What a lovely quiet day here at the Funny Farm, as far away from the Great Desert University as one can get. Cassie and I hung out for an hour or so at the park, one of the nicest neighborhood parks in the city. I’ll try to remember to take the camera tomorrow.
Weekday mornings and afternoons, with the kids in school and most of the grown-ups at work, the park is almost empty, except for a few SAHMs playing with their toddlers on the climbing array and the swings. When the weather’s nice (which is most of the time), it’s a perfect bumhood retreat. I’ll need to get a new day pack (the old one wore out a couple years ago and, in the absence of hiking and camping, got tossed) so as to carry some drawing and painting gear over there, and maybe some fine iced tea.
Gardening
From there it was off to Baker’s Nursery to pick up some flats of dichondra. Last time I was there, two or three weekends ago, they had flats of woolly thyme, which I craved to plant between the flagstones off the back patio. Those were gone, so I had to settle for dichondra, though I did find a few small pots of woolly thyme among the herbs, plus some delicate Corsican mint, a couple of low-growing perennials, and two sprigs of hugely invasive and practically unkillable myrtle. The flags, which until recently hosted a little dichondra and a lot of flowering burr clover, were invaded this winter by a noxious little weed that turned into a wiry, ugly mat and killed off the more pleasant weeds.
Beer Ice Cream
Before turning to the twin projects of digging up the rest of the weeds and planting the new stuff, I tossed together a nice lunch of spaghetti with walnuts, fresh tomato, and basil. At this point I discovered that placing a cold beer into the new deep freezer for as long as it takes to boil a pot of spaghetti and then pouring it into a frozen mug results in a delectable, ice-cold slushy. Very nice!
And so to luncheon on the back patio, where gazing at the new crop of Meyer lemons forming on the tree out back led to a rumination on…
Flat Lemon Juice
Yes. I finally had to pick the last of this spring’s bumper crop of huge lemons, larger than the oranges—some were as big as small grapefruits. Squeezing them produced large quantities of lemon juice.
At first I started freezing the stuff in muffin tins, a quarter-cup per container. These chunks will be handy for cooking. Just now I have two large freezer bags full of them.
Then SDXB remarked that pouring the juice, a cup at a time, into small ziplock bags and laying them flat to freeze is a much handier way to store the stuff. It freezes into a thin, flat layer. To use a teaspoonful or a tablespoonful, all you have to do is open the bag and break off a small amount. This way you don’t have to defrost more than you need. Tried this. It works.
So now I have another couple bags of lemon juice in this format. Shouldn’t have to buy any lemons before the next crop comes ripe!
Cultiver Notre Jardin
The iris came up prettily this spring. The new ones sport an interesting color combination of gold and violet. They didn’t last long—a single 100-degree day fried them.
However, the short blast of summer heat tricked the Easter lily cactus into thinking it was time to bloom, and so it produced its own brief display of startling color.
So it goes.
Consider the Lilies of the Field
They toil not, neither do they spin. This first day of peremptorily claimed vacation offers a tantalizing view of what life will be like in unemployment. Think of it:
Day after day of hanging out at the park, walking or bicycling the canal, schmoozing with friends, visiting nurseries (and botanical gardens and museums and free midday concerts , tending to one’s garden, puttering in the kitchen.
How can I count the ways that I can’t wait?
🙂
You and SDXB should write on the joys of idyllic bumhood. Even with a few sections of Freshman Writing, you should have many days like this.
We are still using our cache of frozen lemon juice, by the way.