Geez, the weather out here has been crazy! I feel like I’m back in the Midwest. Mid-seventies one day, then drops to the forties the next. And, every so often, we’re still getting rain! The rain should be done by this time of year. I haven’t even put the garden plants out because it’s still questionably cold at night. I need consistency!!

Other than crabbing about the weather, I haven’t really done anything worth mentioning. The wife is out of town, so the dogs and I have spent the days foraging for food and doing some light yard work. Speaking of which, I have to say I did a much better job of keeping up with the grass this year. So far, that is. The downside is you have to mow it much more often until it quit raining, but it sure looks a lot better than doing it just once or twice when it’s knee high. I’ve even been keeping up with the weed eating for the most part, which is not one of the more joyful tasks in life. In another major event, I finally started cutting the back yard with a push mower. The hill is far too steep to use the rider, so since we’ve moved here I’ve been knocking it down with the weed eater a few times a year. One year I even just let it go, which turned out to be a horrible idea. The dogs drug burrs into the house endlessly. They have such short hair wouldn’t really get matted in their fur, but that meant they left them on the couch, the bed, the carpet, and everything else in the house. Long summer. So yeah, anyway, I spent quite a bit of time cleaning it up this year so I could use the push mower. Lots of branches, rocks, and other general debris that I wouldn’t want to hit with the mower. And, at the end of the day, it works “pretty well.” I’m not sure it’s any easier than the weed eater but dang it, I did a lot of work so I could use the mower and I’m gonna stick to it. (This season, at least.) It’s really just too big an area for a push mower. I keep having flashbacks to push-mowing the huge yard at the house we lived at in Grandview. Every time I got sentenced to cutting it, it was a whole weekend off the books. I still wake up from bad dreams of that job. (No, really, I do.)

Otherwise, I’ve just been passing the time trying new recipes. The wife isn’t usually too fond of my experimental menus, usually with good reason. I like to try new things though, so while she’s out of town offers a perfect opportunity to exercise my creative passions. (I really don’t have any of those, which could be why the majority of the recipes are abject failures?) This week’s photo album is dedicated to a few of the recent culinary projects.

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