Last night's dinner

was very green, not that you would know it here, since no pictures were taken. It was also a bit on the experimental side, in that several new to us recipes were used. The new ones were Kale Pesto on pasta, and oven roasted asparagus with Spicy Parmesan Sauce (though I used about one teaspoon TABASCO® Chipotle Sauce along with about two to two and a half teaspoons Frank's and didn't pre-cook the asparagus before roasting it in the oven). A fair amount of sugar-snap peas rounded out the green color on our plates.
Tonight's menu has Asparagus Gruyere Souffle on it so far but I haven't settled on anything else yet, but I am thinking there won't be any pictures tonight either. Mostly because souffles look pretty normal to us I suppose. 

Cabbage Yarn

I had a purple cabbage head that was left over from a church function. It had been used to hold appetizers, so wasn't deemed usable by others, but I immediately saved it from the fate of the garbage can. It had science project written all over it! I forgot to weigh the cabbage before I chopped it up in the food processor, but it all worked out. After it was a finely chopped mass, I cooked it in plain water to extract the color I needed, then processed two skeins of yarn in the cabbage water. I used my standard mordants  of alum and cream of tarter, which are both on the acidic end of the pH scale. After the yarn was done, I took the yarn out out, added baking soda (which is a base, aka other end of the scale) to the cabbage water solution, and then after the foaming went down, I put one skein back in. I was quite pleased with the immediate color change of the yarn!

The top/purplish one is the "acid yarn" and the bottom/blueish one is the "base yarn."
Each of the skeins were 50 grams/137 yards, and I have more of the same yarn, so I think I need to go get some more purple cabbage!

Last November,

Costco opened a store here in Rochester. The addition of this shopping spot has made us very happy, if not for any other reason than for the excellent choice of staples. (Though their rebate/sale on contact solution is pretty sweet too.)

Last night I got a phone call

from one of our neighbors. This is a little unusual and just as I suspected as soon as I heard who it was, it was about the water. He was calling to see how our water pressure was since theirs was low; I told him that ours was really low and I had been thinking about calling him as well. He said that he had tried calling the other houses on our shared well and that two of the folks weren't home and the third agreed about low pressure. At that time he didn't think it was worth calling the well people as there is an extra charge for after hours and we did have water after (unlike the two time the well head/electrical thingie has been covered with enough ants or other bugs to shut the water supply down completely).  He said that maybe he would go out and take a look at it and maybe see if throwing the breaker off and back on would fix it. (I don't think one can "reboot" a well, but at least one feels like they have done something proactive I suppose.)
  He called back about half an hour to forty minutes later to let us know that he had made an executive decision to have the well company come out after all. Apparently we had gone from 12 to 7 PSI (or how ever it is measured) in that half hour or less and it was still going down. Something about thinking that we would all be willing to pay the extra $100 surcharge divided by five so that showers and coffee could happen around the neighborhood for work or some such thing. I assured him he made the right choice and that was why he had the (well) executive job instead of one of us. Anyway, a little while after seeing truck lights up and down the street, we had water all back to normal.
  This afternoon I noticed at least one well company truck down there so I figured there was more that needed fixing that they had noticed last night, but had just done enough to get us by until morning. Well, there must be more, since when I got home from Knit Night there was a message from him saying that the pressure was down again and he wanted us to go easy on it as much as possible tonight as it might not last until morning. At least I got the coffee maker all set up and ready just in case it flat-lines overnight. 

A few weeks ago,

(well, February 22, to be precise, since that was when this picture was taken) our front west-side yard looked like this.

 

A few days later (February 29), the morning after an ice/freezing rain storm it looked like this.

 

Saturday our west-side neighbors (the ones that are on the other side of that forest and don't have to drive past our house to get to theirs) came over to see if we wanted to borrow a chainsaw. Pretty much not, since we don't have a 35+ foot ladder to reach all the broken stuff, nor the desire/time/insurance to do it ourselves. As soon as the ground dries out just a little bit more, the tree folks will be out to make it better, plus they will haul it all away. Which we are sure the neighbors will prefer to what we would do with it, aka leave it piled in the forest to decay away.

Last night

was a rather foggy evening/night. So I decided to try an experiment.
This was with the flash, so the light was reflecting off of the water molecules in the atmosphere.


I think this one was without the flash and is just the light of the headlights, but I can't guarantee that to be fact. (Both of these look better if you biggify, but to be honest, I am still not sure what I think of them overall.)

On Tuesday

I had my usual little helper when I was getting some stuff out of the pantry (you know, that place where treats are kept?), but I decided to give her some catnip instead of what she was expecting/asking for.
There was a whole lot of rolling around on the floor once she had a good snuffle,

 

and not enough holding still to get a good picture of her covered in dried leaves.

No, it wasn't weeds

tonight either. It started with roots and fungus,

 

then some other stuff was added to it. When all was said and done, it was soup. (I used a whole pound of mushrooms, seeing as they come in multiples of eight.)
While I was fixing dinner, Hubband was playing with Google Goggles on his phone. (He has had it for sometime, and uses it when he is out and about, he just doesn't usually need it at home.)

 

I guess he was testing its translation capabilities (I am guessing he wished it did Chinese too) and then he decided to see if it really did solve Sudoku puzzles.

 

The answer is "Yes."
(BTW, if you have a "smart phone" and don't have the GG app, you might want to get it. It is pretty useful, as well as entertaining.)

On Thursday,

I had a visitor show up in the mail. Wandering Woolomena gets to be here for a short visit/adventure until she heads out to her next stop.

 

Since I was in the midst of making cookies when the box arrived, she and Astrid helped supervise and inspect the finished product.

 

On Friday the three of us went to the grocery store, and the two of them were rather bossy about what was put into the basket and where.

 

On Saturday morning Woolie went with me help with stuff at church,

 

and then she inspected the "Birthday Party in a bag" project we do every year during Epiphany for the local Women's Shelter.

 

After that we stopped off to get my hair trimmed,

 

and then went home to fill water and food dishes inside and out. Woolie was glad she was inside when the turkeys came along for a snack. From there it was a pretty non-adventuresome Saturday afternoon.

This morning Hubband

looked out our window down to the bird bath and said, "It looks like it got too cold for the birdbath to cope last night." (It was some number of degrees below zero, but I don't know how many exactly.) I came over to look, and sure enough, it looked like it was frozen over and then snowed upon. I can't say I was terribly happy about this since it meant either the birdbath was defective/broken, or that the outlet had broken or gone defective overnight. Later on I went out with a pitcher of water, my gloves and camera to document and remedy the situation. It turns out that nothing had gone belly up, nor was the water frozen over.
I have seen steam rising out of the water on some cold mornings and I think we just had a great visible example of science. I think the steam froze around the rim like it has before, but since it was so cold the ice crystals just made for a catalyst for more frost/ice to form a bridge. The ice is actually sitting about a fourth of an inch above the water.

 

Yep, there are a lot of pictures and they look almost all the same, but couldn't decide which one(s) I liked the best. Totally worth doing the embiggen thing too.(I promise, there are more I didn't share.)

 

 

The sun

was out for part of the day. Fortunately, I was in the right place at the right time.

Random posting

This was part of our dinner last night, but of course not until after it had hung out in the hot oven for awhile.

 

It looked like this around 5:30 or so yesterday afternoon/evening outside our front door. Currently it is snowing after having had several days of breaking records for January high temperatures. Want to guess who left on a plane just before the snow started? (Actually better than after, just in case it caused any issues with the plane leaving on time.)

Tree hunting

on Thursday was successful.

 

 

 

Complements of Netflix,

I just got done watching a really great movie, Lars and the Real Girl. Given that it came out in 2007, I am guessing some of you may have seen it already. It is a wonderful study of relationships within families, work, church, and the wider community. It is about how we live, hurt, grow, heal, love. It is a really good movie and I highly recommend seeing if you haven't, and if you have, I would recommend seeing it again; it is the kind of movie you will get new stuff from each time you see it. It will be the movie I share for Movie Discussion Night this Lent.

I had fun last night.

A friend had some tickets to a prerelease screening of a movie that the whole family has been looking forward to seeing. Yep, I went and saw it with out them! Sadly, there wasn't any pictures to be had in the theater, and since I was with my friend, his daughter, and her friend, I didn't wander around to see if there was a poster somewhere. (Thus, I did the standard "use one from the Web.")
I enjoyed the movie very much and thought it was really well done (no creepy uncanny valley that I noticed!). I have no clue if the script kept to the story-lines it was drawn from, I will have to report back on that after the movie comes out around Christmas and we see it as a family. Despite having a whole lot of the books make their way in, around, and through the house when the kids were young, I don't recall having ever read any of them myself. (I would guess that some of them may have been checked out on my library card though.)
I am looking forward to seeing it again, especially since I will be with folks that can give informed critiques. I am thinking I might want to see if I can do some research first. I am hoping this is a start.

On Saturday

flowers were delivered to my neighbor's house since I wasn't home. Since I had just spent several hours driving and sliding in this,

 

I decided to go a head and drive over to their house to pick them up. It was worth it, I would have hated slip and drop this from my mom.

 

Sunday afternoon the deck looked like this, which I shared with Hubband and he said something about winter having arrived in his absence. It certainly did.

 

Since he couldn't be here yesterday, and the florist doesn't deliver on Sunday, these came today.


So far both of them seem to have been safe from Oribel; we'll see how long that lasts. Fortunately, I will still enjoy them even if they get a few teeth marks.

 

For those who are wondering

about yesterday's post, yes, a certain Someone is currently traveling. Yes, he seems to have (or will today) passed one million miles with one airline. Before you ask, no, he will not be home for the 50th Singed Cat anniversary on Sunday; he will be in a place that requires flying on a different airline than the one he will get the bonus from.

Apparently not all

the cool kids are turning fifty this year. At least one of them got to do it last year.

The other day,

I mentioned "it" was happening again, starting with red and orange. There is some red growing in our yard, red birds around the yard, red blocks, and other red stuff has been noticed with more attention as I have gone about life this month.





Orange has not been forgotten.

 

 

Actually, orange is really hard to forget, given all the help it gives us around here.

The other day

I was driving home and saw the neighbor's cat.

 

Once again, I was really glad I carry my camera with me whenever I go out.