banjo man’s birthday and another heat wave

Posted on July 29, 2021 by is there any more pie?

Banjo Man turns 80 on Saturday.

No one can believe it, especially him. He is very…lively. He loves to get up at 5 AM and head to the Cabin On The Mountain to do important things like build an out house and remove old shingles and haul old lumber to the dump.

It makes him happy.

So…his birthday. He didn’t want a party (for the record, let it be known that I offered). He said he’d like to go to a restaurant in town for a fancy dinner and listen to “Bruce and Beth” play music, which they do every Saturday night.

It’s going to be 99 degrees Saturday. If we ate inside in the glorious air-conditioned dining room, we wouldn’t be able to hear the music. Which was the point. So we decided that we would have a drink on the hot, hot, hot stone patio, hear some tunes and flee into the chilly dining room for dinner.

A plan!

And then I discovered the restaurant was closed for a private event Saturday night.

Banjo Man decided he really didn’t want to go to town after all. But neither of our lakeside restaurants in town are air-conditioned and no matter what, we would still be dealing with a hot evening.  And we’re out of the mood for hot evenings.

I could tell the man was losing interest in the whole birthday party thing, but I was still determined to do something.

And yet…ninety-nine degrees?????  Are you kidding me?  I can’t even grill on the porch in that kind of heat.  The new recipe for marinated shrimp would have to wait.

So we have postponed the celebration.  I will make chicken salad sandwiches from a favorite recipe and we will have potato chips and beer and peaches and cake.  Inside.  With the air-conditioning on.  And the three of us will play cards and take pictures of the sunset.

How does that sound?

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livin’ the good life with the peach man

Posted on July 28, 2021 by is there any more pie?
Peaches and apricots.

This is how I spent my weekend. Result? Seven quarts and seven pints of canned peaches, six pints of apricots and 14 pints of apricot jam.

When I shared this accomplishment with my friend Kathy From Montana, she cried, “You’re working too hard!”

I didn’t get to explain that it wasn’t work at all.

Here’s the thing: I never thought I’d ever have the energy to can fruit or make jam again. I’d resigned myself to the fact that the fun, fruit-preserving part of my life was over.

And yes, my mother-in-law and I always thought it was fun. We got a lot of fruit preserved when she would visit us. We’d make glorious messes and end up with quarts and quarts of apple butter (her specialty).

Okay, so it took me two years to get my energy back after, ugh, cancer.

And when I visit the Peach Man’s tent on Thursday mornings I get a little drunk on all the possibilities stacked there in boxes and I buy too much and I giggle like a mad woman as I drive out of the parking lot.

The other ingredient–beside energy–is the addition of a “steamer canner”, recommended by one of my friends at water aerobics. This kitchen invention is right up there with the microwave and the immersion blender.

A terrible picture of its dial.

Instead of dealing with gallons of hot water and a heavy pan, you only fill the steamer with a few inches of water and let it steam the required amount of canning time after it reaches the spot on the dial that corresponds to your altitude. It happily boils while the jars are steamed.

The only fly in the ointment is obtaining canning jars and metal lids. It’s hit or miss at the grocery stores and I refuse to order the Chinese-made varieties.

Next up? Peach pie filling!

Posted in food, lake, the cancer fight | 2 Comments

waiting for raindrops

Posted on July 21, 2021 by is there any more pie?

As I sit here looking out the dining room windows all I can see are clouds.

Or maybe it’s smoke. There’s a whiff of that in the air.

We are waiting for some rain, forecast by the weather app on my I-phone, which should arrive in the next hour or two.

And how we would love some rain! Real rain, though. Not the scattered sprinkling stuff that does nothing but get our hopes up.

Today is my father’s birthday. He would have been 96. And I’m not sure he would have loved that so much unless he had been in great health and even greater spirits. He filled his world with laughter and fun, and any reduction of those activities and pleasures would have been very, very painful. Still, we all miss him terribly. His ever-present happiness was so contagious.

I tried a new recipe last night, but it was definitely not blog-worthy: Brined Chicken Breasts with Crispy Sage. The guys loved it, but I thought it was a bit salty. I love crispy sage leaves–and I have a mega-sized sage plant this summer–but the recipe was too much work for the end result. And yet the chicken was tender and juicy, so there was that.

Banjo Man and Will can enjoy the leftovers tonight because I am going out to dinner with Wednesday night dinner group, even though there are only three of us available. “Company Season” is upon us here at the lake and many of us are busy entertaining those family members and friends who couldn’t be here last summer.

I wanted to share Nancy’s moon photo with you. She took it a couple of nights before she left. Her phone, the I-phone 12, has an incredible camera.

Happy Summer, everyone. Enjoy it while it is here!

Posted in family, food, lake | 2 Comments

it’s always hard to leave the lake, part two

Posted on July 20, 2021 by is there any more pie?
Posted in family, lake | 1 Comment

edits for today’s post, hard to leave the lake

Posted on July 19, 2021 by is there any more pie?

I had a lot of trouble writing and posting today’s blog post and somehow (!!!!) the post was published and was only about 1/3 there. So when you received an email with the post in it, you didn’t have much of it.

And it sure wouldn’t have made sense.

It’s corrected on the wordpress site now. I don’t know why the “good” post didn’t save to the website.

It’s a mystery.

I need more coffee.

I’m sorry for the trouble!

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it’s always hard to leave the lake, part one

Posted on July 19, 2021 by is there any more pie?

After a month of fun and frolicking, the Funny Grandson is on his way home to Texas.

This is not what he wanted.   Despite his ever-patient parents giving him four water-soaked weeks at the lake, the FG was distraught when it came time to get in the van and head out.  I could hear him crying all the way up the driveway.

He cried for so long and so hard and for so many miles that his mother finally had to tell him to get a grip because people were going to think he was being kidnapped.

A couple of weeks ago Banjo Man and I bought him a junior-sized kayak for an “Early Birthday” present.

Grandpa gets a hug.

I think he liked it!

Being able to kayak opened up a whole new world for him.  His father refused to take it to Texas, so here it stays where I intend to try it out for myself.  It’s light enough for me to drag off and on the beach by myself and then set off along the shore to look at the neighbors’ houses and watercraft.

My other option?  A floaty.

Check out the wooden paddle.

It’s obviously not as sophisticated and cool as a kayak.  And I yearn, in my advanced years, to be sophisticated and cool.

To be continued…

Posted in family, grandmother stuff, lake | 1 Comment

4th of july, the small town way

Posted on July 10, 2021 by is there any more pie?

Yes, I love the 4th of July!

From the parade to the kids races to the hot dogs-eaten-for-breakfast, the waving flags and the fireworks.

The best part of the day.

We were all at the parade, of course. The FG was front and center to catch candy that was tossed from trucks, cars, motorcycles and horses.

There was a huge crowd again this year and everyone I saw looked really happy to be there. So many families, people of all ages, dogs and balloons and lots of hugs as people who hadn’t seen each other in a while (Covid?) reunited.

Is this what “normal” looks like? Hallelujah!!!

The firetruck sprays the crowd with water at the end of the parade.

We entered raffles, ate snow cones, watched the little children race each other (a very important and much loved tradition) and then headed home for a little while.

The guys went back for the sawing competitions. And then it was back to the lake for more swimming. And hamburgers. And strawberry shortcake.

At 10:00 the fireworks began and we were all lined up on the dock to watch.

Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.
For purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain.
America, America, God shed His grace on thee.
And crown Thy good, with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

I am rarely political on this blog–Lord knows we have enough politics in our lives–but this performance of twenty years ago touched my heart.

Could this happen today? I wonder.

Posted in family, lake, music | 2 Comments

four boys and a lake

Posted on July 9, 2021 by is there any more pie?

Is there anything better than a holiday weekend with sunshine, water and the arrival of the grandchildren next door?

These four swam and played and jumped and laughed and hollered for four days. Their energy was astounding.

They had so much fun. There were snacks on the beach and a dog who waited for someone to toss a stick in the water to be fetched. Do you remember times like this when you were a kid, when everything was fun and you fell into bed at night, exhausted and already looking forward to doing it all over again the next day?

The Funny Grandson’s diving style.

I think the boys jumped off the dock three hundred times.

Maybe more.

Cousins. Brothers. Friends.

All good things come to an end, sadly, and the boys have returned home to Washington and Montana. The FG will be heading back to Texas in another week.

But what a time to remember! The youngest boy, the FG’s age, was with his grandmother for nine days. Which meant the two boys have played in the water together all that time. Our beaches are side-by-side, so the adults sat under umbrellas and dispensed drinks and snacks and cherries.

We were also amazed (and envious) of their energy.

Their joy we understood.

Posted in family, friends, grandmother stuff, lake | 4 Comments

peach man, 2021

Posted on July 8, 2021 by is there any more pie?

I have been to the Peach Man twice now, because that’s what I do at 9 AM on summer Thursday mornings.

But no one in this house ever wants to see another cherry again. Or at least not until 2022.

Last week I bought a case of apricots and a case of peaches. I made peach cobbler and peeled and sliced the rest. Some I froze.

And the apricots? Well, they ripened very fast, which meant that I spent Monday morning pitting apricots and running them through the food processer. 32 cups of pureed apricots are in the freezer waiting for me to have the energy and the inclination to turn them into jam later in the summer.

I thought this would be a really great picture, but instead it looks kind of…disgusting.

Sorry about that.

Posted in food, lake | 2 Comments

full house

Posted on July 7, 2021 by is there any more pie?
Will and Nancy having lunch on the deck.

Daughter Nancy arrived last week and the house is jumping with all sorts of family activity.

Have you flown anywhere this summer? If you have you know that it is an adventure–the kind with delayed flights, crowded planes and changes of gates and times that require that passengers take nothing for granted.

Will’s flight here was such a mess that Southwest sent him a $100 voucher as an apology.

Which was nice of them.

Nancy’s plane was supposed to arrive in Spokane at 10:55 pm but instead came in at 1:30 am. I was asleep in a nearby hotel when she called, but it was easy to throw on some clothes and run out to get her, as the hotel shuttle driver had gone off duty at 12:30.

But she’s here and it does my heart good to have all of my kids together.

Floating.
Reading.

We survived ten days of the Heat Dome, with its 109 degree heat and nights when the air didn’t cool down very much.

We set up camping cots and an air bed downstairs and kept the AC on. I don’t remember if we have ever used the AC overnight, unless it was when we were dealing with smoke from distant forest fires.

We were so happy to have it.

And I am happy to be writing this blog again! My computer issues continue and even though I have been up since 4 am and it is now two and a half hours later, I am still dealing with problems transferring photos while Chrome freezes and iCloud acts like it has never heard of me before.

I will try to do better, but if blogging means getting up at 4 am I don’t think it’s going to be a daily thing.

And so I will hit “publish” and get a second mug of coffee to celebrate.

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