Stormy weather

So we got hit by that big storm that swept through the Midwest and then smacked DC/MD/VA.  I don't really have a terrible story -- we didn't lose power, nothing fell on our house or off of our house.  Lots of people have it really bad right now, but we don't.  We are very lucky and grateful!

So I'm really not complaining... but I was kind of sad about my tomatoes, our one casualty.  Here are my tomato plants on June 19.

They are almost as tall as me at this point.  Ten days later on June 29, they were way taller than me.  They were being barely contained by the tomato cages I had planted them in.  Then this "derecho" came through and flattened them.

All ten tomato cages blew over and left a tangle of twisted branches and wilting leaves.  So sad.  But we will rebuild!

We got some stakes and did our best to pull the cages back up and lash them to the stakes and to each other.  It's kind of a mess of wire, wood and twine, but it holds up the monstrous plants.  And, there was a silver lining:  Deep inside the hedge of tomatoes, I found two yellow pear tomatoes that had ripened!

I admired them for a while and then I ate them.  They were so good -- sweet and tangy.  There are literally well over a hundred more green pear tomatoes where those came from.  We're going to be popping them like candy!

In less tasty news, I cut the bejeezus out of my finger tonight.  Dan sharpened some of the knives in the knife drawer.  Imagine that!!  I am used to having dull knives.  So after I cursed a bit and bled all over, I sat down and held a paper towel tightly around my finger.... and then started to get light-headed and nauseous.  This is something that has come on in just the past 10 years or so.  I used to be able to donate blood at our office blood drives.  I didn't LIKE doing it, but I could, and it felt like such an important thing to do.  But sometime in between having Faith and having Holly, I got to the point where I could not donate blood without becoming faint and dizzy, having the Red Cross people get worried, and having to end the donation without finishing.  I was really disappointed in myself;  I felt like a huge baby.  And I couldn't really understand what the matter was!  I mean, I'm not queasy about blood, either my own or other people's.  It seemed like more of a physiological reaction.  Finally a nurse told me I was having a vasovagal response -- meaning that yes, it was a physiological response to stimuli and did not mean I was a giant wuss.  Basically a trigger causes a malfunction in the way the brain handles heart rate and blood pressure.  My blood pressure drops crazily.

Anyway, so I sat there with my bleeding finger, and got nauseous and dizzy, and had to go lay down on the couch and actually cried a little bit.  I felt pretty silly in a minute, when my senses came back, but HEY!!  I have a VASOVAGAL response!  I'm not just a big baby!

Update: Strawberries!

Tonight's harvest:

Six very small strawberries.  They may be all I will get this spring from my rebounding plants.

You would not BELIEVE how delicious they are and how sweetly I am savoring them.  Worth it, oh yes.

Party aftermath

Before I forget, here is what went wrong, and what went right, for the girls' party (a long woohoo-dammit, of sorts :) ).  Pictures at the bottom of the page.

WRONG:  Had to move the party completely indoors thanks to frigid temperatures, drizzle and mud.  Most of my games and activities were subsequently cut from the agenda.
RIGHT:  Let the kids turn on the Wii and play "Just Dance."  That game never fails to entertain.  Even boys and parents were dancing.
RIGHT:  Ghost cookies -- these were knockoff Nutter Butters dipped in melted white candy chips, with black sprinkles for eyes -- and witch hat cookies -- knockoff Keebler Fudge Stripes, turned upside down, with Hershey Kisses secured to them with a line of orange icing.  Kids loved them.
RIGHT:  Frozen party-size macaroni and cheese.  I only got one of these, on a whim, and when it came down from the oven it disappeared in record time.
WRONG:  The mummy dogs -- hot dogs wrapped in strips of refrigerated crescent roll dough -- didn't look like mummies at all.
WRONG:  Also baking the first batch of mummy dogs on top of waxed paper was a bad idea since the paper melted and stuck to the dogs.  (This was an accident, not something I did on purpose.)
RIGHT:  Despite the mummy dogs' disappointing appearance, they were gobbled up -- waxed paper and all.
WRONG:  Eyeball sandwiches -- two meatballs on a dinner roll, with sliced olives attached to look like the pupils of the eyeballs -- were a pain to assemble, and didn't really get eaten.
WRONG:  "Pin the heart on the skeleton" game wasn't really fair since I attached to the wall a poseable cardboard skeleton and thus the blindfolded kids just had to quickly feel him up to locate where his heart should go.  Only the two youngest kids missed by placing their hearts on the elbow and in the pelvis.
WRONG and RIGHT:  Bobbing for donuts -- donuts tied with twine to the bottom of the ceiling light fixture -- was messy and wasteful.  I ran this in three heats of four each, and the kids had to hold their hands behind their backs and try to be the first to finish eating their donuts without them falling onto the floor.  The powdered donuts made a huge mess on faces and the carpet, and most kids' donuts fell onto the floor only half eaten.  However, not surprisingly, this game was a huge hit.
RIGHT:  Black punch in a plastic cauldron I got at Walmart hours before the party.  The punch was two packages of Koolaid (two different colors that would be dark and muddy when mixed together) with the appropriate amount of sugar and water, plus two liters of ginger ale.  Tasty.
WRONG:  The ice hands floating in the punch did not work well.  I froze water in rinsed plastic gloves, and it should have been great, but the fingers kept falling off (one of my floating hands was doing the sign of the devil) and the plastic was difficult to remove.  I found a couple small pieces of plastic floating in the punch.  I think using a different kind of glove would have worked better.
RIGHT:  The three fog machines excited the kids and would have been very cool if we could have kept them running on their intermittent timers, but...
WRONG:  The fog set off my smoke alarm twice, which is wired into the alarm system at the house and so the potential for the fire department showing up was high.  So we had to set the fog machines on manual and an adult had to go flick them on from time to time.
WRONG and RIGHT:  I forgot to set out the Goldfish crackers and the cheese cubes and crackers that I had gotten.  However we had so freaking much food left over, it was just as well.
RIGHT and WRONG:  We made these adorable Tootsie Pop spiders to be party favors.  Then I forgot them in a box in my room until after all the kids had gone home. 

Tootsie Pop spiders

Ghost cookies

Witch hat cookies

Cupcakes decorated by the birthday girls

Me and my daughter's "BFF"

The "haunted hallway".  Fog came out of the skull's mouth.

I explain the rules of bobbing for donuts.

And they're off!

Pretty fun to watch!

Thea opening presents

The last lonely ghost cookie left on the plate.

Partying!

Sometimes you feel like a nut

In honor of National Coffee Day I am having a cup at 8:30 pm. In it I put my new favorite creamer:



International Delight Almond Joy. Yeee-umm!

Going to try to post more regularly in October, practice using my words in anticipation of NaNoWriMo in November. Although I have hardly been writing, I have been reading a lot this year, 31 books so far.

Tea for Two?

I still remember my mom waking me up super early to watch the Royal Wedding in 1981. I remember that she told me to nap during the "boring" parts and that she would wake me up in time to see Diana arrive in her carriage -- and she did. I can remember laying on the couch watching the wedding on our tiny television set.

I intend to watch the upcoming Royal Wedding as well, but for a while my daughters have been saying they don't want to be woken up to watch with me. Finally just this morning Thea said I can wake her up, and Holly immediately said she wants to watch too. Waiting on Faith...

I was only 7 in 1981. I don't expect Holly to remember this but I hope it will be a fun memory for Thea. I think I'll get some cinnamon rolls to have with tea or coffee -- I think that scones would be a more proper food but let's stick to what I know everyone will like.

By the way, I love T-Mobile's "Royal Wedding Dance" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kav0FEhtLug

Microwave Cake

I am eating one of those "5 Minute Mug Chocolate Cakes", made from this recipe: http://i.imgur.com/6edYs.png. The texture is gummy and dense, very eggy, maybe because there's an entire egg in it. I cringed as I mixed the ingredients.



It tastes OK. Very mild. Nicely chocolatey where the chocolate chips are, only vaguely chocolatey elsewhere. I drank a lot of milk with it and I can't finish the last 1/4 or so of the cake, so the dog will probably get it.

I suppose it hit the spot.

New Pictures

For dinner last night I ate over half of a pineapple and then washed it down with a cup of coffee. Unsurprisingly I have a belly-ache this morning.

I put up new pictures from the summer in our photo section: start with July and August here, including our trip to Rehoboth, and be sure to click through to see our summer boating trip to Lake Moomaw in Virginia. Here's a little preview:

Do the Dew

I tried "Mtn Dew Distortion," one of the three test flavors of Mountain Dew. It's described as "lime blasted." It tasted similar to when I used to squeeze limes into my regular Mountain Dew. Which was super tasty when I did it myself, but strangely not exciting when it was coming from the bottle that way. It tasted a little bit like dish soap smells.

Sorry, I'm still loyal to good old classic Mountain Dew.

Catchup (mmmmmmm ketchup)

Some things that have been brewing in my head.

Things that are yummy:

Chocolate Pop-Tarts.

When you toast them, the warm gooey middle tastes just like licking brownie batter out of a mixing bowl. How can you go wrong? Yes this is my hand in the picture -- I am refraining from gobbling the rest of the pop-tart just long enough to snap this photo.

Also, the Mac Snack Wrap from McDonalds.

I could never get myself to eat the Big Mac, with its two all-beef patties, but the snack wrap goes down easy. Includes plenty of special sauce.

Songs I Like:

"The High Road" by Broken Bells



Heard this one last week and it's been playing in my head since.

Things People Shouldn't Say:

My friend Sarah last week bemoaned her colleague using the word "chillaxin'". I would like to add my disdain for my white peers who use the word "peeps" (and aren't talking about the marshmallow chickies that are in your neighborhood Walmart right now). I can't really speak to whether it's still OK for my black peers to say "peeps," but my gut says No, Not Really.