Friday bullets, June 12, 2020

Another Friday rolls around.

• The four youngest are sleeping in a tent tonight. They've been planning this for days and are very excited. They have put on warm pajamas and have thick sleeping bags as it is supposed to get down to the 50's tonight.
• H. has been doing a lot of drawing. Here are her most recent birds. I think they are fantastic and full of personality.

• We made food from my new Indian cookbook tonight. Everything was extremely good, and we are excited to try new recipes from it. The surprise hit was a chaat salad, which was cucumber, radishes, green onions, and chickpeas fried in a pan on the stove. Oh, and lots of spices, of course. It was also supposed to have pomegranate seeds, but evidently June is NOT pomegranate season, because we could not find a pomegranate anywhere. Nearly everyone loved it.
• We have finished reading A Wrinkle in Time and have now started the sequel, A Wind in the Door at teatime.
• Some days I feel as though we will never conquer the poison ivy.
• I had to go to IKEA yesterday because the item I needed was going to be $99 to ship. Yikes! Of course, going to IKEA, especially after a long hiatus is a dangerous thing. I was good, though. I bought the item I went for and only a few more little things that I had been planning to replace the next time I went. I only had one impulse purchase, which I think is pretty darn good. They were cute little lanterns for votive candles. I bought two. But at less than $15 all together, it was a pretty benign impulse buy. At least that is what I told myself.
• When you have two new cute little lanterns and you have an idea in your head about where you want to use them, it causes all sorts of upheaval and work for your husband. I knew I wanted them on the little table M. made for me between our two swings on the back porch. The trouble was, over the winter our back porch had become a huge catch-all for everything. (It stinks not having a basement or a garage!) It was such a mess I didn't really want to spend much time out there so I couldn't enjoy my new little lanterns. Guess what we did today? Yep. Organized (or at least started to) the back porch. It involved moving all sorts of things around, but here is what we ended up with at the end of today.

See my cute lanterns?

• The other thing I want to do on the back porch is create an eating area so we can eat outside together. We haven't really had that since we moved and I miss it. This is still very much a work in progress, but here is what we have so far. The trick is figuring out how to make a table big enough to allow everyone to sit together. And chairs. Chairs to seat everyone is a perpetual problem.

I saw inexpensive folding chairs at IKEA, so I think I may have to make a trip back again to pick them up. I'm also thinking I need a third table... or something. Seating 14 people can be tricky.

• We had the stir-fry with the bitter melon the other day. Yes, bitter melon is bitter. Imagine that. I think it must also be an acquired taste to really enjoy it. Nearly everyone ate it, but they are all pretty adventurous eaters and they were hungry. I don't think I'll have people begging me to make it again.
• All of my seeds have come up and things are growing really well. Weeding is on the docket for the morning, and I think I'll replant some of the okra seeds as they had the most non-starters among them. Many of us really like okra and having enough is important.
• We got all the library books returned this week. Well, we got all but two library books returned. I have no idea where those two book have gone, and I fear we are going to have to take the house apart to find them.

And with that, I'm going to say good-night. Have a good weekend.