where’d i leave off
Sep. 22nd, 2019 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2VfYP1O
Yesterday I hauled myself out of bed and stuffed all my sheets and clothes into the washing machine, then went and tidied the yurt. Farmsister asked me if I could fill in watching the farmstand during that morning’s CSA pickup, because she was leading a tour of the farm, and VegMan really wanted to spend that time digging up the rest of the sweet potatoes, so I got my laundry hung up just in time to get back and watch the stand.
(The yurt has to be extensively tidied before I leave it for any matter of days, because if any blankets are left on the bed or in any kind of accessible pile, anything that’s more than a couple of layers of fabric will wind up with either a mouse nest or an ant’s nest in it, and either of those destroy said fabric, and it’s very inconvenient. I’m doing an experiment currently where I have the cargo net from an old hatchback car hung from the ceiling and my pillows are in that, stuffed with dryer sheets [mice dislike peppermint and various other organic things but will still dig through them, but actually will not mess with fabric laced with dryer sheets, so even though I’m not fond of the smell, I own several boxes of dryer sheets], but other than that, every bit of bedding must be either hung from the rafters or put into a sealed plastic or wooden box.) (I leave one single sacrificial throw blanket or towel on the bed for any cats who may wish to lounge about, but that’s it. The bed has a waterproof mattress pad on it, and thusfar that’s kept both mice and ants out of the mattress.)(Also, nothing can be left stacked on the floor that’s not waterproof, because I can never guarantee that water won’t come in somewhere or other while I’m gone. Fortunately yurts are extremely well-suited for having things hung from the rafters or walls, and up to a point, additional weight makes them more wind-resistant.)
I sat and worked on a quilting project in the farmstand. I’m still an indifferently-skilled quilter, but I’m hand-quilting this casserole carrier for Farmsister in hopes that the unevenness will be charming. It’s all made from repurposed materials (the Insul-Brite layer is new but I’d bought it for something else; the rest is a failed skirt BFF was trying to sew, two old t-shirts as padding, and an old worn twin bedsheet) so it’s not exactly even otherwise… and then I misplaced my quilting thread so a bunch of it is quilted with multipurpose thread, because whatever, the point is to hold the old t-shirts in place against the Insul-Brite so they don’t shift and leave thin spots, so even if the thread breaks, it’ll still hold in some places), and it’s meant to be washable and functional, and now it’s rather grubby from potato dirt because I was working on the same table with the potatoes.
By the time CSA pickup was over, it was too late for me to get to the farmer’s market, so I texted BIL to get me the yogurt I wanted (listen the yogurt there is better than the yogurt I can get in Buffalo, and cheaper, so) and only after that did I realize that meant I couldn’t leave until after BIL got home from market.
I took down my laundry, and put everything away, and figured out how to take my Improved Chimney apart (turns out, it’s super easy, if a little more involved than formerly), and realized I could leave the very grossest most creosote-ey part outside, so that was good. Got the car packed, and then I sat and practiced banjo in the kitchen until BIL got home. (I semi-accidentally uploaded a few banjo practice sessions to my Instagram stories; if you find yourself curious, the compilation of all the banjo stuff is in a permanently-accessible Highlight: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17943979915224463/ )
I wound up with a fantastic score of vegetables from the CSA share left-over– including every single hot pepper nobody else wanted– and a whole flat of tomatoes that now I have to actually process– and some thawed hot dogs that came home and needed to get eaten, and some semi-thawed pork chops that needed a home– and then BIL had traded with a fruit farmer so I got a little skim off the top of all of that and now I’m super well-set for this week.
The drive across New York was long and tedious, as usual, with some annoying traffic but not too much. Google Maps has very recently started telling you where there are speed traps? but it’s not super useful because of course the cops move out of those speed traps fairly often, so mostly you’re being ceaselessly notified that there might be one, and it’s distracting? but it was interesting and illuminating, and in several cases absolutely correct, and in one case I could see that said trap had just been sprung, so.
Arrived home to see that Dude’s laundry was all hung up in the backyard, and he’d finished the dishes and had done a tiny bit of grocery shopping at the gourmet store, so we had wine and he’d collected a number of exotic cheeses and a fancy salami and a baguette, and that was dinner. It was quite nice.
We also, as we were unloading the car, discovered a preying mantis near the kitchen door, which tried to attack me. I didn’t know we had those around here, had never seen one before, and we spent a while staring at it.
[image description: an extremely large insect on a concrete step, with green sides and brown folded wings covering its back and long skinny legs, reaching up with thick bent forelimbs toward some white aluminum siding as it attempts to climb it.]
Yesterday I hauled myself out of bed and stuffed all my sheets and clothes into the washing machine, then went and tidied the yurt. Farmsister asked me if I could fill in watching the farmstand during that morning’s CSA pickup, because she was leading a tour of the farm, and VegMan really wanted to spend that time digging up the rest of the sweet potatoes, so I got my laundry hung up just in time to get back and watch the stand.
(The yurt has to be extensively tidied before I leave it for any matter of days, because if any blankets are left on the bed or in any kind of accessible pile, anything that’s more than a couple of layers of fabric will wind up with either a mouse nest or an ant’s nest in it, and either of those destroy said fabric, and it’s very inconvenient. I’m doing an experiment currently where I have the cargo net from an old hatchback car hung from the ceiling and my pillows are in that, stuffed with dryer sheets [mice dislike peppermint and various other organic things but will still dig through them, but actually will not mess with fabric laced with dryer sheets, so even though I’m not fond of the smell, I own several boxes of dryer sheets], but other than that, every bit of bedding must be either hung from the rafters or put into a sealed plastic or wooden box.) (I leave one single sacrificial throw blanket or towel on the bed for any cats who may wish to lounge about, but that’s it. The bed has a waterproof mattress pad on it, and thusfar that’s kept both mice and ants out of the mattress.)(Also, nothing can be left stacked on the floor that’s not waterproof, because I can never guarantee that water won’t come in somewhere or other while I’m gone. Fortunately yurts are extremely well-suited for having things hung from the rafters or walls, and up to a point, additional weight makes them more wind-resistant.)
I sat and worked on a quilting project in the farmstand. I’m still an indifferently-skilled quilter, but I’m hand-quilting this casserole carrier for Farmsister in hopes that the unevenness will be charming. It’s all made from repurposed materials (the Insul-Brite layer is new but I’d bought it for something else; the rest is a failed skirt BFF was trying to sew, two old t-shirts as padding, and an old worn twin bedsheet) so it’s not exactly even otherwise… and then I misplaced my quilting thread so a bunch of it is quilted with multipurpose thread, because whatever, the point is to hold the old t-shirts in place against the Insul-Brite so they don’t shift and leave thin spots, so even if the thread breaks, it’ll still hold in some places), and it’s meant to be washable and functional, and now it’s rather grubby from potato dirt because I was working on the same table with the potatoes.
By the time CSA pickup was over, it was too late for me to get to the farmer’s market, so I texted BIL to get me the yogurt I wanted (listen the yogurt there is better than the yogurt I can get in Buffalo, and cheaper, so) and only after that did I realize that meant I couldn’t leave until after BIL got home from market.
I took down my laundry, and put everything away, and figured out how to take my Improved Chimney apart (turns out, it’s super easy, if a little more involved than formerly), and realized I could leave the very grossest most creosote-ey part outside, so that was good. Got the car packed, and then I sat and practiced banjo in the kitchen until BIL got home. (I semi-accidentally uploaded a few banjo practice sessions to my Instagram stories; if you find yourself curious, the compilation of all the banjo stuff is in a permanently-accessible Highlight: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17943979915224463/ )
I wound up with a fantastic score of vegetables from the CSA share left-over– including every single hot pepper nobody else wanted– and a whole flat of tomatoes that now I have to actually process– and some thawed hot dogs that came home and needed to get eaten, and some semi-thawed pork chops that needed a home– and then BIL had traded with a fruit farmer so I got a little skim off the top of all of that and now I’m super well-set for this week.
The drive across New York was long and tedious, as usual, with some annoying traffic but not too much. Google Maps has very recently started telling you where there are speed traps? but it’s not super useful because of course the cops move out of those speed traps fairly often, so mostly you’re being ceaselessly notified that there might be one, and it’s distracting? but it was interesting and illuminating, and in several cases absolutely correct, and in one case I could see that said trap had just been sprung, so.
Arrived home to see that Dude’s laundry was all hung up in the backyard, and he’d finished the dishes and had done a tiny bit of grocery shopping at the gourmet store, so we had wine and he’d collected a number of exotic cheeses and a fancy salami and a baguette, and that was dinner. It was quite nice.
We also, as we were unloading the car, discovered a preying mantis near the kitchen door, which tried to attack me. I didn’t know we had those around here, had never seen one before, and we spent a while staring at it.
[image description: an extremely large insect on a concrete step, with green sides and brown folded wings covering its back and long skinny legs, reaching up with thick bent forelimbs toward some white aluminum siding as it attempts to climb it.]
no subject
Date: 2019-09-22 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-22 10:21 pm (UTC)I had perhaps seen one before. I can't remember, now. I was super startled by it, but i know what a katydid looks like and thought it was one at first and then was like nope!
I think they're all around, but tend to be more numerous in places with milder winters than up here. Somebody was talking about importing them to kill cockroaches, and we don't even have cockroaches up here-- like, they live in NYC, and you get them in the cities around here but they die off in winter, mostly.
So it stands to reason preying mantises would do the same.
I can't find the thing today, either my cat ate it or it went to greener pastures.