Category Archives: doing it wrong

Early in the days of the wildlife cam I thought I saw a raccoon without a tail.

It was further away than the photo above and also blurry. I couldn’t be sure but also, how many raccoons are hanging out back there?

We had Rocket (the old, scraggly looking one), Heckle, Jeckle, and Mama (the boisterous two with mom), Mr. Limpet (the one with a limp), the contemplative one that would stir the water and star into the distance. Now this no-tail guy?

I later got this clip that is still blurry but seems to be a raccoon with no tail.

He was like Bigfoot. Rarely spotted and always blurry.

Until just a few nights ago, I got this.

At the end of the summer I bought new summer sheets for next year but I decided to try them out for a few weeks before I switched to the winter sheets.

I purchased them from a popular online source and I would describe them as very nice, cheap sheets.

I didn’t dislike them and they look sharp but they are slippery. Every night the duvet would try to slip off the bed. Sometimes it succeeded. I would wake up in the night and grab the edge of the duvet from my ankles and yank it way up under our chins to try to keep it up on the bed.

Maybe with a few more washings this feature will go away.

Well, I can see how using this photo with this title is confusing. The photo is unrelated to the subject matter.

This is Noah, one of the next door cats. If Oakey is the cat who looks like he’s going to kill you, Noah is the cat who looks startled. The other morning I lifted the window shade and he was out on the porch, eyes wide, staring at me.

When Bob was getting ready to retire he kept saying that he was going to do the cooking. I was skeptical.

But he has taken over about 99% of the cooking. On the days I work from home he often makes me lunch, too. On the days he makes breakfast he offers that, too. I had a pancake and bacon yesterday.

He’s really into it, too, and looks for recipes and tries different things. He makes lots of vegetables.

One night he told me he’d found this recipe blogger and she was focused on making simple, healthy meals for her family.

I scoffed and said, “That’s ALL the recipe bloggers. Is her name Tammy?”

Her name is not Tammy and she does have an approachable style and anyway, what do I care? I get a big break from cooking. Even when I have an idea for something to make he’ll say: “Well, we still have some noodles and I wanted to mix them with that last bit of sauce I made, and use up the last of the ricotta. And tomorrow I wanted to thaw the chicken and use those peppers for fajitas. I also have those sausages that I wanted to fix this week but maybe after that if you want.

Lisa gave us a bucket of apples to take home – that was my one big canning project. I wanted applesauce.

Whenever my braces got tightened, applesauce was a big treat.

I enlisted a helper this time. Now that Bob is retired and can’t go anywhere because of The Covid, I can get him into domestic stuff.

I made a strategic error. I have tons of regular mouth jars and only a few wide mouth. But I gave my regular mouth canning lids to Sherri to thank her for generously giving my dad a bunch of jam that he liked.

Canning supplies are tough to find right now.

I had only wide mouth lids for myself. I went through the house and found every possible jar, opened some dilly beans and moved them to a different jar, moved my sourdough to a different jar and I was able to come up with 6 pints and 1 qt.

This is the stuff we canned. There are two quarts in the freezer plus we had a big giant bowl to eat all week.

I have probably had this spatula 15 years. I have bought many replacements but I could never part with it no matter how decrepit it looked. Many of the replacement spatulas have fallen apart and been tossed but this one was always reliable.

It finally pooped out — you can see daylight where it broke.

I call this my Mrs. Meyers Karuk scent. In the alternative, it’s my Spice Girls name.

I can’t tell whether as I get older I am more in tune to life’s various b.s. or if life is getting more b.s. as time goes by.

We get our office supplies from a particular company we do business with. I am being intentionally vague.

Office supplies are the biggest crock. Back in the day I would buy office supplies from a big box store.

The mark-up for buying supplies from a company like we do is ridiculous. But these days I don’t drive to work and in particular I have no way to get a heavy box of paper up to the office. We hardly use any office supplies except for paper.

I usually buy 2 boxes at a time and just opened the second box from our last purchase. There was an entire ream of paper — with no wrapper. It was like it fell on the ground in a stampede and someone ran around and grabbed it all, piled it together, and shoved it in the box. Another ream was too damaged to use.

Not buying from them again.

Back in 2006, the first time I posted every day in November, I posted the Hot Cocoa Ceremony.

I still do this, more or less. Hot chocolate and homemade apple pie are my 2 favorite foods. If it’s cool and gloomy even in August I will make this.

I no longer use a standing blender, I use a stick blender but I mix it in a container. I tried one time to blend it in the cup and it did not go well. Don’t bother trying yourself.

I never add cayenne or vanilla.

During the Covid I came perilously close to running out of cocoa so next time I saw it at the grocery store I grabbed two kinds. My recollection was that the Dutch process was better.

With the two above choices the Hershey’s is miles better.

How did the pioneers keep their squash from getting bloopy? I followed all the steps for keeping squash and I keep finding mold spots. I already processed some of the smaller ones. Now this guy.

The big red kuri is looking a little spotty, too.

I’m roasting them and putting them in the freezer so it’s not the end of the world but it wasn’t a project I had on my list for this weekend.

I don’t love Halloween and I’m glad families are keeping safe but I was a little heartbroken. For the first time in 20 years we didn’t have one single trick-or-treater. The candy is hidden in a secret spot.

I gave myself an easy goal — I’m going to try for 25K on a new project. Here we are after day one:

1050 / 25000 words. 4% done!