I’m not knitting.

I have a rheumatologist who, the last time my lupus attacked my fingers, exclaimed, “But you NEED your knitting! We have to *do* something!”

And with that, he finally got me to try plaquenil, an antimalarial drug that, like aspirin, nobody reacts to, and as long as you get your eyes checked regularly for retina damage, everybody can take it.

And you know how well aspirin and I get along. (A thank you forever to my ENT and to heaven above for the rare chance to thank Rachel Remen in person as well; story in that first link.)

I got the most massive case of upper-body hives and we crossed another med category off my list.

I knitted yesterday anyway when I had a half hour wait at the pharmacy and then just couldn’t do it again. Hopefully this will all be a very brief interruption, but I’m afraid to push it for now.  I’m realizing I was getting casual about sun exposure: add it all up and I might have spent ten minutes outside in the sunlight yesterday, way beyond my safe point, rationalizing about the low UV levels this time of year. The cage does get old. And there’s so much that’s so pretty outside in a California winter.

Well, hey, there are other ways to be creative, and desserts have been calling me. Here’s one:

First, turn off your hearing aids, this is going to be loud. Ready?  Okay.  Frozen strawberries, a little sugar to taste, add some cream in the food processor.  Whirr for about a century, stopping every now and then to break up the strawberries that are absorbing just a bit of heat from the friction of the blade, (or maybe I just have to do that because my Cuisinart is very old), whirr some more till it’s smooth, serve immediately and there you go.

I used to use egg whites to make it a non-fat strawberry mousse, but after my daughter drove her friend Natalie to the hospital for salmonella poisoning during the egg scare last summer (no no she didn’t eat here), I’ve stopped doing that.

I handed my sweetie his.

“This is better than usual!”

Yes, well. Cream does that for it. It’s the side effects you have to be careful of.

Here’s hoping a good night’s sleep will leave me embarrassed for saying anything too soon and that my hands will be fine in the morning. I’m hoping.

A conversation with Sandra led to my going and looking…

Years ago I had two signature dishes: the chocolate torte, in its early stages (can you believe Hershey’s called for water in the cake when you could add manufacturing cream?), and maple pecan orange strudel, which I adapted from a recipe I scribbled down and took home after seeing it in a Redbook magazine circa 1990 while waiting for one of my kids to be seen by the pediatrician. (I write notes in my cookbooks to journal our food a little.) Thank heavens I forgot my knitting that day.

This is seriously good stuff. It’s also a serious amount of time and effort and calories and some of the ingredients are hard to find.  Those Danish butter cookies in the tins you see everywhere this time of year? This needs them to be without the coconut added in that so many have now for the preservative effect. Walker shortbread might work better; I haven’t checked their ingredients list lately, but it was coconut-free last time I did. I’ve tried just making my own and they weren’t quite as crunchy.

And the oranges? You really do want organic. I’ve tried, and the regular ones have a bitter aftertaste in the gratings that the organic ones just don’t. I have neighbors with trees (thank you Al J.), which helps a lot. Okay, here goes:

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Maple Pecan Orange Strudel by Alison Hyde

Mix:

1 1/2 c finely ground pecans (a good source is here.)

1 c of finely crushed butter shortbread cookies, about 15 of the little Danish ones

1/4 c sugar

1/4 c maple syrup (don’t even THINK about substituting the fake stuff, you want knock-their-socks-off exquisiteness, that’s the whole point)

1 tbl finely grated orange peel, fresh and organic

1 tsp cinnamon

Mix these together and then take about a half pound of phyllo dough, 8-10 leaves. Watch the ingredients when you buy it: some are all butter, but some in the freezer case at the grocer’s are not. Lay them out with a barely damp but not wet towel over them. Take out one at a time, re-covering the others quickly, and lay out on a cookie sheet with slightly raised sides, ie a jellyroll pan, and brush with melted butter. Repeat till all are layered together; fill with mixture, leaving 2″ at the sides. Roll up like cinnamon roll dough, bake at 350 for 30 min.

While it’s baking, have 1 c sugar and 1 c water in a 1 qt pan, bring to boil and till the sugar is dissolved. Pour half of this over the strudel when you take it out of the oven; let it cool. Meantime, let the rest of the syrup boil another 6-8 minutes till it’s a deep amber. Shake the pot gently if needed to keep one side from burning before the other side turns color, but don’t stir.  Whip in (I have 1/4 c crossed out and 1/2 cup written in instead) of heavy cream with a wire whisk, pouring it in slowly so it doesn’t explode at you (watch your hands–the steam burst is hot!) to make a caramel sauce to serve it with. This may take vigorous work to get the suddenly solid sugar to melt into the cream. If you end up with a few solid leftover lumps, ignore them. Pour the sauce into a mini-pitcher without scraping the sides of the pan, which might dislodge crunchy sugar crystals you don’t want.

Run a finger around the pot later when no one’s looking to make sure it tastes just so. The cream will have cooled it down.

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One note on maple syrup: traditionally, where it was produced, it was the poor man’s sugar and the grading was determined by how close it came to being substitutable. So if you can find it, grade B has a more pronounced maple flavor than the usual Grade A. I explained that once to a Trader Joe’s manager, and a few months later they started carrying Grade B! Cool.

Looking at Sunnyland Farms’ site to post that link, I see they’re now selling pecan oil. Hey. Michelle could eat that. Richard is hoping for a homemade cinnamon pecan kringle… HEY!

I apparently guessed right on the shape of kringles changing in Wisconsin. I did not know that the pretzel shape was an ancient guild symbol for a baker and still in use in Denmark.

Here, you can go read the rest yourselves if you’re interested; that recipe is calling me. As for the raspberry filled version I miss, I’m pretty sure I can come up with my own.

On the other hand, there is a certain practicality to being limited to what one can easily buy: when the calories are over, they’re over. And if I start making butter versions you know I’ll have to come up with an acceptable dairy-free one somehow too for an acceptable celebration, while avoiding all cross-contamination.

You know, I learned how to do handsmocking and many, many baby dresses and a great deal of knitting later, how to knit lace, because it just bugged me that here was something I thought was cool but that I didn’t know how to do yet.

I’ve baked a lot of bread in my life. Kringle?  This should be a piece of cake.

There’s a pattern brewing here… (The problem is that I would keep working at it and producing them till I reached an acceptable level of perfection in the creation. Which would only be the starting point.)

You know those days when you do so many things so outside your normal routine that it feels like you’ve lived a week in the space of a waking?

One of those was that John and I, on a lark, drove up to Burlingame today. He drove; I wound a ball of Malabrigo Rios he’d picked out.

Okay, back up a little.

When I was ten and my family was doing that long drive circling the entire country with a little of Mexico (one afternoon) and Canada (several weeks) thrown in, Maryland to California and around and back that summer, one of the things we apparently did (I don’t remember it) was that we stopped in a Danish bakery in Racine, Wisconsin. (Mom and Dad, correct me if it goes further back than that.) Kringle? What’s that?  …OH!

The end result is that my folks have ordered kringle from that bakery every Christmas for four decades, through a change in generation and ownership quite awhile ago. The bakery does them in a racetrack oval, rather than the traditional pretzel-ish shape, and the things cover an entire cookie sheet: flaky dough rolled in butter to almost phyllo layers, filled with cooked-down fresh fruit or cinnamon pecan. It takes them three days to make them, and for many years you had to order by Halloween for the holiday season or you were plain out of luck.

We carried on the tradition here too about every other year or so, and a few years ago when we did, something was…different.  I checked the ingredients. When did they start cutting corners and putting in hydrogenated fat for part of the butter?

I googled for other bakers; Racine has become famous for kringles over the years.

I asked about the hydrogenated fat issue.

I struck out.

Kringles are a splurge in money and calories, and if they weren’t going to do it right, there was no point. Besides, Michelle can’t eat them anymore anyway.

But they are our tradition.  And Michelle’s not going to be home yet at my birthday.  So with rationalizations in hand, this year I went looking again.  One bakery in Illinois looked promising. One in Solvang quite surprised me–my friend John from Stitches and his wife own the Village Spinning and Weaving shop in Solvang in, judging by the pictures and the addresses, the same building! Small world.

And I found Copenhagen Bakery up in Burlingame, certainly within reach. Hey. Why not try it out?

And so John and I braved the rain and set out on an adventure. We did call ahead to make sure there would actually be one there.

They make the traditional pretzel shape, the traditional almond-paste filling. Only. (At least that they call by that name.)  I guess our fruit-filled oval ones were like chow mein in San Francisco: changed/reinvented by immigrants after they landed in the States. I explained to the woman at Copenhagen why we were experimenting and trying out their kringle and I asked if they put any hydrogenated fats in it?

She was horrified. No!

This evening, I finally closed the box to keep the three of us from finishing off the entire pastry in one day.

As for the yarn? John had said he needed me to go buy him a hat, and I was surprised and amused and countered that we had a ton of hats right here. Some Assembly Required. (An amused, *MOM*.) And so he chose the Azules colorway.

He didn’t really want me to post his picture with the hat in progress stuck on his head for measuring, four needle ends waving around his face.

But it is done. He has his hat. And we have a kringle source.

John’s home, John’s home! He even put up with doing a little birdwatching with me while I tried to explain why the Bewick’s wren flipping itself around by the tail was so cute.

The other bird watching: he and I got up this morning and decided to get that turkey going together. (My husband usually wrestles the yearly bowling ball, but we beat him to it and let him sleep in.)  I was going to roast it in a turkey bag, in part because it was only halfway thawed and that would help speed it up and even the cooking out, I thought. So, John held the flimsy thing ready for me–and twenty pounds of bird slipped straight through it to the floor.

So now we know why they put two bags in a box: one for the Julia Child moment, one for doing it right. I think we better move to over the pan, honey.

I later read some of the more infamous Butterball hotline questions: if I use a chainsaw to carve the bird, will the oil make it taste bad?

Or the college kid who used a cookie sheet under his because that’s all he had and it splattered and sparked and caught on fire in his oven, so he called the hotline.

The person at Butterball who answered that one was his own mother.  I bet they’ll be telling that one at their Thanksgiving dinners forever after!

We skipped the chainsaws and the fires and enjoyed a lovely time in a warm house on a cold day with good food and good family, feeling how keenly blessed we three were to have the time together. One-on-one time with an adult child is a rare thing.

And then for the first time in days I actually sat down, put my feet up, and knitted!

I was at the bird center this afternoon stocking up on seed for the month.

Freddie, the owner, asked me, glancing at her computer, if I wanted a suet cake this time with that?

No, I was set, thanks–and then I told her my Nuttall’s, my woodpecker, had not been seen for a few weeks and I’d been missing it.

Yesterday, trying to entice it to come back, I’d replaced the broken bits of the old cake that were in the holder with a big solid new one that had been waiting for it, wondering, if I made it look prettier, set it a nice table up there, would that do it? Had the hawk gotten her? Had she migrated?

I checked it this morning and even though the chickadees like it and the finches will occasionally give it a peck when the feeders are both crowded, it was simply untouched.

No point in buying more yet, then, so, thanks, Freddie, hopefully next time.

And so it was that I was sitting here not long after I returned home, having run gobs of errands after that first one, finding that the grocery store was in total crazy mode, (well…yeah…) having company coming tonight rather than Thursday for dinner, getting home, getting the groceries put away, how to get it all in there and everything done, needing a moment to just finally sit down and crash for a moment, suddenly–

–who should fly in.  My goodness, that brilliant black and white outfit looks formal and perfect for celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday: there she was!

I simply watched, all else fallen away, not glancing away for a second, knowing how fast she can fly out of sight, all the more keenly aware for her absence of how blessed I am to have such moments.  Wow that’s a gorgeous bird.

She ate and ate and ate some more, diving into her food, more than I’ve ever seen her do in one visit. ‘Tis the season.

The Bewick’s wrens, meantime–I actually saw two at once–who never, never fly up to the cake but who come for the crumbs that fall from the woodpecker’s table, have been celebrating the extra crumbles I put out from yesterday’s taking-down; one showed up underneath the Nuttall’s for more, the perfect exclamation point in the flick of its tail.

Dinner to cook, still.  But those wild birds made the weight of it light as a feather.

Having one of the guests later exclaim, “OH! This is my FAVORITE!” topped it all off.

And a good meal was had by all.

I spent a fair bit of time poking around the various books at hand and Patterncentral.com and Google, searching for… I wasn’t sure what but page after page, those weren’t it.

Till I stumbled across the picture of the pink one here. Hey. Color Transplants R Us. That’s IT! That’s what my subconscious was trying to push out of the memory banks. I’ve seen that before but I couldn’t tell you how long it’s been.

During the few years of my life I wasn’t knitting much, I was making smocked gowns and dresses for my own babies, and that round patterning around the neck, called a bishop style, was something I made over and over.  A knitted sweater that echoes that, a generation later? Perfect.

I hadn’t ever realized till I took the photo just now that the reverse holds true too: I designed a smocked dress back then for Michelle with a sheep front and center.

Meantime, today was my monthly trek to Los Gatos to buy birdseed. There in front of my car as I parked was a signboard for a shop at the far end of the plaza–where I had never been nor really looked. A chocolatier? There is?  Okay, that’s worth checking out.

You walk in and there’s an intricate haunted house at the front with figures and jackolanterns and all kinds of detail. And it’s chocolate. All chocolate. All made in-house by hand. We are talking someone who plays with chocolate like I play with baby alpaca and silk.

I decided to try just one piece to test the place out, just one framboise.

Oh. My. Goodness. Change the metaphor to qiviut and silk.  Richard exclaimed later, You didn’t get ME one? But I had no idea till she rang it up what it was going to cost vs the amount of cash I had on hand for an impulsive try-out.

To give you an idea, I later got in and out of Trader Joe’s without buying a single chocolate thing. Not even a plain good dark Valrhona bar.  It would only have been a comedown.

The one thing I regret? I didn’t eat it till after I’d left and the woman didn’t get to see my whole face light up. She certainly earned that. I’ll have to go back, and Richard needs to come too.

Okay, right about here a good essay would pull the knitting and smocking together with the chocolate shop. Does that sentence count?

As long as I keep knitting my hands aren’t getting the ice cream out of the freezer.

Nor the raspberry sorbet that would go so well with that vanilla.

Just another row.

Go ice my hands.

Yeah I hear you guys yes I could use the calories but he shouldn’t. No I won’t sneak it past him; if I get some, he gets some. Fair’s fair.

Put icepack back. Ignore pleading freezer contents.

Do another row.

Raspberries are healthyyy.

I’m not *listening*!

Calcium is healthyyyyyy. Makes you grow big and–oh wait.  You’re right.  6’8″ might be enough.

Just another row.

Just another half a row while they thaw enough to serve–if I’m going to do anything painful on the hands it is not going to be serving up rigid calories. It can wait. *Sssssh, you guys.* This project can’t.

Another row just because I’m an addict that way.

Eat (and share).  Gotta build up my strength for these knitting marathons, y’know.

What I said to LauraN after her daughter’s comment was, beats serpent-dip-it-thusly finding new uses for a fondue pot.

And on that quick note, I’ll go back to helping Michelle with her last-minute packing. Like covering up her lemon bars, finding her another shipping box, wrapping her cinnamon rolls carefully for eating on the way to the airport, finding another box, putting away her leftover baby bok choy tomato soup, helping her finish her homemade dark-chocolate nutella she wants me to have, making sure she has cocoa for her hot chocolate and don’t forget your mug, and picking and eating the first homegrown tomato (which needed another day or two but it was share it now or never), a little Durkees sauce on our three carefully carved pieces.

Go Blue! It’s going to be very, very quiet after tomorrow.  She made sure we wouldn’t starve.

The guy in south San Jose tried my car this morning and it seemed peachy fine. Huh. So he took it out on a short road test and suddenly all four brakes completely locked down and those wheels turned not at all. He had to manually disconnect them and get that car back to his bay. The man is definitely braver than I.

I am all the more amazed they turned–just enough–for me when I desperately needed them to.

He commented that the brakes were new; yes, they were. That smoke I saw? Turns out it was a puff rising up from the tires coming off the freeway with the brakes in full blast yesterday.  The master cylinder was toast.

My regular mechanic is closed weekends.  Couldn’t ask him for advice.

This guy was open Saturdays.

The dealer is closed on weekends.

This guy couldn’t get a new master cylinder from the dealer till Monday. Would I like a rebuilt one, then?

I asked for an estimate while quietly googling ’99 Chrysler Town and Country ones: list price was over $1500 just for the part.  That was about the Blue Book right there.

The rebuilt cylinder? With tax and labor, it rang up at $377.  Amazing how cheap that looked by then.

They finished it at closing time, we got way back down there to pick it up, and I got to go off at last to a long-anticipated party of peregrine volunteers.  I had my car and I would get to go after all! Good and late, but verily, them’s the brakes.

It was held at a condo clubhouse.

The gate (there being a pool behind it) was on autolock.

The door to the clubhouse was open and no farther away from me than the length of my living room, and I could see two people I knew in there through the glass walls.

I called out.  Nada.  I waved my cane above the gate. Nada.  I held up the chocolate torte I’d brought for it. Nada.  They were right there! I was right here! If just one person would glance up!  I tried calling them on my cellphone and found I didn’t have their numbers in it.  I stood there for ten minutes, sure that someone surely must…c’mon, guys!… And then, as I got back in my very own car (yay!) going back to my own home, I reminded myself how good it was that I could do that again.

I laughed at the sudden thought of, me, I may be fairly invisible, but good European dark chocolate?

Ah, well, tonight was just trying to make tomorrow look good, right?

(I got profuse apologies, but there was absolutely nothing to apologize for. They’d had it propped open and the prop-er had fallen.  Sometimes life just does what it does and you go on to the next.)

I’ve got my car back! And a little extra chocolate on the side. I’m sure I can find something to do with it.

I forgot to add on yesterday’s post: at one point we were in an area of Foothill Park where there was a wide expanse of grass. They decided it might be a good place to let the baby out to run off some energy. I stayed in the car, out of the sun, reading the newspaper, Richard staying too to keep me company; not ideal but it worked. I did mention to them before they got out the rattlesnake we’d seen once over there by the trees, which had a creek hidden behind; umm, might not want to go that far.  Mountain lion country too.  Open is better.

Oh, okay, good to know!

Rachel, however, plunked right down in that grass where they put her and sat playing in great delight with the tiny flowers she found growing there.

Well, hey, that works, they decided.

My niece the flower child. I love it.

In the meantime…

Michelle, who is always looking for a good dairy-free recipe, made rice krispies treats today to take to some friends, leaving some for us.  It brought back memories that I don’t think I’d told her before: my little sister and my dad and I went on a visit to his widowed mother’s in Walnut Creek, California, the summer I was 16 and Anne turned 15. In happy anticipation of our arrival, Grandmother had made a big pan of those for us.

This was the grandmother who lived across the continent from us in an age when both planes and long-distance phone calls were monopoly-owned and hideously expensive. We didn’t get to see or talk to her often, and though I loved her, I didn’t know her well.

I hadn’t had those in ages. To me, it seemed like a little kid’s treat from way back in my childhood: so sugary. So sticky.  So not-Adelle Davis-healthy.  (Davis began the health food movement in the ’50’s and ’60’s; running and checking, my copy of her Let’s Eat Right says 1947.)

I’d been baking a lot of cookies and bread in my mom’s kitchen for awhile by then, often grinding my own wheat for the bread especially, and like a lot of teenagers, thought rather highly of my own skills–and I’d been raised by a mom who thought desserts should be a last chance to get good nutrition into her kids: she would make fruit pies, blueberry cakes, (that was a collective swoon you just heard from all my siblings) Davis’s wheat germ and powdered milk “Butterscotch Brownies” with, ahem, not the slightest hint of chocolate… (I still love them. My friends thought they were the weirdest ever, and probably still would, and they were, and I still do.) Mom’s pear-and-lime pie creation won an award once.

At least with popcorn you get a little fiber, and one year for a birthday cake I got, at my request, a great big tube-pan-shaped popcorn ball for slicing onto your plate. Dyed in green food coloring. I wanted different and I wanted green and by golly I got it and the sense of triumph that my mom had actually created that for me is one of the delights of my childhood.

If it was rice krispies and not popcorn, set me straight, Mom, but my memory is it was popcorn and that the popcorn came out tough, but oh well–it was green! And unique!

Can you say contemporary-art-dealer’s daughter?

Empty-puffs cereal, butter, and melted marshmallows. And yet. Grandmother had made those treats just for us, and I had enough sense to be touched by that and enough of a kid’s craving for sugar to enjoy them.  And so I let myself rediscover rice krispies treats. It wasn’t till writing this just now that I realized how much of an effort it must have been for her to stand and stir that sticky mixture on the stove–Grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis! I don’t make them, so I just never saw clearly before the effort it must have taken her.  (Man, am I slow.)  She was trying so hard to create good memories for us. And she did. Oh, she did.

I did not know it was the last time I would ever see my Grandmother Jeppson.

I told Michelle she’d made my grandmother’s treat and that it had brought back all these memories. She was delighted.

And I ate some of Michelle’s, too. Because I love her, too. (Adding chocolate chips–‘Shelle, you are SO my daughter!)

Imagine looking at a Claude Monet painting up very close, or any other pointilist painter’s, examining all those tiny dots that make up the picture.

Now imagine those dots are all shades of green/graygreen and they’re all moving, constantly moving, shimmering gently in the mountain breeze, countless thousands of individual hanging circles amidst the whole of the trees. Those are the aspens. It was gorgeous up there. We were at a cabin in the Utah mountains at 7950 feet. (Thank you GPS unit!)

I had a good case of altitude sickness–every morning I started to pass out, every single day I got offered to bail if I needed it, but I just didn’t want to miss anything. I googled: if the headache doesn’t respond to the analgesic, get off that mountain! Oh. Okay, then. I could stay.  (Somewhat… But I stayed.)

For the record, I knit really really slowly on low oxygen. On the other hand, what I knitted was done and didn’t have to be done again.

And who knew when we might get to all be together like that again. As I told one nephew, I would have loved more one-on-one moments and it was all so short, but on the other hand, it was better than a wedding for that.

My sister-in-law made her trademark decadent fudge sauce and some brownies and got some ice cream to  go with them for our last night there. Celebrate!  When everyone had been served, there was just a bit left in the pan–you can’t throw away that good stuff, you just can’t. It’s chocolate! I scraped out as much as I could onto the large serving spoon and went looking for someone with a little ice cream left.

I spotted a nephew, a young adult. A victim. I asked him.

Sure! he grinned.

Then instead of trying to pour the mostly-solid-by-then chocolate into his bowl, I simply put the spoon in his bowl; we’re talking a large mound of chocolate over a very small lump of mostly melted ice cream here.

Just then my son came up from behind, having  spotted that spoon in my hand a moment before–but it was gone now.

My nephew grinned up at his cousin and in a singsongy neener neener voice declared, “Your mom loves me more than youuuuu!”

We laughed so hard. SO hard.

And I would have missed that and so would they have.

I’m so glad I stayed!

Michelle made a dessert with the neighbors’ plums and some star fruit for the occasion.

Meantime, we had one of those afternoons where looking for a tool that hadn’t been used in over a year led to closet cleaning and the non sequitor of this discovery from the early days of my spinning, just waiting to be uncrumpled and admired out of its bag.  Briefly.

I’d splurged on the 50/50 angora/merino fiber at the now-missed Straw Into Gold in Berkeley and had carefully spun up the most luxurious fiber I’d tried yet on my wheel, not knowing that Michelle would prove allergic to it and that I would later be getting angora out of my house.  This was for her big sister.

And it’s…pretty big.  Angora has no sproing to it.  It might fit one of my sons.   But I was looking at it, going, wow. I did spin that fine back then. And really evenly, too, even though I was a rank beginner. Not bad!

Then I took it back out of the breathing space and zipped it back up, a little wistfully.

Meantime, we have two juvenile falcons perched for the night at either end of the louver in view.  They don’t always now, but they did come back tonight.  Curious.  I was surprised by fireworks going off a few hours ago–maybe one of the towns was saving on overtime on traffic control?  Dunno, but I did get to see some of it from my street, crowd-free, once I looked to see what was going on.

Maybe the falcons were boomed out by the noise and headed for the familiarity of home.  It was good to see them.  Happy Fourth of July!

A constant reminder to myself: it doesn’t get finished if you don’t finish it. That half a cast-off row isn’t going to cut it.

Right, right. So there you go.

And while we’re talking about glorious deep rosy reds like that–a return doorbelling, plum jam, a surprised plum-tree-owning neighbor, a protest of “But you didn’t have to do that!”, a response of “But may I?” (And I explained that Michelle had wanted to learn how to make jam, so it was from both of us.)

And then I got invited out to their garden.  Squashes were picked and I was gifted right back again.

My kind of neighbor wars.

Oh, and–they showed me a large leaf, quite shredded; insects, I thought, and a bad case at that. Birds, they corrected me: they’d liked it for their nests. (They clearly thought that was pretty cool, actually.)

So THAT’S where they…! So we talked birds a moment, and when I described my Nuttall’s, they smiled, oh yes, they knew that one. It has really taken to my suet feeder–that’s today’s picture, and I’m hoping it’ll let me get closer and closer.

Meantime, my black squirrel climbed a tree and stared at my being somehow on the wrong side of the fence.  What are you doing over there?!

Speaking of squirrels–my tomato container got dug into, bad, and trying to figure out how to keep the bushy-taileds out, I hit upon this: I took the lid of a plastic spinach box, cut out to the center and wider there for the stem and pushed it down into the pot. Voila! Mulched, sort of, and squirrel free. (Picture taken after the digging and before the sweeping up the mess.)

One of the things about the pot is I can haul it inside when I’m not around to give those squirrels The Look. It is the funniest thing to see one of them stop dead in their tracks and even sometimes turn tail.  You don’t mess with the momma here. You can have sunflower gleanings, but the tomatoes, those are mine.

I’d share them with the neighbors when they ripen but they’ve got their own ahead of me.

There was a knock on our door again today.

Michelle looked in the bag and grinned. Her jam jars are ready to go.  We’ve got serious work ahead!