miscellany

The pants, when held up to the lad, appear to be waaaaay too big. With any luck, and judging from the zest with which he consumed a quesadilla today, they will fit eventually.

The dinner: oysters rockefeller. I followed the traditional recipe (spinach, bacon, anise liqueur, olive oil) and it was edible. Not terribly tasty. But very impressive looking! I more enjoyed the lettuce from my deck garden patch. I'm noticing that after eating each oyster I gain a little lump in my stomach that feels.....alive. Strange. Resistant to digestion. I know that when I shuck them they're still alive, and the reason they are so difficult to open is because they are desperately *trying* to remain closed. These also baked for 10 minutes in the oven so were overwhelmingly dead when I consumed them. But the strange knots remain. The lesson in this I think is that scavenging for my food is great, but in the future I should maybe avoid the oysters. Kristie had a better idea when she patronized the bbq guy in the next tent over. Mmmm brisket.

those limes in the background are for day three of the strawberry jam

I am digging paint out from under my fingernails. Over the past year I've repainted every single wall in this house except for the stairs and hallway in the basement. It's remained the same dingy off white that it was when we moved in. Quite filthy looking no matter how much I scrubbed it. This afternoon I cracked open yet another gallon of cotton whisper, the slightly off white color that occupies every non-fancy wall in our house. It's a great neutral that manages to seem warm when paired with bold colors (the orange wall in the guest bedroom) or pleasantly cool with others (the fern green wall in our bedroom). For some reason it looks a lot more beige in the swatch on my computer monitor, but in our house appears white. We used so much of it that at one point I bought a five-gallon bucket. It felt like an extravagance but was gone within weeks. I have two one-gallon pails left and hopefully that will stretch to cover what remains downstairs.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 2
Eggs found in the woods today: 0
Chickens that crowed this morning at 10.30 am: James! He is a boy, after all!