The Sound of Summer Whooshing By

I want to post everyday, because there is so much stuff going on, and I am barely scraping out one post a week, because there is so much stuff going on. I can’t really think of any cohesive way to make some observations except all hither and yon. So I will just do that, and you can consider yourself warned.

• Red raspberries. Let’s start there. It is just so delicious to go out and casually pick a quart or two to go with breakfast, and then another bowlful for garnish on the cottage cheese, and then some more to make a rich, gourmet sauce. All this from those ugly, prickly sticks we stuck into the ground a few years ago.
• Kittens. They are at the most adorable stage of fluffy cuddliness. There are still 10 of them, mostly calicoes and a few cloudy grey ones. We call them our Hutterite cats, because there are 3 mothers who share the care of the kittens. As soon as any of the mothers lies down, there is a scramble of furballs crawling over her to nurse. She automatically starts licking and cleaning any that come within reach of her tongue. They have long forgotten who belongs to who. It is all one happy family. Did I mention that they are incredibly cute? You probably need a kitten or two, yes?
• Daily showers of rain and very high temperatures. The result of weeks of this is an overgrown garden. I have been trying to pull it back from the brink, and slowly we are making progress. Today I planted 28 broccolis and cauliflowers. Do you know what that means? Fall crop is growing. Already!
• Eleven pound cabbages and five pound zucchini. Yes, really. I think all the rain and heat contributed to those whales of veggies. Today my sister in law Ruby and I sliced up two enormous heads of cabbage, salted them down and put them in buckets to ferment into the best sauerkraut. Last year we only fermented ours two weeks, as opposed to the six weeks that some people do. It tasted so fresh, almost crunchy yet. I gave Ruby a pint last year, and after eating up the whole jarful herself, she was hooked. (You should know that where some people guiltily eat a whole pan of brownies by themselves, the Peights tend toward whole jars of pickles or whole bags of sour patch kids.) If you even sort of like sauerkraut just a  little bit, you should try the homemade stuff. It is so very easy to make that everyone should try it! If I were a proper blogger, I would have step by step photos and instructions, but there are lots of people out there who will flood to google when you check it out. As for the zucchini, I do have more to say on that tomorrow.
• Bathtub rings. They are unspeakable these days. I am just so grateful for water running from the faucet, even though we pay for every gallon. Summer is so amazing… and so grubby.
• Trip to my sister’s in Ohio. It had been over three years since we all went to Ohio to visit my sister. I know, it is like the next state over from PA. But when funds are low, we travel not. So we finally cleared up that bit of neglect and took a few days to spend with Rachel’s family. We showed them how fast 5 children can shred through a box of bandaids printed with cartoon characters (which is why the mother of the 5 children buys Curad strips at discount stores, the number of owies being directly related to the allure of the bandaids.) We spread our stuff all through their little house and made racket and dirt and walked to the corner for ice cream and watched the Apple Creek parade and just had a great time.
• A grand rearranging of the house in general. We moved the boys into our former guest room now that Gabe no longer needs it to study. Then we restored the room where the boys were sleeping for the last two years back into the den in the basement where the toys and children’s books live. After that the boys’ bunk beds got cleaned up and painted for the girls’ bedroom and the baby got moved in with them in the toddler bed. Guess what the itty bitty nursery will become? My room!!! Not to sleep, silly. To read, to think, to write. I have grand ideas for that room. The bookshelf in our bedroom will migrate over there, and probably the six foot bookshelf in the living room as well. I will have a teeny room, lined with books, a comfortable chair, two sunny windows, and a lock on the door. Hee heee. It isn’t all shuffled around yet, but we are about half way there.  I love moving furniture and changing things around. I do it for fun. Gabe humors me, sometimes a little grudgingly, but he does kindly help me move the heavy stuff. We have this joke that every time we need a new piece of furniture I say, “Not oak. It’s too heavy for me to move it by myself.” Sometimes we switch things up for a while, decide it still isn’t quite right, try something else until I finally hit the feel I am aiming for. All this rearranging is a little busy,(vast understatement there) but it makes me happy that we are utilizing the space we have (900 square feet x 2 with the basement) in a more efficient way for right now. Storing the nursing textbooks that didn’t sell also made me happy. The sociology ones? I kept them out to read in my reading room.
• Mold. We discovered it growing in our basement rooms, on the doors, on the overstuffed chair, on the leather covers of the books. I went a little mad, washed everything with germicidal bleach, all the walls, the stores of blankets and pillows, etc. Gabe bought a second dehumidifier and fixed the one that was on the fritz, so now it is feeling much drier down there. Again, we had such prodigious amounts of rain, it is no wonder stuff grew. But I detest mold.
• School. The boys’ DVD’s came. The books are here, but their desks aren’t ready. Gabe wants to make them stations of sorts, movable but fairly permanent. Not oak, please. I feel a little detached from their school preparation since we decided to give ABeka DVD’s a try this year. It feels pleasant, in a way, but I passionately love learning with them, so I am not sure how this will be for me in the long run. I am sure you will hear more about it in future. 🙂
• Zucchini. Oh, but that is for tomorrow.