Nancy and I collaborated on another culinary delight – the last green tomato cake of the season. My job was reading the recipe and chopping the tomatoes; Nancy did the basic mixing. I cut down the last of the tomato plants that had run their course and used about half for the cake and put the other half on the hall window sill to ripen. The plants themselves are now resting in the compost pile. The next cake won’t appear until May, assuming all goes as planned.
I’m officially a bachelor as of today. Nancy is cruising and quilting her heart out and I’m slaving away here at the farm. So far the only thing noticeable is how quiet it is. I rounded up all the frozen meals she had squirreled away for me and it looks like far more food than I’ll be able to eat in just a week. I usually approach eating as to how much effort it takes – is it easier to pour out a bowl of cereal, pop something in the microwave, or pick it from the garden and eat it raw? There’s no shortage of material for any of the above. The weather forecast for the whole week is good so no doubt I’ll be doing a bit of fishing. I’m not a big winter olympics guy so I’ll be diving into my Netflix lineup which has been expanded to include a Tarantino movie too violent for Nancy.
So far February has been mostly Portland, cool and wet. We’ve had more than an inch of rain in the past couple of days and the lake is rising at a time it’s usually falling. I dusted off the old time rain gauge just in time to capture the action this week.
I mentioned that my neighbor was going to the hospital to repair or replace a broken lead on his pacemaker. It was billed as an out-patient event, possibly overnight. He was scheduled for a 7:30AM operation Thursday morning. It came off right on schedule but they found that his body tissue was attached to the lead and would require some laser work. The guy who did that work wasn’t there. Not sure how that can happen. Surely George wasn’t the first guy with this situation and I would have expected them to anticipate just such a happening. So they reschedule him for 5:30 PM on Friday. They wheeled him to the OR right on schedule with the right doc’s on hand but they were unable to intubate him and the right folks to deal with that complication weren’t on hand. Rescheduled for Monday so he spends the weekend in the hospital in the ICU. I haven’t talked to George directly but he has an aggressive personality so I’m guessing that by Monday, the janitorial and nursing staff will be volunteering to do the operation themselves with whatever tools or utensils happen to be on hand.
Wonder what the large southern migration of snowy owls is all about? Do they know something we don’t?
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