Fourth of July Week

Fourth of July was a Tuesday this year which made a week where Monday felt like Friday and Tuesday felt like Sunday and Wednesday felt like Monday all over again. And, since June 30, the Friday before, was my last official day in the office, this odd week was my first week of retirement.

On Friday of Fourth of July week (July 7) I went to a happy hour on Memorial Union Terrace with a bunch of former work colleagues and they were all asking me how I liked the retired life, and I just said, I dunno!”.  My work threw my retirement party way back in May so they all thought I’d been retired since then. Instead, I had this weird week where on Monday phase 2 of our house construction, the screen porch, started so we were expecting the contractors before 8:00 and then I went to the basement of the main UW library to select used books for their biannual sale; Tuesday was the 4th; I went in to the office on Wednesday to finish cleaning out and then to volunteer at the food pantry where I got to be the veggie lady because my friend Susan was away; and then on Thursday I had to be back at the pantry by 9:00 to stock shelves. I’m doing a  couple of weeks where I’m going both Wednesdays to help with the food pantry for seniors, and Thursdays to stock the shelves, to see which I like better.

Speaking of office cleaning out, here’s everything I brought home.

Tomorrow (Monday 7/10) I think I will go back in and get my chair.

Monday the 3rd after I’d gone in to work in the basement at the library, we went to swim laps. We joined the local outdoor pool for the summer because it was such a deal for two old people, and we thought maybe we could take Jasper there sometimes. I jumped in and my knee twinged, then I set off like I was still a lap swimmer and took like 5 strokes before settling in to breathe every stroke, then at the end of the lap, I realized I was over the deep end and totally panicked. My right leg cramped up something terrible and it continued through Tuesday. My hypochondria kicked in and I was sure I had everything from a chip of bone coming loose from the fracture to having cancer and it’s screwing up my electrolytes, making me cramp. I bought some magnesium supplement that I started taking and orange juice and drinking a small glass in the morning and trying to eat a daily banana like Mark does. But I think the most important thing is just drinking as much water as I can so I’ve been doing that too. Anyways, it loosened up Tuesday night after a couple of glasses of wine at July 4 dinner with the kids, and when we swam on Friday it didn’t do it again. The water felt softer and I was more relaxed. And it wasn’t as hot.

July 4 dinner with the kids was turkey burgers and coleslaw and sweet potato salad and the last of that cinnamon sugar donut cake with whipped cream and berries. We packed it all up and took it over to their house, so we could see Jasper for a few minutes before bedtime and we could eat with the baby monitor on the table after he went to bed.

And I liked Patti Smith’s 4th of July post.

So that was the 4th, and I told you about the 5th, office clean out & pantry.

The 6th was a busy day when I biked over to the food pantry at 9:00 and unpacked stuff – there was a lot of produce to sort – then came back home and ate and then biked to campus at 3:00 for the book sale. Oh, and I checked out a British cookbook, a 2014 edition of a 1937 book, illustrated by Eric Revilious, an artist Maisie Hitchcock got me interested in. She posted some of his paintings with her own photos on Insta. She’s been a Rick Steve’s tour guide and so worth it to follow her on Insta to see the sites.

Anyways, the book is The Country Life Cookery Book, by Ambrose Heath, originally published in 1937 when both Heath and Revilious were alive. Like I said the copy I checked out at the main library is from 2014, but I just was looking around a bit more and it seems like the Ag library, where most of the cookbooks are, has the 1937 edition, on the open shelves. I’ll have to go check when I go to campus tomorrow.

Revilious contributed woodcut frontispieces for each month.

Due to my convoluted thought processes planning the 4th of July turkey burgers that had zucchini in them, I ended up with extra grated zucchini and an extra pound of thawed ground turkey. And oh yeah, I even thawed out breadcrumbs because I thought the burgers might need them to hold together (they didn’t). So I shaped all that into meatballs on the 4th when I was prepping our July 4 diner, covered them, and stuck them in fridge. And finally cooked them off and put them into tomato sauce on Friday, when we ate them with buttered noodles for our post-swimming dinner.

I also broke out the mandoline, and tried out this fennel salad from 101 cookbooks, that was quite good, subbing in parsley for the dill, lettuce for the arugula, and almonds instead of pine nuts. I didn’t put all of it over the lettuce and there’s a lot of the fennel-herb-zucchini mixture leftover, but it seems to be keeping OK in the fridge and I suspect I can toss any remnants into veggie broth.

On Saturday morning we were at the Farmers Market relocated to Breese Stevens Field to make room for the Art Fair on the Square, and John texted me that they were coming to Madison for the day for a golf outing their friend Jake planned, and would stay overnight with us. We established that I wouldn’t see them till after golf, and we all carried on with the day. Mark and I finished our market shopping biked up the hill to the Square for coffee. He took the most fragile stuff – lettuce and berries – home, and I left the broccoli and cherries in my panniers and made sure to park my bike in the shade when I went back to Breese Stevens to help with DCFM cookbook sales. And of course get my copy signed by Terese Allen.

Sunday morning John & Megan didn’t need to leave right away so we had a nice brunch. Corn & cherry tomato galette and leftover calabacitas quiche, and I made some chocolate chip scones, and a salad to go with.

Looks like Jasper can pick up his own crackers – or anything else – and stuff it in his mouth now. Yay! I guess.

Monday I had the last of the corn and some of the fennel salad on top of lettuce for lunch. That brings us to this week, which I guess is actually my first real week of retirement.