Master of the Obvious

Last week I defrosted some squash because I needed room in the freezer. (Everyone does this kind of thing, right?) This particular container was given to me by a friend who was moving, and I knew I'd use it, because one of my favorite baked goods in the known universe is pumpkin spice bread. Which I usually make with squash anyway, but 'squash bread' doesn't have the same ring, so I still call it pumpkin, but you get the idea.

Anyway, I usually make it with canned squash because real squash are large, and if I suggested, say, eating squash as a side dish, my husband would give me a Look. I'm sure you've encountered this Look at some point- it's the one that says, 'is she mad?', or 'do I *look* like the kind of person who eats vegetables that aren't salsa'. (Actually he does eat vegetables. Usually stir fried, or covered in blue cheese dressing. But not squash by choice.)

Anyway, the other thing about using real squash is that it has lumps. Strings. Natural bits. Texture. I don't mind this if I'm just eating it, but I much prefer a smooth puree to use in bread or custard. And yet, no amount of beating will do the trick. Or at least not any amount of beating that I have the patience to administer. As I was contemplating this all-natural squash (which by this week I really needed to use up), I had a brainwave. I knew just how to get the smooth texture I wanted, and I even had the perfect tool right there in my kitchen. The food mill. Its mission in life may be applesauce, but I was betting that sieving the squash through it would give me the effect I wanted. And so it did.


Now the only question is, will there be any pumpkin bread left when company arrives this weekend? (Answer- yes, but not this loaf! Mine, mine, all mine.)

It's All In Where You Stand

Wednesday, I started a post that was so boring, it made me depressed just to read the introduction. Thursday morning, there were little patches of blue trying to join hands across the sky, and an errant ray of sunshine intermittently tickling the sun porch, and everything seemed a whole lot more manageable. This might also have had something to do with starting to recover from the extreme lack of sleep I suffered over the weekend or it may have been the two solid weeks of rain. Probably both. Of course I didn't make it as far as actually posting anything due to a severe attack of employment, but hey, these things happen. And employment is a good thing to have, so I can't complain.

During the deluge, my husband and I wondered if the the dry-adapted Colorado wildflowers were going to make it. But despite being beaten down by the ceaseless streams of water, they seem to have survived with only minor damage. We've even got new varieties starting to bloom.


They're picking up the slack from the violas, which are finally calling it quits after nearly two months of continuous flowers. My mother reminded me that I could keep them going longer by picking off the dying blooms, but we want them to re-seed, so we're letting them go.

So- extreme lack of sleep over the musical weekend. I wish I could say this was the result of staying up late listening to music (which it partly was) but it actually had more to do with waking up early despite staying up late. How does this happen, I want to know? I mean, I'm perfectly capable of rolling over and going back to sleep- with or without shutting off the alarm- on a work day. But apparently not this weekend. On the plus side there was crafting. I started a new pair of socks.


The yarn is Lana Gross Fantasy- I really liked the colors in the skein- and at first was ambivalent about them as they knit up (this seems to be how I often feel about self-patterning yarn when I cast on with it). But it's growing on me.

Thanks to general brain deadness, none of the more complicated things I brought with me got much attention. But I did do rather a lot of crocheting- I'm almost halfway done with the new baby-or-lap afghan.


The observant crocheters will note that I have mastered a fourth stitch, double crochet (hey, slow but steady learns the new craft). It's actually much prettier than this photo makes it look- off white and navy blue in a bulky weight yarn. All that white yarn for the afghan, about 16 skeins of it? Was a gift from my mother's friend Sandy, who has been doing a little de-stashing. She also gave me a huge amount of beautiful sport-weight cream-colored wool, more than enough for a sweater. I'm still playing with ideas for that. I'm torn between dying some of it, and doing a Norwegian-style colorwork ski sweater, or casting on something extremely textured. In a sport weight yarn I could get a lot of detail. Or I could dye all of it. Decisions, decisions! That's probably not going to be for a few months though, as I have two other sweaters queued ahead of it.

For now, it's Friday, the weekend is blessedly not scheduled for anything, and I have all sorts of things to do, knit, crochet, weed...hmm. Strangely, housework did not appear on that list, but there ought to be some of that, too.

Off the Bench

Today I wrapped up a lengthy carpentry project. Not because it was long or complex though- it had just been around a while. When I bought my house, lo these seven years ago- (What? Seven? *counts on fingers* Yes, seven. Aieee.)- where was I? Oh, seven years ago, the former owners abandoned quite a few odds and ends in their struggle to stuff several tons of clutter into a moving van. Much of it, I simply threw out, but there were some items my thrifty compulsions just wouldn't let me trash. One of them was this bench:



Now, this was clearly something that had been knocked together out of scrap lumber in the wake of some home improvement project or other, but it was a more-or-less functional piece of furniture. However, brief experimentation soon proved that anyone attempting to sit on it had a better than even chance of getting a splinter...well, we won't go into detail on just how I determined this wasn't a good thing to sit on, okay? So it was removed to the basement until it could be rehabilitated into something less likely to draw blood or cause pain in the posterior.

Earlier this spring, I decided its time had come. I ripped off the top boards (too warped to save) and sanded down the body of the bench. My original plan had been to put on a wooden seat and use this as a sort of window seat in the library, but once I had it sanded down, I decided that the original construction was pretty crude, and that it really wasn't a good candidate for indoor furniture. So instead, I repainted the frame with three coats of exterior latex, and replaced the top surface with plastic decking material- suitable for people to sit on in wet bathing suits.

Woats thinks it's pretty nifty.

Me, I'm just glad it's no longer taking up space in the basement, and has been restored to functionality. One project down, 673 to go....