Clouds above me, fog around me

I'm trying to pull myself out of a funk I'm in much of the time lately, so bear with me.  Lately the high spot of my day is my morning walk through the pasture and woods, and there's only so much I can say about that.  Rain is sorely needed, but watering the whole (admittedly small) garden is more than I'm willing to do, so I water the young strawberry plants every other day, and that's all.

I have been enjoying our mid-day meals lately, thanks to the tomato plants that finally produced a few nice big tomatoes.  Wednesday we had fried green tomatoes, and yesterday we pigged out with BLT's.  OK, for me it's just BT's, since I leave off the lettuce; all it does is make my tomatoes slide around more, and who needs that?  I shouldn't admit it, but we both had two full sandwiches!  Now we're out of Costco bacon, so I guess that'll be that.  Bacon is ridiculously high-priced.

I'm about out of fruit, and that's a bad situation for me.  I can't buy more than three or four bananas in summer because we don't eat them that fast, and one can only eat so much banana bread; we don't have a decent grocery store near us, and the closest grocery store of any kind is ten miles away.  One thing I've had a lot of lately is sweet cherries; I almost have an addiction to them, and have eaten literally pounds of them in the last few weeks.  I'm a big fan of mangoes, too:  I accompanied my daughter and her husband to Cozumel three or four years ago to visit their friend Brooke, and she introduced me to mangoes; it was love at first bite.  Aldi usually has them at a very reasonable price, in season.  I like avocados, too, when the price is right, although I'll admit my main reason for eating them is because they are good for me.  That's another frequent bargain at Aldi.  Unfortunately, the nearest Aldi store is twenty-five miles away.  I suppose that should be no big deal to retired folks with plenty of time whose car gets thirty-five miles to the gallon, though.

I was messing around with Google Earth and remembered that somewhere on this blog, I had shared an old picture of our property taken years ago.  Those "fingers" through the woods are where I still walk, and I placed the red rectangle there to show where our trailer house was.  

Below is a more recent picture that shows the trailer house.  Our property is long and narrow, and consists of a little over 40 acres.  You can see the railroad tracks at the back of our place.  What these pictures from the sky does not show you is the canyons;  Most of those trees you see are in ditches deep enough to dwarf our old two-story house.  Our house sits on a high river bluff, but the back of the place is probably 200 feet or more lower than that, and north of the railroad tracks, it's all fertile (and often flooded) river bottoms where various farmers plant corn and beans.     

You can easily see our trailer house, and the driveway going past the grandson's house and leading up to our two-car garage.  I still walk the dirt trail from our house back to the "fingers" of my walk.  This would have been taken not long after the grandson bought the property and upgraded the old house, in the lower left-hand corner.  The bigger, red-roofed building north of it is the shop.  Almost straight cross the driveway from the shop,  the building with the gray steel roof is the old barn.  I have no idea why all that bare dirt is there on the right of the trailer house, but it may have been where Cliff and the grandson were getting some needed dirt for things they were doing around the old house at the time.

That's it for today.

Weather and other things

We are in the middle of an incredible period of perfect weather; the only thing that would make it more perfect would be a decent rain; but the temperatures are cool and refreshing, giving us a chance to sleep with the windows open at night.  This cool-down follows a few days of temperatures near 100º, so I am doubly grateful.  Of course it will warm up again, but I can keep in mind that we are that much closer to autumn.  Gabe and I can wait until 8 a.m. or so to go for our walk, instead of leaving as the sun is about to come up.  

The crazy cat insists on following us if he sees us walking through the gate, but he usually stops early and spends the whole day in the woods.  That would be great, except that coyotes and foxes eat cats, so I usually worry my daylight hours away and then make Cliff take me back there on the four-wheeler in the evening so I can bring him home; silly, I know.  Blue always comes out near whatever spot we left him in that morning.

Yesterday, however, he came back on his own before noon.  Sometimes I think maybe he just stays because he enjoys riding on the four-wheeler.  This morning he wasn't in sight and wasn't following us when we left, I thought; but when we reached the giant mud-puddle small pond in the pasture, he came bouncing up from behind, then stayed behind as Gabe and I moved on.  Now that he's come back on his own once, I'm not going to worry about him (sometimes I lie to myself like this).

On to another subject:  For years I've been searching for the world's best biscuit.  I googled the phrase "biscuit nirvana" on my blog and found several entries where I've used that term in a post, many of those times mentioning yet another wonderful secret I'd found to making the perfect biscuit.  However, I recently watched a video that gives probably the best suggestion of all, and it's something I hadn't been able to force myself to try before; turns out I had been over-working the dough.  If you like, feel free to watch the video and see how Chef John makes biscuits.  Click HERE.  I found this recipe on allrecipes but had never taken time to watch the video.  Cliff is very impressed with the difference this method makes.  No matter what biscuit recipe I use, this is bound to improve the final product.

Gabe survived his fourth birthday yesterday.  If he makes it to 14 years of age, I will be 87 if I'm still around, so he could well be the last dog I ever have.  I used to worry about what would happen to him if I died, but Cliff has come to like him, and I think he would take good care of him at this stage of his life, other than the fact he'd feed him too much of everything he shouldn't have.  However, my mom's old poodle lived like that to the ripe old age of 17... and died obese, blind, deaf, and happy.

Of course, what if Cliff goes first?  He always says he expects to die before I do because he thinks I'm in better health.  I won't worry about that just now.