just rambling

About the thirty day challenge:  The purpose of the exercise is to make you aware of your surroundings and your feelings, to get you to live in the moment.  Somebody expressed surprise that I used a picture of the waffles we had for breakfast for my "favorite food".  Here's what you need to know:  I have at least fifty favorite foods.  I'm always talking about how much I love pizza, I know.  But there are other foods I love just as much.  
There is a reason why waffles won out yesterday:  Cliff and I usually have oatmeal or cream of wheat for breakfast.  I buy the generic brands, so it's cheap and yet nutritious.  I cook proper portions, so our calories are controlled.  But sometimes, probably a couple of times a month, I fix pancakes or waffles.  Cliff prefers pancakes, so that's the most frequent choice, but I love waffles best.  They're a big pain to make and we have to wait between servings for the next one to get done, but oh, I do love crispy waffles.  So on the rare occasion that I decide to make them, at that golden moment, waffles are my favorite food.  
Someone remarked about the plate my waffles were on:  Indeed, that is a really old Corelle pattern.  I've had that set of plates for at least twenty years, and I bought them at a garage sale from a lady who was tired of them, so they were old when I got them.  See, here's something that never happens to me:  I don't get tired of a plate or a pattern!  As long as it doesn't break, I'm delighted with it.  Now, if somebody wanted to bless me with a new set of Corelle Livingware, I wouldn't turn them down.  If you have a set you are tired of, especially if it has blue in it, I'll take it off your hands.  Why blue?  Because it's my favorite color.   

In the middle of the series of posts about how I don't go to church much, I was sitting in my recliner a week ago Sunday.  I looked at the clock and noticed it was 10:30, which is the time a lot of local churches begin their services.  Cliff was on the couch, surfing the Internet on the laptop and I was reading a book on the Nook.  I said to myself, "Look at us:  we're not doing anything productive; we may as well have gone to church."  
So yesterday we went.  We're sorta church-hopping right now.  We'll pick one before long.  It's going to be hard to choose, though, because the three local ones we've visited have all given us a positive experience.  Since we are keeping it local, we see familiar faces.  For instance, yesterday when we walked in the door, there sat the guy who had fixed our furnace twelve hours earlier.  The three churches we've visited are all smaller ones, which means we are noticed, and the people are glad to see us.
Heather says she would like to get back to going to church, so she and our grandson might attend with us.  If they want to make it a regular thing, they can help us decide where we'll be going.  I intend to stay in our immediate community, though.  I'm done with traveling fifteen or twenty miles to a attend a church where I'm invisible, just because they have good preaching and and an outstanding choir. 
 One thing I really like in all the churches we've attended is the casual atmosphere.  Cliff says next Sunday he's wearing his overalls, and he should!  He wouldn't feel a bit out of place, and he'd be comfortable.    

Morning thoughts

Everything I have read online about goldfinches tells me they disappear from feeders around August 8. While I'm not seeing as many as before, I still have several still showing up at my feeder; that's a good thing! I love the splashes of yellow cavorting around my yard. I understand their color fades to brown for the winter.

I've acquired several kinds of flowers with which I'm getting acquainted this year, but the Coneflowers are my new favorites. They absolutely bloom their little hearts out all summer; they attract butterflies; and although it's recommended that you "deadhead" them, I'm leaving the dead flowers on the plant because I've seen goldfinches making a meal of the dry seeds. You absolutely MUST get some coneflowers if you don't have them already! They demand little, and they give so much.

Last year my hummingbirds left sometime in mid-August, as I recall. They're still here this year, extra feisty of late. I have one feeder attached to a window by Cliff's chair, and we've had a marvelous time watching the little critters chase one another. Sometimes one will even hit against the window pane in his haste to escape from a rambunctious friend.

We've had rain. Lots of rain: another three and three quarters inches since Sunday morning. All the varieties of tomatoes in my garden are blighty, but the fruits are still staying ahead of the blighted areas of the plants. I think I'm done canning tomatoes; I only have a few pint jars left, and I do believe I have plenty to last until next summer. We shall see. At present, for any dishes requiring tomatoes, I'm using fresh ones from the garden. With any luck I won't have to start using canned ones until sometime in October, depending of course on how bad the blight situation gets.

I'm still scouring the Internet for ways to use Butternut squash. The pie I made last Sunday was excellent. Yesterday I made Butternut squash soup (recipe HERE), and I like it fine; I sent some with Cliff in his lunch to take to work; I'm anxious to find out if he likes it. I found a different recipe from Emeril, but his version requires two cups of heavy cream. With a Jersey cow in residence here, I can obtain the cream; but I don't think Cliff and I had better indulge in so much of it.

From only one plant, we've enough eggplant to indulge in rattatouille, Russian Eggplant caviar, and Eggplant Parmesiana; my daughter has taken a few eggplants home with her, too.

My garden is a weedy mess, but it's still providing us with good things to eat. The okra is taller than I, and is just coming into its own; I'm freezing plenty to use in chicken gumbo this winter.

If the weather-guessers know what they're talking about, it looks like we might have a few days with no precipitation. That will be a nice change.

Enough rambling! I wish each of my readers a wonderful day. I'm wasting time at the computer when I could be outside enjoying a crisp morning that feels like autumn.