Busy times abound

Things have been sooo busy here.


Finally got Macy well, and here comes this one (Gabby) with a big ol' lump on her side. We've had one cat--Amber, also a grey tabby-- die from fibrosarcoma, so naturally that was the first thing that popped into our heads. But it was soft and grew very rapidly, so I really didn't think that was what was going on.


And it wasn't. It was an absess, probably from a bite of another cat. Ugh. I am one of THOSE cat owners that lets their cat outside when she asks aka scratches the furniture/jumps on us in the middle of the night. I would prefer she be an inside cat, but she LOVES it outside. Anyway, she was sedated, absess was lanced, and she came home still stoned from the sedation and with a nice little bald spot on her side. The main thing is, she should be just fine, although maybe posessed if the above picture is any indication. lol



We also had this fun guy around for a week. He stays at my mom's house when he comes in but I try to visit as much as possible, which usually means every day. We had lots of fun as usual. His vocabulary is just exploding and I love that he is putting complex sentences together.

And last, but not least, I spent a few hours with this view:

I took a fall on some water and went down hard on my knee. It happened inside a business, so I was obligated to get it checked out that day instead of waiting to see if it got better on its own. It appears to be just a nice little sprain (which I was surprised to learn from my discharge papers can take as long to heal as a fracture can) so hopefully nothing permenant.

I might be scarce for a while, because I've got a few other things going on that are keeping me hopping. On one knee that is.

Philosiphizin', tunies, and canners

Just a few flower pictures from my backyard:

Blackberry lily. I love these flowers. They are so dainty.

Day lily. Love the color of this one. I have tons of yellow day lilies in front and a few in back of my house, but just one plant that blooms this color.

Canna. These were already at our house when we bought it 9 years ago. The bed they grow in is outside our bedroom, just off the deck. I love lying in bed and watching these tall beauties blowing in the wind.

My granny called these "canners." Growing up I didn't know that much about flowers, and had no idea what these were really called. She also called petunias "tunies." As in "Don't forget to water my tunies" or "You have to pinch the tunies."

Speaking of cannas---I have always heard that in my zone or colder, you have to dig them up in the winter. To this I say: Are you kidding me? Now my beds do need weeding, and I am certainly no professional, but most of the time when I plant a flower it grows. Here is my gardening philosophy: NEGLECT. When I plant something in the ground, I water it in for a while until it gets established. And then it's on its own. Let those roots dig down deep and search out their own water and nutrients. I don't do fussy plants. If it can't make it in the hot, humid South without babying, I've no business growing it. Now of course I'm talking about perennial flowers, trees, bushes. A vegetable garden needs regular gardening of course.

How about you? What's your gardening philosophy?

Let the negotiations begin

You see that box? OK good, because I'll get back to it in a minute.

Earlier this week I cleaned out our bedroom closet. Boy, did it need it. Anything that doesn't belong elsewhere winds up having a home in our closet. I managed to get rid of several boxes and all the clothes are either on hangers or folded. (I like my jeans folded.) Shoes all have mates, except for one house shoe of Mr. GV. It's probably hiding under the bed, which reminds me that when I cleaned the closet I also did a thorough vacuuming underneath our bed. And I ran across a pacifier that belonged to my nephew. There's no telling how long it's been under there. I swear I vacuumed under there not too long ago!

Anyway, I was on the stepladder putting some things on the top shelf of the closet when I noticed THE BOX. The label says "Open Aug 1 2010." Well, that day had already passed, but I wasn't too far off. It took me a minute, but I finally remembered what was in it.

It's full of electrical gadgetry---cords that don't have a label on them, so we have no idea what gadget they go to, generic cords (USB, etc) that you can find anywhere, and so on. Probably there are cords in there that go to things we got rid of years ago. Five or six years back I went through all the cords and such, put them into zip top baggies, and labeled them. So these are what's left from before that time.

The date is on there because we were supposed to get rid of the entire box on that date if we hadn't needed to go into it. Well, guess what. We DID go into the box, twice I think, in the past year.

So.....I'm still ready to get rid of the whole box. lol But I know Mr. GV, who doesn't like to get rid of things, is going to resist. And the deal was that we would only get rid of it if we didn't use anything out of it. Maybe I can renegotiate? Something like---whatever we STILL have in there in 3 months, we get rid of. We shall see!

Food stuff

I have somewhere to be this afternoon, so started bright and early this morning on some food prep.


End result:

For the fridge:

6 pints + 1 large bowl of chili
bowl of kale from the garden
baby spinach (not shown) ready for Mr. GV to use as salad

For the freezer:

brown rice (made earlier this week; I just bagged it up for the freezer today)
lacinato kale
collard greens


Still need to do:

Make cabbage/apple dish
Process oldish apples; I'll dry them, most likely
Cut/freeze a couple of red peppers
Cook/dry/freeze some squash/broccoli, zucchini that are getting old
Go through fridge and freezer and make plans to use up what is getting old

Tomorrow I *hopefully* will get a call from my favorite local organic farm telling me there are enough culled (non-perfect) tomatoes for me to get a 1/2 bushel or bushel. I am going to try canning tomatoes for the first time ever! There are so many reasons I hope this works--they will be BPA-free, so much cheaper than organic tomatoes at the store, and very little waste--just the flats to throw out from each jar.

I promise an update, whether I have success or failure, sometime next week.

Update: The farm didn't have enough tomatoes for me. So no canning for me this year.

"How I spent my summer....and spring" by Macy

This is where we've been spending our time lately:


Our vet's office. In the spring, Mr GV and I took Macy on a field trip to the emergency vet a few counties over because of a sudden case of blindness. Long story short, the blindness was a result of a very low platelet count caused by ehrlichiosis, a tick-born disease. We got that cleared up with meds, and thankfully the vision problem went away and her platelets are normal. For a while we were told "Don't let her jump/run/get hurt because she might bleed to death." The platelets were pretty much unmeasurable. I promise I'm not just being dramatic! It took a few repeat blood draws to determine that she was in the clear. When she had her vaccinations we had it checked again, and it was normal.

A couple weeks ago Macy started feeling poorly. It's pretty obvious when she's feeling badly--mainly there's a lot of panting and she separates herself from us. In the past it's been an anal gland problem. We visited the vet, where we found Macy had a low-grade fever and had lost a couple pounds and got her gland cleaned out, just in case that was the problem. Her bloodwork was again normal.

Fast-forward a couple weeks and Macy was still not well, and actually seemed worse. Added to her symptoms were trembling, lethargy, and lack of appetite. I took her into the vet this past Saturday and she had a fever of 105 and had lost an additional 2 pounds. A loss of over 4 pounds in about a month is significant when you only weigh 62 pounds to start with. Her bloodwork showed infection, although we have no clue where it's located, and she started on Bactrim, a powerful antibiotic. She was tested again for ehrlichiosis, and that was thankfully negative.

Monday night we noticed a bit of blood here and there. And then more blood--on the couch, the bed, the carpet. And it was coming from Macy's nose. There was no gush, mind you, just enough blood to freak me the heck out. We put a call into the vet and she said she thought it was probably a dry nose from all the panting, and to bring her to the office in the morning. (By the way, our vet rocks! We have been to at least 8 vets since we adopted our Sophie cat back in 1995, and Dr. W is the best EVER! I could do an entire post just on her, but I won't. lol)

Here's Macy, trying to shrink as much as possible so she can disappear into the wall and maybe the vet won't see her. Ha! Poor thing has always been so nervous at the vet. She's still bleeding from her nose at times, but there was no bacteria or fungus growing in there, so that's good. Her temperature was also back to normal, so it looks as though the antibiotic is working. And she started eating again and has started gaining weight back.

So hopefully she is on the mend. She is my baby, I've no qualms about saying that!

Outta my house, outta my life

I mentioned previously that I love magazines. But they had started to mount up around here lately, so I needed to turn my reading from books (did I mention I love those too?) back to magazines.


This is part of what I took to the Friends of the Library bookstore last week. I added a few more magazines after I took the picture. The two books were ones that the used bookstore did not want. All together, I donated those two books plus 40 magazines---38 were mine alone, 1 belonged to my dad, and 1 to my husband. (The husband's magazines are another topic entirely---he has a large stack that he has been given in the last few years, but he doesn't really care for magazines all that much. He much prefers books. But he feels compelled to hang onto those magazines and pretend that he is going to read them some day. We are currently negotiating this topic, but have been at a stalemate for a while now. lol )

At any rate, I've got probably 25 more magazines to go through, and then I will be completely caught up. Most are going to the library, with the exception of "Body and Soul", which is going to my sister, and "Reminisce", which is going to my great-aunt Louise, who will pass them on to her son, who will pass them on to someone else to read. Win-win-win, that one.

From my garden

My little summer garden is winding down. The squash are most definitely over for the year, as I had to pull up all the plants. They were completely covered with adult and baby squash bugs, and wilting overnight.

There's probably going to be one more cantaloupe after the one pictured below. By the way, I was at Whole Foods yesterday and looked at the price of organic cantaloupes---$3.00 each! Makes me thankful for our little volunteer cantaloupe plant.

There should be a few more peppers. I'm trying to let them turn red on the vine, but when they start getting soft or spotty, I go ahead and pull them.


Next up: fall crops. I planted some seeds last week---broccoli, kale, turnip, and spinach. I don't usually do fall plants, so we'll see what we get!

Spotted around my yard

Here are a couple of friends spotted around my yard recently:



A beautiful butterfly resting on the deck railing. Note to self: Hammer in nail soon.

There are dragonflies swooping around the yard everywhere, but only when I don't have my camera with me. I did manage to catch this one in the front yard, where he was taking a rest on the branch of our (unfortunately) dead cherry tree.

The deer, of course, are frequent visitors. They are especially fond of tomato plants. Fortunately I found this out at the beginning of the growing season, as they ate the tops of the plants before they ever bloomed. So I just kind of gave it up for a loss. There was one tomato plant that had grown in the shelter of a huge squash plant, and was hidden enough from the deer so that there were three small green tomatoes growing on it. And then one day I went to water the garden and there was the plant, pulled up out of the garden but not eaten.

So the next day, in broad daylight, I watched a doe come up to the garden and start investigating. She started nibbling on the tomato plant that was lying beside the garden. Mr. GV stuck his head out the door and the doe startled and ran into the woods. The funny part, though, was that she kept the entire tomato plant in her mouth for the first half of her run, then finally dropped it. lol

Love those deer! Wish I could feed them so that they would leave my plants alone, but feeding wild animals is a huge no-no. Next year we might put a deterrent in the garden. Or just plant a lot extra.

Processing.....processing

Have been doing a bit of food processing around here lately.



Here we have some kale from the garden, after it was cooked down. Half was left in the fridge for Mr. GV and half went into the freezer for later. I also made a big pot of veggie soup with TVP and bulgar.

Here you see the remnants of two canteloupes from our garden. Woot! The woot is simply for the fact that we actually got these two before the deer did! The first one was devoured when it was perfectly ripe. We had planned to pick it that day, but a deer got to it first. lol Oh well, it's an improvement over last year, when they got to all of them before we did. This year we didn't even plant canteloupe. The plants just volunteered from the seeds left by the deer last year. At any rate, we have learned to pick them when they are still a little green, and let them set in the hosue for a couple days, then process. (By the way, this is another food that Max the dog loves. He had three pieces at least, and still begged for more.)

One of the things I most like to grow in my garden is a stash of bell peppers. It is next to impossible to find organic bell peppers around here, and when you do find them, especially the red ones, they are very expensive. Unfortunately I've had to pick some of my red peppers a bit early this year, because they were starting to get bad in some spots. Spots were cut off though, and everything else was washed, cut up, and frozen. I love pulling out pieces of pepper all winter for chili and stews, and knowing I grew them myself, organically, and didn't have to pay outrageous prices for them!

Let's get saucy

I have had trouble finding a good marina sauce that both Mr. GV loves and I think is worth the time to prepare. So on my quest for a simple, delicious recipe, I decided to try the on from Vegan on the Cheap.

The ingredients were simple enough:

There was some chopping involved, which I don't mind at all. I could use a food processor but prefer to do it by hand. If I needed large volumes of chopped veggies or was always pressed for time, you betcha I'd use the processor. (I also prefer a hand masher for potatoes and a spoon for mixing things. I will occasionally break out the electric hand mixer for batters that need a few minutes of mixing together.)

I just love seeing the colors all mixed together!

And here is the final product after the immersion blender was used.

The verdict: Mr. GV said it is a keeper; the best marinara yet. I can see making a double batch next time and freezing half for days I'm not around to cook. Now that I've made it strictly by the book, next time I will begin tinkering with it. I'll reduce the oil, sugar, and salt until the taste is no longer satisfying, then kick it back up one notch. No need for added fat, calories, and sodium unless the recipe just isn't good without them!