JauntHie's Jumble

It wasn't the best year in the garden, but now it's time to put the beds to bed, as it were, and get out spooky decorations.

It has been absurdly busy at work recently, and there's a ton of stuff to take care of in home life too. So I've been pretty quiet here. But I'm about to go on a long weekend trip with friends, and hopefully recharge enough to get back into the fray.

I hope all is well with everyone.

We lost B-cat, L-cat's brother, late last fall to cancer. L-cat had never been an only cat, and while she did not react quite as badly as M-cat did, she made it plain that she wasn't really happy being a solo cat.

So this happened.





L-cat isn't bored or lonely anymore. Occasionally dubious, sometimes appalled, but she's also having fun playing with them.

It's getting to be time to start closing down the vegetable beds for the winter, although the weather continues to be unusually mild. Some things, like the broccoli, are still going strong and I'll leave going as long as possible. Others, like the beans and peas, are done and the beds need to be amended and covered over for the winter.

Anyone's guess when we'll get a break in the rain long enough to do it, but that's the nature of fall.

In the meantime, my dahlias continue to put on a show

If you follow this journal at all, you know I garden. Let's take a virtual tour for our 2020 social distancing pleasure, shall we?

Warning: lots of pictures. Not very interesting if you're not a gardener.

( Lots of pictures behind this cut. )

I hope you've enjoyed this virtual garden tour!

I saw this recipe recently and decided to give it a try. Verdict: YUM! Plus lots of leftovers. Warning: you'll need a big crock pot for this one. And vampires need not apply.

Ingredients:
 - 8 chicken thighs, bone-in, with skin
 - 8-10 chicken legs (drumsticks), bone-in, with skin
 - 1 large onion, diced
 - 4 stalks celery, cut into 3-inch pieces
 - 2 large carrots, cut into 3-inch pieces
 - 1 generous teaspoon dried tarragon
 - 6-8 sprigs fresh parsley
 - 1/2 cup olive oil, plus 1-2 teaspoons for the skillet
 - 1/2 cup dry vermouth
 - dash fresh ground nutmeg
 - 2 teaspoons kosher salt (or to taste)
 - fresh ground pepper (at least a teaspoon, but as you will)
 - 40 cloves garlic, peeled (you can cheat and get these at the store)
 - Fresh loaf of crusty bread of choice

Directions:

Put 1/2 cup oil onto a large rimmed plate. Oil chicken pieces until all pieces are evenly coated. Heat a little oil in a large skillet. Sautee onion until it colors up nicely and is soft. Transfer onion and juices into crock pot; return pan to stove to keep hot. Add cut carrots and celery to crock pot; layer in parsley. Put oiled chicken in batches into hot skillet and cook 2-3 minutes per side to give chicken a bit of color. As each batch finishes, transfer to crock pot. Layer in garlic cloves around chicken as you add it. When all the chicken and garlic has been added, toss on the tarragon, salt, and pepper. Pour vermouth over the whole and cover crock pot with foil, and then lid. (Make sure you crimp the foil to keep a good seal and not cause steam to condense and drip all over your counters.) Cook on high 2-3 hours or low 4-6 hours (more cooking time won't hurt, but check the chicken temperature if you're trying to skimp on time).

To serve: Place piece of chicken, pan juices, and at least 3-4 cloves of soft smooshy garlic in a bowl. Place bowl on plate with slices of bread. Spread soft garlic all over the bread, then dip the slices into the pan juices and devour along with the chicken.

Put leftover chicken into a container separate from the pan juices and veggies/ garlic. Strain out garlic for future eating. Strain pan juices and store separately, or puree the remaining juices plus veggies for a nice thick sauce and/or the start of some killer chicken soup.

Fair warning: this post contains a LOT of pictures, so expand accordingly.

Today was the Women's March. I had decided to go along with fisherbear, and my friends A and F decided that this was important enough, and likely to be mellow enough, to be their daughter K's first protest event. Given logistics, we decided to carpool to the light rail station and travel together to the access point closest to the start of the parade.

Well, we and everyone else living in our end of town.

This is the train car we were in. Keep in mind that we got on at the VERY FIRST STOP, the terminus of the line. There was no one on the train before we started boarding.
( Images and text behind the cut. You have been warned. )

All in all, a very good day. I've seen absolutely zero reports of any vandalism or aggression from the marchers. It was exactly what it was meant to be, a peaceful protest and an astonishing display of communal activism. And I got to break out my camera and exercise my rusty documentary skills as an extra bonus.

...and so is this journal, although obviously I'm not posting here very often. Things have been very, very busy in Jaunthie-land this past year.  I shan't go into details, but suffice it to say that I'm working for another company, that I'm writing and gardening and walking, and that the cats remain cats.

Oh, and this year's garden experiment plants: watermelons, to go along with the cantaloupes. I actually got cantaloupes last year, so I figured that I'd try watermelons too this year. Goodness knows it's hot enough!

So it's that season again. Rose-petal jam season. (Also garden season, but that's a much longer season than RPJ season.) And naturally enough it's fallen into a really busy time, where I was out of town, and then on a deadline, and oh, of course, the weather couldn't actually co-operate, naturally not.

On top of all that, I was out of several of the ingredients required for RPJ (it isn't *just* roses). Some, like sugar, just require a trip to the regular grocery store. Other, like canning jars, require a more specialty trip (particularly if your regular grocery is a) teeny-tiny b) not serving an area where home-canning is a common practice anymore or c) you want something other than your standard pint jar).

So this morning I went off in search of one of the ingredients I needed. The usual grocery where I go for this was closed, worse luck, but the neighborhood it's in has several little hole-in-the-wall ethnic groceries, and sure enough, the one almost literally across the street - a persian-greek-mediterranean grocery (seriously, as far as I could tell, that was the actual name of the place) - had an open neon sign flickering in the window. So I went on over.

And oh, opening the door of the little place was such a wonderful sensory experience, I almost stopped dead in my tracks. For one thing, it was *warm* - both temperature-wise (it was about 50-odd degrees outdoors, and I'm guessing somewhere 70-plus inside, and also 'this is a tiny family business' wise, with hand-made God's-Eyes around the doorway, and an older man all the way in the back, hand-sharpening knives, looked up alertly when the door-bell rang, and who grinned welcomingly at me when I waved to let him know that yes, I was a customer, and no, I wasn't in a huge rush. For another thing, the smell! It was a wonderful melange of middle-eastern and Mediterranean ingredients, cumin and oregano and saffron and garlic and onion and citrus and probably half a dozen other things, all melded together into one giant YUM. I felt tension I didn't even know I was carrying loosen from my shoulders, and a happy smile curve my lips.

Like I said, it wasn't much of a place: a few tiny tables for customers who came in to eat whatever lunch fare the owners offered that day; a few wire shelves that held packets and containers of spices, oils, grains, and other bulk ingredients; and the counter all the way in the back, with a tiny refrigerated glassed-in cabinet below, and a metal counter on top. There was a teensy old-fashioned cash register jammed off to one side about midway through the narrow shop. But they had exactly what I needed, and the owner was happy to pause in his knife-sharpening and come out to ring up my purchase, and oh, if it hadn't been early morning, I would have been *severely* tempted by the saffron ice-cream advertised by the hand-written notice on the whiteboard.

Such a lovely experience, and one that I don't know that I'd have had, if I wasn't out shopping for RPJ ingredients on a Saturday morning. Incidental bonus of RPJ, definitely.

I swear it was just August around here a minute ago... *sigh*

So life continues on a rocketing pace this year, and yet I don't feel I have a heck of a lot to show for it. Sure, work is busy; when is it not? And the garden yielded some pretty decent harvests, particularly in the beans, onions, greens, and sunflower seeds department (the latter particularly surprising). I had a successful photo show. There was bee-chasing and climbing and lots of walks and writing and...yeah, okay, so my life has plenty of things to keep me busy. But still, it seems like a lot more to juggle this year than it has in years past.

Perhaps I'm just tired. I certainly know I need to get more sleep.

Which makes the perennial question of "To NaNo or not to NaNo?" rather more difficult to answer with an enthusiastic "Yes!" than I would prefer. It's a valuable exercise, no question: makes you put your writing right up in the priority list, no excuses, no whining. I did it, and won it (as they define 'winning') five years running.

Last year, I took NaNo off. I wrote quite a bit in November, but I didn't officially sign up, and it was really, really nice not to have to worry about official word counts or anything like that.

But there's also no getting around the fact that I didn't write as much LAST November as I had done in previous years. I didn't make creative writing a priority in the same way. And I really, really need to make it more of a priority.

I don't know. I'm conflicted. I want that completely-arbitrary deadline effort, and yet I'd rather focus on quality over quantity, and not have the pressure of meaningless (but historically effective) expectation hanging over my head.

Meh. When in doubt, go for it. And I probably will.

But I'm not signing up officially juuuuuust yet.