Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

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We got a mild frost a little while back.  I was surprised, actually… usually we are totally safe when they say we are going to get a frost.

Not this time, actual visible damage to the tomato plants.   We’d picked the only 2 tomatoes close to being ripe, just in case.  The plants got a little damage, but not a lot, and they’ve since recovered.  They are also covered with green tomatoes.  Dang it.  I doubt any of those will get ripe, but you never know, so we are leaving em out there.  I don’t have anything I want to do with green tomatoes, nothing at all.

Anyhow.  I sold my muscadine grapes.  Crazy, huh?  I offered them on Craigslist and someone snapped up the offer… come pick them for a dollar a pound.  I told them I was considering pulling the plant out… and they said they’d come back next year for grapes, too.  So, I may keep the vine.  We will see.   I know I spent more on water than I got for the grapes.  Wasn’t expecting the dang things to smell like diesel fuel when getting ripe.  Still, a pretty good harvest for a first year vine, altogether about 30 lbs!  Sold 18 lbs for the price of 15, gave away about 12 lbs but said it was 10.  Picked a pound or so and juiced em… gave that container to the folks that came and picked and paid for the ripe grapes.  Heck, maybe I should just dig up the vine and give it to them!

I also sold my citrus tree.  I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about it on the blog, but I grew it from a seed.  Every winter I haul it in the house and try to kill it, and every spring I haul it outside and neglect it some more.  I’d never got it to bloom, and it probably should.  I advertised it on Craigslist a while back, got a couple emails, no follow up.  This time I got someone local super interested… bam, she was at our house ready to take it home.  Funny, I think she lives just across the little valley from me, on the next ridge.  I asked that if she got it to bloom that could I please have a photo?  I was happy my tree was going to a good home… it was like trying to place a puppy almost.

The neighbor guy that likes to hunt has been walking through our yard.  We give him access to the woods.  As far as I know he’s never actually killed anything… hunting is just a hobby that gets him out of his house.  He always starts off with bow season, then switches to guns when he can.  I doubt that gun he’s carrying now is legal, but I doubt he actually shoots anything anyhow.  He’s got 6 kids… he probably just wants some peace and quiet in the evening.  He’ll go all winter, as long as hunting seasons last…  and when I walk my dogs at least one dog will haul off into the woods and find him every once in a while, hah!  Hey, he =knows= I walk the dogs off leash.  BuddyMack has come home with the guys gloves… go way damn dog, have a glove…   and then here comes Buddy so proud and happy with his glove he hunted.  :)

I bought a bunch of  fall  bulbs and planted them…  lots and lots  of pink tulips, some red oxblood lilies and some yellow species tulips and my favorite fall blooming spider lilies.  I still haven’t found the bag of narcissus that my friend Jan gave me a year or so ago…  it’s like it grew legs and walked off.  Wasn’t the right time to plant them right then…  poor bulbs are probably dead now, but I still can’t find the dang bag.  She’ll probably never give me anything like that again… what, you just go and lose it?  One thing about planting this year…  I did the major digging and getting the weeds/grass out…  but when it came time to put the bulbs in, Ron came to lift the dirt out so I could have trenches to plant in.   I have to not just plant stuff everywhere I feel like it…  Ron likes to mow stuff down.  He’s mowed down a bunch of my iris because the grass grew up…  I think I’m going to move those iris so he can keep mowing that bit next year.

Oh, and I bought concrete block edging for some flower beds.  Not like building blocks… decorative.  When they mark down the blocks is the time to buy them… if there are any left.  I found one I could live with at 1/2 price, so eventually I’ll have wider beds in front of the house and they will have concrete footing and edging and maybe I’ll be able to keep more of the bermuda  grass out.  Plus pile in more dirt for the plants to grow.  We have plenty of dirt for raised beds…  and I may just go the way my Mom does, and do building concrete block raised beds.  Plant enough flowers and you can’t see em, so what the heck…  it’s another we will see thing…   I can’t go piling a foot of dirt on some of my other flower beds unless I want to go dig up my pink stargazer lilies…. I doubt they will survive if I pile half a foot of dirt on em.

The trees are really beautiful this year, but of course I’m not posting a photo.  Yeah, they are pretty, but to me that’s a sad thing… going towards winter.  I don’t like winter.  Just get rid of the leaves and be done with it, without giving me pretty colors that won’t help.  Blargh, not looking forward to winter.  Never am.  Changing of seasons is nice, but see… I want to go from spring to summer to fall and back to spring.  Let someone else have winter, thank you very much.  :)

Still not smoking, health still giving me fits here and there.  It’s like, you do something good for your body and your body repays you by breaking down somewhere else.    Eventually it’ll be better…  I hope!

I guess I’m almost caught up now…

hugs,

Vyx

 

 

 

I seem to be about a once a month blogger.

Well, that’s about what it’s come to these days.

The sad thing is that it’s not that I don’t have anything to say… it’s that I’ve been too lazy to sit and write it.  Not really lazy… but I’m not a fast writer.  I can and do spend hours writing about simple stuff.  I just don’t have time most days to sit here at the computer for all those hours.

Anyhow, I’ll try to catch up on some of it…

First a simple recipe.  I was browsing around some of the blogs I sometimes bother to read and came across a meringue recipe.  Well, howdy!  I’ve got a tub of 8 egg whites in the freezer needing to be used.  I looked around at some other cooking sites to make sure I wasn’t heading into a disaster, and then I went for it… with all  of the egg whites!

Easy Chocolate Meringues  (adapted from http://www.bakerella.com/chewy-chocolate-meringues/ )

1 cup egg whites (7 or 8 large)

2 cups sugar

5 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder

4 ounces  finely chopped baking chocolate (or skip this, I will next time)

On very low speed beat the egg whites with the sugar until the sugar is dissolved.  This can take a while… no need to stand there,  I left the mixer running and did chores.   Line your baking sheets with parchment, and get out your cooling racks.

When the sugar is dissolved, switch mixer to high speed and beat the mixture until stiff and glossy.   If you have a good stand mixer with a whip, this will probably go fast.  If you have an ancient Kenmore mixer with just beaters, this is gonna take a while, too, so go do some more chores.  Oh, but you might want to turn the oven on now.  Heat it to 350 degrees F.

Finally, those egg whites are beat into stiff peaks!  Now sift the cocoa powder into the egg and tip in the finely chopped chocolate, too.  Fold that in gently with a spatula or spoon.  Mix it up!  You might even get away with using the mixer, but I didn’t… used a spatula and folded gently.

Now, get out your big cake decorating bag and a big star tip.   Put the tip into the bag, then fill the bag with meringue… that’s the stuff we just mixed up for the last 45 min.  :)   Make pretty little flower shaped poofs about an inch apart on the parchment lined baking sheets… I think I ended up using every baking sheet I own.  Make the poofs a nice size…  say, 1.5 to 2 inches across, and about 1/2 as tall.   Have the bag clog up repeatedly with bits of chopped chocolate that weren’t chopped enough.  Decide to leave that ingredient out next time because you’ve just bent all to hell your brand new tip.

Bake one sheet in the oven at a time for 15 min or until they look like tips are starting to get brown.  You are going to be baking these for hours if you use all the meringue and make them just slightly bigger than bite size.

I didn’t count how many I actually made, but I took a gallon bag bulging with them to work.  Oh, and we still have some left, even Ron is getting tired of them.  1 cup of egg whites makes a LOT of freaking meringues!  So, because I’m nice, I am recommending that normal people use one of the smaller recipes to be found…  like HALF as much.  Seriously, I had to dump some of the meringue out, I wanted to live the rest of my life, not be forever stuck in the kitchen making cookies…  lol!

Sealed up in an airtight container, these seem to keep dang near forever.  They bite really fragile, but they carry pretty tough… and probably if you tried to ship them somewhere the recipient would just get a box of crumbles.  Still, they are mostly air with chocolate flavor, they feel like you are eating nothing much at all.  The big bag I took to work lasted only a couple days… but we have a lot of women where I work.  Some of those gals really liked the cookies.  Some said “ugh, meringues!”   And one said she doesn’t like chocolate…. huh!

Okay… so… on to the next post…

hugs,

Vyx

 

 

Which is pretty darn funny considering what an odd spring we had.   Cold and way too much rain, then boom it went into summer.

Not going to complain when the clematis is blooming like this!!!!

I also noticed buds on my muscadine grape.  The one that is chock full of  ripening fruit.   I have the names (and where I planted the grapes) mixed up… either that or the dang company I bought them from mixed them up.  Wouldn’t surprise me, as they were NOT helpful at all when I wrote to them about one plant arriving dead.

So, my Granny Val muscadine is covered in fruit.  It has to be that one, as that is a scuppernong, a bronze or golden colored muscadine.  The problem with the fruit though… I don’t know if I can get past this or not… it smells HORRIBLE.  Like diesel fuel or something.  I’ve tasted a grape, but I can’t get past that smell to find out if the insides taste okay because the smell is overpowering.  It’s so strong you can smell it from 6 feet away!  Not appetizing at all!

Took more photos of the clematis….  let me just toss another one in here…  :)

I just don’t know what to do with the muscadines.  Should I pick them and freeze them and hope the smell goes away and that juice from them will be palatable?  Should I write to the company I bought it from again and ask them if it’s supposed to smell this horrible?  What kind of freaky grape did they sell me, anyhow?  Ron said maybe I’m growing my own bio-fuel, lol!  (He can’t smell anything though…  I can smell them from 6 feet away and he stuck his nose right into a bunch of grapes and couldn’t smell a thing.  Huh.)

That clematis though… it sure is beautiful.  There is a house down the road a ways that has 2 clematis plants which I always admire in the spring.  Their plants aren’t doing anything right now.  Huh.  Nothing at all, probably going dormant for the winter like they should be.  Mine is having one last hurrah before winter though…

We are going to be putting in an enclosed carport type building.  Big, as in 20×16.  Something to store the lawnmowers, grills, and other stuff like that in.  Ron is working to level the ground… by hand.  Which means he started out with a mattock, a shovel and a wheelbarrow.  But now he’s using the rototiller, a shovel and the big pull-behind wagon attached to one of the lawn tractors.  He’s moved a LOT of dirt so far…  has piled it all up in one spot.  I’m sorry that I don’t have any raised beds for him to fill…. but I can’t stop him working on that to build me a raised bed somewhere.  He’s out there working on it right now, in the dark… yep, in the dark.  Because he has a laser level, and he can’t see it to use it in the daytime.  So, in the dark.  I can just imagine all the cats going after that, lol!  The cats are of course helping him…  they always do, any project outside.

My tomato plants are still alive.  We may get some tomatoes this year after all…  if I can keep the dang caterpillars from eating them to death.  I’ve got hornworms, of course, but also some ordinary striped caterpillars.  They don’t do as much damage… or so I thought.  No, they don’t eat the leaves much, they go straight for the green fruit.  ARGH!  I’ve been handpicking the dang things off almost daily, but today I mixed up some liquid Sevin and sprayed the plants and bugs with that.  With my luck… and the way the poor tomatoes have gone this year…  my first tomatoes of the fall will start getting ripe just in time for our first big freeze.  :)  So it goes…  :)

Been having health problems.  Gallbladder attacks, too many of them.  Doctor gave me a prescription for something that didn’t help and I’ve had a lot of tests… ct scan, ultrasound and then a hida test and a ccr test.  I went and looked up stuff on the Mayo Clinic website, and yep, those horrible stomach aches I get could be from gallbladder… even to the pain between my shoulder blades!    So, the biggest thing is…  I need to avoid caffeine and dairy products, but also fats.  Great.  What do I drink in the morning?  Coffee with a LOT of half and half in it.  What is my breakfast?  Instant breakfast with some benefiber… milk again, and I buy whole milk because skim milk goes sour too fast.  Too much added fiber to the diet can also be bad, and what did I do in the midst of all these attacks?  Yes, added another daily drink of fiber.  Adding it slowly is okay, doubling it overnight is not so great.  I left work early Tuesday because my stomach felt like it was going to explode, and the pain was so distracting I was very careful driving home.  Then those tests Wednesday morning… I felt horrible… again had to drive carefully and just come home again.

Well, I got a call from the doctors office today.  According to the latest tests, my gallbladder is working just fine.   They can schedule me for a scope down into my stomach to look at it if I want.  I passed on that.  I’ll try to change my diet a bit…  but I’m not giving up my morning coffee just yet!  Heck, I get up at 4 am, I can’t do that if I can’t have coffee.  Oh, but eating apples is super super good for your gallbladder.  Guess what I’ve been craving and eating this week?  Yep, apples.  I love red delicious apples, but they have to be the small ones… I hate the huge giant ones.  Got a good sized sack of them at the grocery store yesterday.  I guess if I eat apples I won’t need to worry about the benefiber in my instant breakfast that I’m no longer going to be drinking.  At least my digestion seems to be back to normal now…  no more feelings of things going to explode inside me.   Gallbladder attacks are no fun at all!  And I really don’t care that the latest test came out perfectly normal… I was not imagining the pain.  A few diet changes, and well, I’ll hope for the best…  moderate changes, nothing too drastic.   Just a little bit at a time.  Maybe I’ll even lose a bit of the weight I’ve put on this summer…. summer is when I’m usually thin, but not this year.  Hah.

Well, as usual this has taken a lot longer to type out than I thought it would.  I have to go feed my dogs, poor things are starving because Mom is blogging!  They still won’t eat the sweet potato chips I made for them…  I’ve been tossing those into the pond with the bread for the fish.  Have a better idea for those sweet potato chips…  slightly steam them before putting them into the dehydrator.  That oughta make them taste better…

hugs,

Vyx

 

Gotta have a kitty photo once in a while.  Stubby likes to come in the house every so often, and because we know he won’t spray, we let him.  He tends to pester Rita a bit, but mostly he just wants to nap on something soft like carpet.  :)

I think he has really grown up to be a handsome cat.  Beautiful blue color, with a cream tinted chin.  For some reason he reminds me of an otter… I think it’s partly the short tail, and partly the teeth I can see when he’s sleeping.

We are finally out of the kitten business.  All the adult females are spayed, so we won’t be having any more kittens here.  Have one adult male to neuter, and 3 boy kittens.    The adult male is Tonic, who has to be one of the wimpiest male cats I’ve ever known… but from his point of view I’m sure it was just a survival tactic.  If your own momma runs you off, backed up by 3 other momma cats… I guess you run away and hide.  We have finally coaxed him back into the herd, and he actually comes up on the porch again.  Just don’t try to pick him up.  Gonna be hard to get him to the vet.

Finished my purse with the twill I dyed while on vacation.  All the sewing machine work was done before vacation was over… and when I got sick midweek and ended up staying home I did the hand sewing one afternoon when I was feeling slightly better.   Still don’t know what is wrong with me, but at least the doctor I saw on Wednesday didn’t say heartburn and not listen to me.   He gave me something else to take, and set up a ct scan for today.  Got to take my new purse out and about to be admired.  :)

I love how this fabric came out, and changed up the purse quite a bit for it…  no quilting, for one thing.  I put some sturdy fusible interfacing on the insides to give it a bit more stiffness,  plus made the outside pocket big enough to take over one whole side instead of that wimpy little pocket that the pattern has.  Oh, and longer handles.  It still has the whole lining with built in pockets…  I do like this purse pattern for the most part.  Takes quite a bit of work, for something that should be fairly simple.

Of course I didn’t realize when I enlarged that pocket so much just how much of the side it would be taking up…  and forgot to leave room for handles to be sewn on.  Plus, I covered up some really nice fabric, darn it!  It also isn’t sitting straight… but neither are the pockets on the inside.  I was lazy and not using a lot of pins.

But as you can see, that double pocket is quite useful now… deep enough for reading glasses and deep enough that stuff won’t fall out.  Not sure I need the whole side in pockets like that, but for sure it’s more useful than the previous version.  I mostly carry my little reading glasses in that case in the left pocket… but I have to dig in my purse for them.  Now they are out and handy.  Heck, I can carry a few pairs now…  in case I forget I’ve got some stuck in my shirt and need more.  :)

The pocketless side of the purse.  Click on that and look at it… isn’t that fabric absolutely lovely?  I never would have thought that those two colors went together if it wasn’t for my friend Rabbit.  She wanted a shirt with those 2 colors and one other… and I thought ugh, mud.  But it came out so lovely I actually did another for myself and then decided that I wouldn’t mind the purse in those colors, either.

Ron and I are both on day five of no smoking now.  I’m using the patch.  Ron is using nothing but will power.  He seems less bothered by not smoking than I feel… I get that 2 min craving but I don’t see Ron doing =anything=.  I’m sucking down lots of cinnamon and coffee candies… Ron isn’t even chewing nicotine gum.  Heck, even with the patch I want nicotine gum.  (but I know not to)  I think we’ll both be fine…    I know I needed him to quit because I am easily tempted if there are cigs around.  He knows he needs to quit because it’s a dang money drain he can’t afford.  Me, I’ve been wanting to quit again for years, so I just really needed Ron to get on board.  Together we can back each other up, and it’s working out well.  Yay for us!  (and thanks for all the encouragement from my friends!)

Got a bit of cooler weather again and rain today, so I got out my knitting.  Instead of finishing the fingerless glove I was working on and got tired of last winter….  (after making one pair) I decided that I needed to knit my grandbaby  a little hat.  So, that’s what I’m doing, a blueberry blue hat in acrylic yarn.   Just sort of winging it without a pattern, sort of like the last acrylic hat I did.  I cannot do ribbing any more for some reason.  That switching back and forth from knit to purl just makes me crazy with having to pull the yarn this way and that.  I’m sure part of that is that I totally forgot how to knit continental again… my hands just automatically do it the way I learned when I was 5 or so.   Having something to do with my hands is nice when I’m quitting smoking though…  so I’ll work through this hat and then probably go back to something simple where it won’t matter so much about the knitting/purling thing… because it will be felted.  Hmm, that’s a thought, maybe I should just knit the baby a big wool hat to felt up.   :)

Well, this is all the news I can think of now….

hugs,

Vyx

 

It’s been really exciting, NOT.  :)  I’m too lazy to have too much fun.  :)

I’ve done some heavy cleaning, but not as much as I should have done.   Chores of course are always the same.

One thing I did do before vacation was order a folding parallel clothesline.  I never even got a notice of it being shipped, but it arrived today (Saturday) by FedEx.  I won’t be able to use it much when it gets to be winter, but in the meantime I can have sheets and such that are air dried rather than tumbled into wrinkled balls.  We have good cotton sheets, but the dryer just tumbles them into a mass of tangles and wrinkles.  Makes me want to iron the pillowcases,  almost.  :)

I’ll check the size of the fit in the existing sleeve tomorrow, my last day off before work again.  I figured out how to fill it in so the new pole isn’t 18 inches in the ground… I’ll drop something that I can tie a wire to down that hole, then fill in with rocks that will be lifted out.  Just in case I ever need to have a pole sunk that deep again.  I haven’t figured out what I’ll put as the pull out for the rocks, but I’m sure I’ll find something around here.  The rocks are no problem at all, got plenty of those.  The fit if it’s loose I can shim with something or other.  Perhaps another bit of pipe if needed.

Dyed some fabric this week, and am sewing a purse.  I’m sewing the same purse I’ve been making for years, same basic pattern anyhow.  I’ve changed it a lot…  I quit sewing things outside in and turning them, and now just use the serger for that stuff.  Works great, lots less trouble.   As I get older and my vision gets worse, I am thankful that I have a sewing machine with an automatic threader.  Whoever invented that is a genius!

The fabric came out absolutely wonderful and I only used 2 colors.  I carefully picked my spots to use for the purse sides and outside pocket, as of course with most of the LWI stuff I do some bits of it are even better than others.  Woven fabrics are harder to dye in my opinion… the dye just doesn’t travel as easily as it does on knits.  I got a little impatient with the batching process and stuck the bucket in the microwave… that actually helps set the dye faster with the heat.   In summer I just set the stuff outside in the sun, but it’s been cool here already.

I should be able to show off the purse here sometime this week… I’m hoping to get it finished tomorrow, but my last day of staycation has a lot going on.  Gotta go grocery shopping.  Install the clothesline, and test it out by doing laundry of course.  I’m sure there is stuff I’m forgetting.  Plus, I’m expecting my stepdaughter and our grandbaby to come visit.  Visiting with the grandbaby Aiden will override everything else.  Aiden is 6 months old already!  We don’t get to see him that much, but when we do…  well, everything else is gonna be dropped.  I love being a grandma, although I’m trying to teach Aiden to say VeeMa.  :)  I’ve gotta order more shirts for him, he’s starting to outgrow the stuff I’ve been making him since before he was born.

Ron has been busy with his own projects.  Mostly that’s been the truck he’s been fixing up for his son.   I’m not sure the truck is ready to leave with the kid yet, but it’s pretty close…   and Patrick has been helping with it all as much as he can on weekends.   Ron is teaching as they are doing, and hopefully his son is picking some of the stuff up and remembering it… today they changed the oil, with Patrick doing the squirming on the ground bits.  Which is good, because my husband just got out of his neck brace and has managed to crack a rib working on that truck.   He says the rib hurts worse than the neck did…. but that’s just because it’s fresh.  At least he’s able to do stuff again… that’s really made a big difference.

Took a day trip to Eureka Springs yesterday, and visited with my friend Jan.  No, my other friend Jan, lol!  It’s funny, I have very few friends…. and the two best ones are both Jan.  We did some shopping and had lunch and stopped by to see Sara at Paper Odyssey, but she wasn’t there, only Tony.   I reminded him of my name and gave him a jar of my wild plum jam, plus of course bought a few things.  I felt stupid when I realized I’d brought jam that didn’t have labels on it…  you know I print out labels.   Tony may never remember my name, but hopefully Sara will remember that it’s one of the things I bring to my friends…

Before and after shopping and lunch while visiting with Jan… well… she has dogs.   I love dogs.  Puppies!  She has a puppy that was just so adorable I wanted to bring it home with me.  Aussies, beautiful ones.  Very well trained, the little 10 week old puppy knew how to sit and lay down.   I got to get strange dog smell all over me to make my dogs jealous…  I wish they’d get a strong whiff of  well behaved dog… instead of silly stuff like oh,  jump in the pond because those other dogs like water!  I paid for the strange dog smell when I got home with BunBun mudpawing me to get a better sniff.  Ah, I shouldn’t complain, really.  The beagles are pretty well behaved all things considered.  BuddyMack’s harness broke sometime overnight and he was running loose but didn’t decide to run to town…. he stayed where he lives.  He went and got in his house when I went to find out why he was out and about in the yard.  He was happy to stick around and play chase with the cats and steal some of their food.

Well, it’s now Sunday morning and my last day of vacation has officially started.  Guess I should get to bed and sleep… there is that shopping to do and we all know how I hate grocery shopping on weekends, but I’ve gotta restock the fridge… lunches for me, etc.  Too much stuff to buy…. and I have to include lots of fresh veggies.   Ron and I are both supposed to quit smoking this week, as of Monday morning.  Need lots of low cal munchies like carrot sticks and such.  I know what happens when I trade cigs for cookies.  Not funny.

hugs,

Vyx

Ha ha, the joke’s on me.  Old sleeve in the ground is too small!  So, I started a hole today… in a better spot (not under trees) but had to stop when I hit a rock I couldn’t budge.  Ron says he’ll finish it tomorrow.

The other bad thing… No grandbabies were seen today.  I stayed home all day waiting.  Sigh.