoarded in the refrigerator.

It was an interesting experience, thankfully short-lived. It showed me a place where my preparation is lacking. I need to keep a few jugs of water on hand, just in case, for the future. I need to research some storage options because I do not want to pick up a few jugs at the grocery that will sit there leaching chemicals out of the plastic for the next year until they are needed.

The experience also showed me that I am privileged. If my neighbor had not had water or had not been home and we had a dire need of water, I could have walked to the office to fill a jug or gone to the store to buy some. Not everyone in my town, in my country, in my world has that ability. I am thankful that I have that option in my life.

Recent conversation between Isabella and myself:

Me: You know you are my princess.
I: But no one else knows I am a princess.
Me: Does that really matter? You still are a princess to me.
I: Yes. Other people should know I am a princess.
Me: But being a princess isn't about what other people think. It is about acting like a princess, being kind and considerate, being helpful. That makes you a princess.
I: I know. But I still wish that everyone would know that I am a princess.

Do you hear that, world? Princess Bella Bee* would like you to acknowledge her royalty. She is ready and waiting.


*It is actually Princess Bella Bee Bubble Butt, but she gets mad when we say that last part. Really, I cannot imagine why. I just have to add it on mentally.**

**Footnote add-ons inspired by Annie over at The Daily Digress.

I just had a fantastic blog topic; I swear I did. I just opened up the dashboard ready to write, and while the screen flipped, I turned to my agenda for just a second to cross something off my to do list.

Poof

There went my blog idea. I remember that I had an entire thread of thoughts ready to go. Could I tell you what those thoughts were? No. How utterly absurd.

Such is my life.

If anyone finds my brain, please bring it back to me. I could use it.

I was playing around in photoshop, and discovering ways to make black and white photos to really pop. Whaddya think?

Original:
Retouched:

I do love photoshop! So many fun things to learn if only I had unlimited time to sit and play with it.

I was a schoolchild through the eighties. During my youth, the home computer established its foothold in American society, going from novelty to common tool to almost reaching the status of one of our perceived rights (though I fail to find "bear arms and laptops" in the Bill of Rights).

I grew up composing essays and reports on lined notebook paper, then typing them out on the computer for the final edit. I did the same in college, but somewhere between graduation and now, I learned to compose my thoughts while at the keyboard. Personally, I think that is yet another thing I can thank yaaps for, but I digress.

So the other day, while waiting for the children at swimming lessons, I decided to use the time to write a blog post. I pulled out my pen and my Circa notebook (woohoo, Levenger!!) and...nothing. No thread of text pouring out through the ink. No idea taking seed and blooming into a post. No inspiration at all.

Later, at home, I sat at the keyboard to nurse the babe, and the post about procrastination flowed out. Have I lost the ability to compose my thoughts on paper? While environmentally sound, writing and editiong on a monitor is not as satisfying as simple paper.

And so I forced myself to write this post down in my Circa notebook and typed in like the days of old. Just for nostalgia's sake.

Photo Day!

My darling nephew and his mother whispering softly into his ear:
I do love baby feet:
Cousins, but which feet belong to the toddler and which to the tiny baby with enormous feet?My princess Bella:
Cheesy grins are par for the course with Vincent:
Abigail is growing up so quickly:
Simon loves life and it shows:
One just because I like it: