Three reasons

to visit Polish Chicago include the following:

1) People speak Polish. They will speak it to you, too, without bothering to know whether you speak it or not. They just assume that you do. Then, when they hear you speak Polish and realize you are a bit rusty, they will pretend like they don't notice.

That's me, next to the babcia playing the lottery.

2) You can buy Polish kiełbasa.

3) You can buy Inka.

The happy Inka nuclear family. It has expanded since last I knew. From left, there is the original Inka, then the Inka korzenna (cinnamon), Inka czekoladowa (chocolate), Inka o smaku karmelowym (caramel), and the black sheep of the family, the cheap Inka knock-off. I will let you know if Krakus is any good. It is made in Poland, so that is a start. If anyone wants to come enjoy any of the five Inkas with me, just let me know. 

There are ancillary reasons as well. 

For instance, there is an IKEA in Chicago. IKEA will expand your food horizons. Like, who knew you could buy caviar at IKEA? 

We got some of this too, so let me know if you want a taste test. 

Also, there is a temple in Chicago. 

(Actually, this is the main reason we went to Chicago. But Inka and caviar never hurt anyone.)

Labor day laboring

Alex and I spent our day laboring. That is not to be confused with the being in labor type of laboring. There was none of that going on in this household today.

We re-organized our craft room/office/entertainment room/repository of random stuff room to a more organized clutter than the previously strewn about/stacked on piles of stuff type of clutter that it was this morning by adding two extra sets of shelves. I don't have a before picture but here is the after picture.

And now you officially know that this is a boring blog about boring stuff like putting up some shelves and organizing your food storage. I am so sorry.

Alex learned as he was planning for where to put the shelves that 36 + 16 ≠ 50. We decided he needs to learn how to add. However, all's well that ends well and we fit all our relevant junk into one corner. I like it when life is tidy.

This is Alex right now. He is getting a haircut tonight. Maybe. I am exceptionally tired right now and I feel like going to bed.

He wants me to tell all of you that live in CU that Beachy's is a good place to get food storage. There I go again about the food storage. See me if you have questions.

And please try not to be jealous of all the delicious fruit I canned this year.

Why everyone should own a seam ripper

even if you don't sew. Someday it will come in handy. I promise. As long as you are taking my advice, here is another one: Measure twice, cut once. And before you measure twice, measure once. That was the step I forgot.

Remember this quilt?

The first thing Alex said when I showed him was "Is the top wider than the bottom?" By gum, he was right! To the tune of 2 inches! Yes, I am an awesome quilter. 

So I had to decide if I was going to fix it. I was worried it was going to take a lot of work. If it had been the second thing Alex had said, I probably wouldn't have fixed it and just given it to someone I didn't like. But seeing how it was the first thing out of his mouth, I knew I would never appreciate the quilt if I didn't attempt a redo. 

So I did. As soon as I got home from the fair. 

First place Southdown ewe. She is loooong. I like livestock shows because it takes me back to my 4-H days.

Alice is super cute. No comment on the sign. 

The famous butter cow. 

Here is the new and improved version of the quilt.

I know, you can't really tell.

Here is a side by side.

If you don't want to end up like me, measure before finishing your quilt.

Thank you.

Huzzah

I own a bicycle flat repair kit and a small tire pump. I carry it with me on my bike commutes because if I didn't have it with me, I would get a flat, right?

A couple weeks ago a young man stopped by the clinic on his bike and when he went to leave, his tire was flat. We weren't all that busy at the time so I pulled out my repair kit thinking "awesome! A chance to serve someone and experiment on someone else's bike!" I thought we had fixed the thing and I was bragging about it later until one of the front desk staff said something like "yeah, he showed up five minutes later wanting to use the phone." That was the first flat tire I had ever attempted to repair.

You can imagine my dread when I went to leave work today and my back tire was flat!! Alex had a meeting or I would have made him come rescue me. Everyone else at work was gone. I had no choice but to fix or be fixed.

So, in record breaking time (50 minutes), I repaired the flat and it actually lasted me until I got home! This is the triumph of my day.

FYI there is a nasty defect in my tire where a whole area about 1x3 cm is worn away almost to nothing and a little thread is poking out. And the tire curves the wrong way. Not good. And I am not sure when I will be riding my bike again. In all honesty, I should have caught it before it got to this point. Now maybe I will take more seriously the advice to look over your bike on a regular basis.

Not a great picture, but you get the idea.

As an aside, because I biked home an hour later than normal, I got to see a beautiful sunset. I also swallowed about 50 dusky bugs.

I love Thursdays

I don't have to go to work on Thursdays. It is the awesomest thing in the world. I have 26 hours of work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before my day off on Thursday and I have found myself recently counting down to 1:00 pm Tuesday, which is halfway to Thursday.

So what do I do on my days off? A better question would be: why do they go by three times as fast as any other day?!?

Today I finished a quilting project I have been working on for a while. It was originally going to be a baby quilt but I think you will all agree with me that it would not make a fabulous baby quilt unless the baby loved to read or chew on books.

Maybe we will hang it on the wall.

We got about five minutes of rain today. That is the most rain we have had for about 2 weeks. One upside of the drought is I have gotten a lot of biking in. No worries of being rained out pretty much the whole summer. Here is what my biking chart looks like:

That is compared to a couple months ago:

And for you observant people out there

there are four additional squares. I had to add them after I bought some biking shorts and figured I should "pay off" those as well. Biking shorts are not cheap!!

The Year of the Peach

Part I. Our peach tree had a very bad year. Right as the gobs and gobs of peaches were ripening, this had to happen:

A split down the trunk right at the V where the two main branches diverged and the trunk bore the most strain. This was our fault - we could have pruned better, shaped the tree's growth better when it was much younger, thinned the growing fruit more, and probably a dozen other things. Luckily, the weaker part (on the right in this picture) originally fell on and was supported by a chain link fence and the tree's vasculature wasn't compromised. So we sort of tied it back together and staked up some of the branches while the fruit was the heaviest. 

Which brings us to...

Part II. Our peach tree had a very, very good year. We got bushels of fruit from it: enough to freeze a little, can four different batches of jam, conserve, chutney, puree, make a couple cakes, eat in our oats, give some away, and blah blah blah... And the other great thing was that the peaches were amazing - sweet, juicy and oh so tasty.

I really wish I had taken a picture of the cake I made.

Part III: What do we do now? Prune heavily? Chop off half the tree? (Probably not.) How will the peach tree weather coming seasons?

Part IV: The moral of the story is that even if you have a humongous crack right through your trunk and you can't stand up straight and it looks like you don't have a chance, you can still have an amazing and miraculous season. I can't promise what will happen to you in future seasons though. That remains for the gardener to decide :)

Drought

They say it is the worst drought in over 50 years and I am in the epicenter of it. I don't think I have ever been in the epicenter of a natural disaster before (yes we were officially declared a disaster zone last week.) All I know is, the corn is shriveled, short, and turning brown. The soybeans still have a chance I hear if we get rain in the next week or so. Our yard is brown. But that is ok because so are all of our neighbors' yards. Our garden is hanging in there, thanks to our garden hose. If you see any rainclouds, send them to our soybean fields. Your cows and tofu will thank you later.

To answer the questions about the expensive cows: The milk, cheese, and ice cream that the dairy from the previous post produces is actually all just a byproduct of the real money maker: genes. Embryos actually. Cows are only worth so much in the last few years because we developed the technology to be able to harvest a large number of embryos from a single female and implant them into surrogate mommy cows. The expensive cows became so expensive because of their fabulous milking abilities, udder quality, and quality in general and therefore their genes are an international commodity.

To explain about the squirrel: We were concerned that squirrels would strip our peach tree as they have been known to do in the past so we borrowed a live trap and started catching them a few weeks ago. Alex skinned the first one he caught and stuck it in the fridge but we couldn't ever bring ourselves to eat it and eventually threw it away. We've caught a handful of squirrels so far and we just need to keep them away another week or so. (Our squirrel trapping permit ends in a couple weeks anyway.) Joe is welcome to come shoot as many as he wants too :)

And, because no post is all that fun without a few pictures:

Panda on the left and Ernie on the right. Panda was my very own dog when I was about 12 and I sure loved her. She chased cars and the UPS truck ran her over. 

Jessie, I love your hair. Ben, I love your face. 

Yes, I used to wear bows like this. Thank you mom. 

My first 4-H lamb, Lana.