Our AFS student Toni stayed a little longer than the rest of this school year’s students, because her family – mom, dad, and little sister – came to pick her up and now they’re traveling in the US for about 2 weeks. Even though Toni is leaving, we are now entering into a period of hot & cold running house guests. Toni and her family left today, Sunday. Tomorrow, Monday, Rach gets here, and Tuesday the dad of a neighbor down the street, who is visiting from New Zealand, arrives for a 5-week stay. He’ll get Toni’s room, Al’s old old room. We put Toni’s little sister in Rachael/John’s room. Then when the New Zealand visitor leaves at the end of August, Megan is moving in for the school year.
Toni’s family arrived Thursday evening. I got my CSA box that afternoon, and I got more cucumbers and zucchini and summer squash, so I made a pasta salad and creamy cucumbers, Aunt Harriet’s cucumber salad, which is just cucumbers with a dressing made of sour cream& sugar. I seeded and salted the cukes, which makes it better, I think. It can have onion too – I got a Walla Walla sweet onion in the CSA box, so this batch did. I put out bread and cheese and salami and sliced tomatoes, and we ate a light supper out on the deck. There’s a lot of pasta salad left – not sure what I’ll do with that.
On Friday, I got up and walked, and our guests were up wanting breakfast before I had time to meditate. I biked to the bagel place and got a dozen bagels, and that made a good Friday breakfast, with fruit. I’m trying to remember what I had to do on Friday – I know I needed to clean up email, and read student journals, and various other work things. I had a couple of cooking projects for supper – parboil the ribs (thank you Anna Alberici, for teaching me the most reliable method to cook ribs, when we were both cooks at Ovens of Brittany. Boil them with onions, Worcestershire, soy sauce and garlic, then drain, cover with sauce and bake); make the potato salad; make the peach icebox cake. I had to go get a mammogram at 4:00, too. Tipi was selling extra basil, and I got some of that Thursday – 2# for $20 – so it was in its box in the basement waiting to be processed.
Everybody else went off to tourist, and I kept busy here at home. I went to the mammogram, it was remarkably painless this time – hope that’s not a bad omen. And stopped at the Peck’s farmstand in the shopping mall parking lot, and got a quart of local strawberries, and a couple of tomatoes. Then home and got the rest of dinner together, interspersed with email and logging into my online course to read student work, and check the discussion board. Dinner was ribs, collards with peanut sauce (another recipe to post, Real Soon Now™), the potato salad, and peach icebox cake. After dinner I turned all that basil into pesto. The 2# yielded close to 2 quarts of pesto – I have three cartons with about 2 – 2 1/2 cups in each in the freezer, plus about a cup of basil/olive oil puree – ran out of cheese.
The Art Fair on the Square was this weekend, so on Saturday, instead of going to the downtown market, we went west. I biked over and had completed all my shopping – beets, carrots, Farmer John’s parmesan, potatoes – by the time everyone else got there by car. I was volunteering at the art fair from 11:30 – to 3:30. Which was kind of fun. I booth-sat for four artists – 2 photographers, a jeweler, and a ceramicist. I think I liked the jewelery the best of the four.
When I got home, I took Toni’s parents and little sister out to the airport to get their rental car – she stayed home to pack. Toni got the better deal – getting the car took way too long. It had been her dad’s persistent question all weekend, “when do we go get the car”, “they said between 4:00 and 6:00”, “maybe I should call”. And we all said if they said between 4:00 and 6:00, let’s just leave here at about 4:00 and it should be ready when we get there. So we actually got there at about 4:45, and they said they weren’t expecting us for an hour, and we probably waited a whole hour for the car. I drove over and sat in the cell phone lot, so I wouldn’t have to pay to park. Anyways, they ended up with a giant Nissan Pathfinder – I said you won’t even need hotel rooms with that.
Home quick to change and they bought us dinner at Otto’s – which was quite pleasant. Toni’s dad and I had the seafood grill, Mark, Toni and her sis had the duck and Toni’s mom had the pasta. Came home and stayed up a little too late baking a loaf of long-rise bread that I’d started in the morning. I had a notion that I’d make egg sangwiches & potatoes for Sunday breakfast, but it was too early for that much food, so I made blueberry muffins instead. They bought blueberries and raspberries at the Saturday market. We had the fresh bread for toast, and muffins and fruit.
Mark had to go to Chicago for the day, to deal with apartment so he left first. I saw Toni and her family off, then I had the whole place to myself. Toni had organized well and before she left, she showed me exactly what was in each of the piles in her room. I filled the recycle bin, and got the backup bin out of the garage. I washed endless loads of sheets & towels, and took the trash out twice, but everything’s ready for the next house guests.
I still kind of ran out of Sunday – I got some work done, went for two bike rides, and got the rooms tidied up – still have to put the clean sheets on Toni’s bed. I made a greens & goat cheese pie I have to deliver to one of my students when I do her internship site visit tomorrow – she was the highest bidder for one of the two pies I put in the SLIS silent auction. Savory pie tomorrow, chocolate cream for the other high bidder next week. But now it’s 10:40, and I’m still trying to write this post, ad I haven’t washed my hair yet. Oh well, I guess there’s still Monday morning ….
