Late summer

Life is still centered around the garden. It's hot, in the 80s and 90s, but cool at night.

The tomatoes are slowly ripening. I do enjoy picking something that turns bright red when it's ready. Makes a nice change from rummaging among green leaves to find green beans or peas. We have several big bowls of lovely ripe ones we need to do something with today. I think C. plans to cook them down to make sauce. I'm lobbying for catsup, and salsa, too. So much better than store-bought.

We've been saving our pennies, and bought a fancy-ass bright-red HUGE food processor to replace the old Cuisinart. It's magnificent. It's squatting, glowing red, on the counter. It's a Breville Sous Chef, which sounds pretty cool (though not as cool as the Robot Coupe, another brand). I've promised to never use it, so it should last a long time.

I hate those things (C. loves them). C. has five or more small ones, most bought second-hand. They've all got discs and stems and bowls, all in different sizes, and are all such plastic crap. I hate the way they all open and close and lock and work in counter-intuitive ways. I get frustrated and come close to breaking the damn thing every time I use one. Give me a knife and a cutting board, please.

But when it's time to thin-slice basketball-sized cabbages for the 10-gallon crock, I can see the advantage.

C. is thrilled.

The house was messy, so I decided to organize the books. That's how I roll. So now the messy house has stacks of books everywhere. I've been working on it for a couple of weeks. Most of our books were just plunked on random shelves when we moved, and it's been hard to find anything – especially anything in the boxes of books that were never unpacked! I tacked together a shelf for paperbacks, but will probably need to build one or two more. And the book sale is next weekend...

I'm off to feed the chickens. C. is preparing to slice some vegetables.