Lady of Leisure
1:47 p.m. - 2006-08-08


I am liking this new/old life. I still wake at the crack of dawn and get moving, but ha ha, I don't have to be anywhere! There seems to be an amazing amount of chores that needs to be done, so I would assume that I have been putting stuff off for years and now feel obliged to get with it. This week I have been busy doing the yearly roof fixup (stupid raccoons, and I ended up covered with roof tar), making a long delayed doctor appointment to see to that knee I clobbered with an exercise weight back in the spring, signing up on the state employment website, doing actual housework (I had almost forgotten what that was), and resurrecting my artistic life. I set up a table in the girls' room and spread out all my polymer clay supplies. First I amused myself making molds of all kinds of interesting items, like my mother-of-pearl brooch, but my real goal was to try making faux dichroic glass. I succeeded beyond my hopeful dreams, and handed the finished product over to Melissa to make into jewelry.

I have since tried several new-to-me techniques, and some were successful and some were failures, but it was all fun. I work on this until noon, clean up the considerable mess, then have all afternoon to come up with something for dinner. Yesterday I found some frozen hot dogs so I made beans and franks, and today I found some frozen chicken patties, so I made some hamburger buns so that we can have our own 'Crispy Chicken Sandwiches'. I am now trying to decide what kind of sandwiches they should be, because I could make pesto mayonnaise, but I also have some leftover barbecue sauce, so they could be a BBQ sandwich. It is so nice to have more than 1 hour to make something for dinner. My oven is acting very nice to me this week. I made two fresh apple cakes, one last week and one this week, and both turned out great, which for me means not burnt. Today the hamburger buns baked evenly all over, and I even remembered to stamp them with the kaiser roll indenter thingy I got for Christmas one year from the King Arthur catalog. Now I am going to go read several of my cookbooks and find a recipe for some kind of grain salad, which I have never made before but which sounds good to me.

Our new computer has arrived at the office. He gets to have a computer at home as a perk for being a partner, and they will also pay for the internet provider. I think we are going to go with Astound because my dad and brother like it and the service is supposed to be good. The office tech is working on the new machine to install all the needed stuff, then Melissa is going to hook it up for us (because we are lame) probably this weekend. So pretty soon it will be goodbye to dial-up and welcome to the new millenium.