Goodby Summer

 

This was the last hike we took before summer was officially over. I love summer but the one thing I never miss are the bugs! Now it's time to enjoy all the blazing colors Fall has to offer!

August Sunset

My daughter and I drove to Wethersfield Cove, a boat launch area in Wethersfield, Connecticut, for the specific purpose of watching an August sunset. My daughter skipped rocks while I sat near the water's edge with my dog and watched a duck peacefully drifting around in the water. I snapped off at least a dozen pictures as the sky changed from pale pastel colors to vibrant and intense shades of yellow, purple and orange. I wish I could take credit for this photo, but it was the one and only shot my daughter took with my camera. She came over and asked if she could take a picture, snapped off this one, handed the camera back to me and went off to skip more rocks. Her picture turned out the be better than any of the ones I had taken. So much for all those photography classes I took.

Vacation Breakfast

I'm not much for breakfast but when vacationing in Vermont we have to have something with maple syrup at least once so we usually visit Anthony's Diner for pancakes, only this time my daughter chose to top hers with whipped cream rather than maple syrup.

Farm Stands

One of the great things about living in New England is the abundance of farm stands. We get to drive by farms, barns and orchards along Rt. 17 and have our choice of stopping at several different farm stands. I always look forward to buying, and cooking with, native produce straight from our local farms. Going out to shop at the farm stands always feels like being on a mini-vacation. Now many of the stands have bakeries and offer coffee so I buy myself a cup of joe and an apple cider doughnut to share with the dog and just load up on the fresh veggies!

Easy Beef Fried Rice

When I'm at the store I often find those packages of beef strips and chopped peppers and onions marked down and I stock my freezer with them. Everything is already prepped so it doesn't get any easier! So here is one thing I do with them...

I saute the beef and veggies in either sesame oil or olive oil (or butter in a pinch). I season it all with some ginger, garlic powder, onion powder, a little soy sauce and a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and of course, salt and pepper. I cook it until the veggies are tender and the bottom of the pan is nice and brown. I throw in a dash of parsley and deglaze the pan with a cup of water. Stir it up until the water turns into a nice brown broth and then add in a cup of instant rice. Bring to a brief boil and then simmer until the rice is done. Sometimes I add in some mushrooms and corn. Broccoli is good too. If you have orange juice in the fridge you can deglaze the pan with with a 50/50 OJ and water mix. Add in whatever you have around that you like. It serves 2 to 3 people so if you need more use 2 cups of rice and water and some extra veggies.

It's quick and easy and won't turn your kitchen into an inferno...enjoy!!

Easy Steak Fajitas

I love peppers. I love the colors, the flavors and the added bonus of them being good for you, too. I grow them in my own garden in the summer. At the grocery store I often find packages for stir-fry that have steak strips and already chopped red and green bell peppers. That makes life easy when it starts to heat up around here and staying in the kitchen doing all sorts of prep is not something I feel like doing. So for this supper I pull out one of those stir-fry packages from my freezer stockpile and make an easy supper.

Just heat a couple of tablespoons of butter and a tbsp of olive oil in your skillet and then toss in your steak strips and chopped peppers. I also added in some chopped vidalia onion. I love vidalia onions! We see those in our Northeast stores in the summer.  Put a little brown on your steak and a little caramelizing on your peppers and get a little brown on the bottom of your pan.

Now take out some instant rice and see how many servings you want and pour the proper amount of water into your steak and peppers, deglazing that nice brown stuff off the bottom of your pan. Add in a package of fajita seasoning (or less if that suits your taste) and about a half a cup of some kind of cheese ( your preference). I use whatever I have in the fridge. Sometimes a blend like cheddar and Colby. Stir it up and bring the water to a boil, stir again and then slap on a cover and simmer until the rice is cooked. Eat it as is or roll it into a tortilla with some chopped tomato and enjoy all the free time you'll have left.

Note: You can use beef stock instead of water and add other good things like mushrooms or corn. What I love about recipes is that they can be changed to suit each individual cook. And if you want to make this even faster? Buy one of those packages of Lipton fajita rice.

Victoria Earns The Game ball...Twice

Congratulations to my daughter Victoria for getting awarded the game ball two games in a row! Both times it was for stepping in to pitch when the other pitchers were having a bad day. The very first time Victoria was brought in this season she pitched a 1*2*3 inning. Good work in the circle!  (The photo was Victoria pitching her first season a few years ago)

Making Pretzels

Ingredients:
1 cup water
2 pkgs yeast
2 teaspoon honey
2 1/2 cups milk
1 stick butter
1/2 cup honey
4 teaspoon salt
8 cups flour
 Extra salt for tops

Dissolve yeast in one cup of warm water + 2 tsp of honey.
Melt butter in a saucepan, add milk, honey and stir.
Add yeast mixture to warm melted butter mixture and stir to blend.
In a bowl blend flour and salt and slowly mix into warm butter mixture until a dough forms.
Kneed dough and then set aside to rise for about an hour.
Punch down dough and take about a baseball size portion and roll it out so it's long and thin and form it into a pretzel shape.
Brush each pretzel with an egg wash and then sprinkle with course salt.
Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.

My New Ford Fiesta

For the first time in my life I have a brand new car! Not a new used care but absolutely new. Technically it's not *my* car since I'm leasing it, but so what? I think of it as mine, all mine!
I got to pick the color: violet/gray. And it has all sorts of great features, like it tells me how many miles I have left to go before the tank is empty. It even tells me what song is playing on the radio. It gets 38mpg on the highway, all the repairs and maintenance and property taxes are covered in the lease payments, and it just plain runs great! Time to head out for a drive

Holy Waxwings!

I put up a bird- feeder last spring and began to see an impressive variety of backyard birds. I'd seen pictures of cedar waxwings and started looking for them in my yard, neighborhood and local parks. No luck. I just never saw this particular bird around town. This morning my husband asked me to look at a bird that was sitting on a wire over the road beyond our driveway. He thought it was a jay but when I glanced out I suspected it might be the elusive waxwing. I rushed for my binoculars and was absolutely stunned. There were waxwings by the dozens!! What a sight! They were sitting all over the wires. What a way to start the day!

Enchiladas!

The Good Times of Summer

My friend and coworker when we visited another friend at her lakeside campsite last August. Another summer is just around the corner with the promise of evening sunsets, leaves rustling in gentle breezes, colorful wildflowers and fun times!

Creative Maxie Photo

My older daughter got artistic when creating a memorable photo of Maxie the Schnauzer.

Spring ain't all good!

We recently took a memorial Day weekend trip to the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont. When we arrived in the late afternoon we were shocked to see so many roads closed. What was going on?? After several detours along potholed dirt roads and through darkening forests we finally arrived at the general store we always visit when in St. Johnsbury (which is usually just minutes from the motel) and we were told of a horrific thunderstorm that had passed through the area the night before. We were told that 5 inches of rain fell in just 2 hours. Creeks had flooded causing roads everywhere to collapse and many of the dirt roads had washed out. The next day we visited a local campground run by people we had met on one of our earliest visits several years past and were saddened to see the destruction caused to their property which sits next to the Moose River.

So truth of the matter is...Spring can actually suck sometimes!

Cabin Fever

I love winter. I love a peaceful white landscape or the feel of cold, sharp air under a clear starry sky. I love walking streets that are empty and all mine because people don't want to come out into the cold. I love the look of pines covered in snow and the sun low in the sky. No matter what time of day it is, it looks like the soft light of early morning or late afternoon. No blazing, blinding high noon in wintertime. I admit though, I do have my limits. I love the wildflowers that grow with abandon along roads and in fallow fields in the summer. I love the colors: shades of purple, lavender, yellow, pink and even white. I love the sweet scents as they rock beneath the hot sun, and the sound of muted buzzing from insects that flit from petal to petal. I love the sound of silence as I stand alone at the edge of overgrown fields that sway beneath the drifting fair weather clouds. Heavy sigh... but for now I have my pictures, and memories.

The Shopping Cart Constellation

I have to get up early for work, and in the Fall and Winter months it's usually still dark. I like getting up in the dark because while I walk the dog around I get a few minutes of stargazing before it begins to get too light. One sight had me taking out my binoculars and I was pleasantly surprised by what I viewed. At first I saw what appeared to be a very small, tight constellation. It looked like a miniature Big Dipper, but it really reminded me of a shopping cart. So I called it "The Shopping Cart" constellation until I was able to find out its true name. I saw these stars every morning and so I decided it was time to take a better look and brought out the binoculars. Through the eyepieces the stars went from faint to brilliant! Bright, white and luminescent. But even more than that the whole field of vision was filled with stars. A whole cluster! I was soon to find out from my guidebook that it is the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. I put the binoculars down and there were no stars visible around the now faint "Shopping Cart" constellation. I again looked through the binoculars and saw the circle filled with stars set off by the brilliance of the Pleiades. Work was a let-down after that beautiful discovery.

Maxie 1998-2010

I open the back door and Maxie runs out and down the steps. I see him pause to sniff the air and stare towards the back of the apartment complex beyond the yard. Nobody is there, but if anyone shows up he’ll be ready to bark and bark until well after they’ve gone out of sight. He’ll be ready to let everyone know this is his domain. His empire.

He then trots across the yard to the back fence where he’ll slowly make his way sniffing, very thoroughly, every inch along the bottom of the chain link. Several of the apartment people own dogs and walk them along the grass near the fence so I know Maxie has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to checking who’s been there recently.

Maxie works his way along the fence until he disappears from view into the next yard. Nobody there ever seems to care if he trespasses since they never use the yard themselves anyway. Although I can no longer see him, I can picture him stopping every so often to check if anyone has appeared outside the apartments, and I can imagine his nose twitching while he checks the air for interesting scents. Nobody is there yet, so with his nose back to the bottom of the fence he presses on.

I know he will be pushing through the weeds, that have grown taller than him, until he reaches the far corner of the fence and he can briefly survey those back yards while thoroughly exploring around the jungle of tangled grass and saplings. His little black, furry body partially concealed by the neglected growth, his little bobbed tail sticking up like a flagpole.

Once finished he’ll turn back and emerge from the tiny jungle, the fence now forgotten, and trot down through the neighbor’s yard and straight to the back door. I’ll see him suddenly reappear from around the shed that separates our two properties. If I’m not there at that moment I know he’ll stand there and wait, staring at the open door until I return, and once back inside the people from the apartments will be able to come and go in peace.

He has done this several times a day for the past several years and so I can see it clearly in my mind, but only in my mind, because once the horrible kidney disease took hold, those days became fewer and far between. He stopped barking. He stopped going to the fence. He stopped being able to go on walks. One by one we saw him lose the things that made life enjoyable for him.

Yesterday he gave up on eating and drinking. He couldn’t stand anymore and he couldn’t rest comfortably. He twitched and gasped and there was no life left in his eyes, and so I had to make the decision I’ve been dreading, and give him his peace. We stayed with him until the last breath and the vet carried him away, still in his bed.

Goodbye my friend. You were deeply loved and you will be greatly missed. Goodbye.

Walking Journal

Just about a year ago I decided to take up walking. I started in the summer by walking the high school track everyday. I was pretty dedicated to to the task and made sure I walked nearly every day of the summer. I kept a little log book of how many miles I walked per day and in August I logged about 58 miles. When Autumn came, and the days got shorter, I was no longer able to use the track since there were football games and then it got dark much earlier. I began making up the best routes around my neighborhood and by the time winter was winding down I found that I'd become very familiar with the details of each route. In short, I was seeing things I hadn't noticed from just driving by everything all the time. I took in details on the houses, the architecture of buildings, saw Christmas lights up close, rustic porches, the flowers that began to bloom in the spring and even paintings on mailboxes. I came to appreciate our historic district and all its beauty and even found a walking trail that ran through some fallow corn fields beyond main Street.

I at first thought getting in a decent walk in the winter months would be difficult, but it proved to be a worthy experience. I'm ready to get back on the track but I enjoyed my time traveling the local roads and streets, even in the cold of January, because there's nothing like watching those deep orange winter sunsets. How many people actually watch sunsets when it's 20 degrees out? Call me crazy, but the experience was worth the misery. And there's nothing like getting back into a warm house after freezing out on the streets! Kind of like getting into the air conditioning after sweltering out on the track in July.

Man's Best Friend

Maxie’s best days are behind him now. He’s getting old (pushing 12) and has kidney disease so he’s slowed down quite a bit over the past year. He can’t do walks anymore, and he doesn’t stay out in the back yard much these days either, so one way to get him out and about is to take him to the pet supply store.

When I first got Maxie from the shelter I started looking for dog friendly places to walk him. We branched out from our neighborhood streets to quiet roads in the farm areas in town, to the woodlands and on to the beaches. Maxie has been to Canada, the White Mountains, Maine, and Vermont and just all over. We’ve covered countless walking miles on roads and trails over the years. Maxie was my best traveling buddy and he rode shotgun with gusto. Shake the keys and he would head straight for the door and stand there staring forward until I opened it and set him free (he still does that sometimes but he has to be “airlifted” out). Mention the word “park” and he would dance in circles and run wild through the house. His ears still perk up, but his racing and dancing days are over. I would actually have to avoid driving past the park if I didn’t intend to stop because if he caught sight of it through the window he’d get all crazy right in the car.

Maxie was hard on the neighbors, too. He would patrol the back fence that separates my yard from the condos behind us and many of those people walk their own dogs in the back lot. Maxie would hang out back watching and as soon as there was a hint of movement he was on them yapping and racing along the fence until they finally disappeared beyond the buildings. Maxie was no more forgiving of my other neighbors and they would be victimized in their own yards. Maxie owned everything and everywhere we went became his territory. Sadly, he doesn’t bark anymore either now that he’s in his sunset years. We still go to the park where he meanders quietly sniffing trees until he gets tired, but everyone gets by him with just a look and a slight perking of the ears. The neighbors don’t get stalked anymore and the days of hiking together in the woods are done. Anyone who's had a dog knows how sad it is to have to start leaving them behind and going off on your own. It’s like, well, losing your best friend.

It's December...

It’s December and the Christmas season is upon us once again. It’s time for the grumpy among us to start complaining about the music, the snow, the crowds, etc. However, I really enjoy this time of year and view it as a nice diversion from our regular daily lives. I like the different music, and the snow, but not the crowds, only the collective excitement of the season. People are on a mission. I don’t care for the commercialism, true, and so I try to keep my shopping low-key. I try to keep a “let’s count our blessings” perspective going with the kids. When I go to the stores I have a plan, I know where I’m going and what I’m looking for, and gone are the days of schlepping from store to store until my feet are screaming and my temper is flaring. I also try to get the kids minds off the merchandise they hope to receive and get them to enjoy the other little things like beautiful Christmas trees everywhere, and decorations, the smell of pine in the air and the beauty of lights on cold, crisp nights. The elegant and the gaudy all come together for one shiny bright show. Okay, I like presents, too. I love the colorful wrapping paper, and tearing it up to reveal something that I really wanted, and it feels good that somebody knew me well enough to get it just right. In the end though, I love a peaceful Christmas Eve sitting by a lit tree, and sometimes I’ll take a quiet, late-night walk and see other lit trees twinkling through windows that have little electric candles glowing in the dark. The little things that you don’t find in the store…ya know?