Weekly update - July 29, 2022

It's been two weeks, but life has been pretty calm, so I'm not quite sure how much there is to share.

• Y. has started algebra. She loves math but at the moment she is not quite sure that she loves algebra. D. comes home late tonight for most of August, and I'm hoping that he can help fuel her enthusiasm for the subject.
• I continue to love our new range. 
• The tomatoes are starting to ripen and we are enjoying them. The tomato plants, however, are large. They are taller than I am and are loaded with green fruit. If it all comes ripe at the same time we will have a significant amount of tomatoes to deal with. It's not a bad problem. The cucumbers however... They are not doing so well. I don't know what is up with them as we have never had issues with cucumbers other than having too many.
• If you were wondering about my question regarding borage, I did some searching. As well as being a pretty flower that bees really like, the blossoms and leaves are edible (and are supposed to taste rather like cucumber), but their real benefit is that they help secure nutrients in the soil so are often used as mulch . It sounds as though they are cut down and worked into the soil once the growing season is at an end. Now you know.
• I never get tired of this view.

• K. really enjoys country music and it turns out has been really wanting a cowboy hat. So, when he went with J. to the feed store to pick up our monthly order, he found this and bought it for himself.

• A friend picked-up ten pounds of blueberries for us (I reimbursed her) from Michigan for. They are so good! Now I need to freeze a good bit of them so we can have them throughout the winter.
• J. has been reading Y. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. She has been enjoying it very much.
• Finally, our excitement for the afternoon. I think I have mentioned that the sliding glass doors we have around the first floor of the house are very old and are starting not to work so well. This is particularly true of the back door which we haven't used for several months now because it just doesn't function. This is annoying especially when I realized exactly how expensive new doors are. Yikes! Today J. and I decided to head to the Habitat ReStore to see if they had any doors we could make work. (Have I mentioned how much I love the Habitat ReStore?) They had one door which we thought might work, but J. wanted to go home and measure once again and look at some new doors so he could look at the possible door more carefully. We then wandered around to see what else there was to look at. We wanted into the furniture room and J. and I both were rather taken with a pair of large chairs (very small couches) that they were selling. Now I have to back up and tell you about our ever evolving (devolving?) couch situation. We had many couches in the Big Ugly House. Many of them were not terribly nice and some were a step up from that. We moved the once that were not yet on their last leg. They were not new and we knew their days were numbered. Once we got rid of a couple of years ago when we found the new living room couch. The others? I just try not to look at them. Having found the very inexpensive small couches, we decided to purchase them and to a major couch switch, getting rid of the worst of them. J. will pick them up tomorrow and there will be a lot of shuffling.
• But back to the door. When J. was at our local home supply store, he found a returned but new door for a very good price, so bought it. It is going to be a definite step up and it is an actual door, not a slide, so should last a lot longer. He did have to rent a truck to get it home. Here's the not so fun part of the story. He and I were carrying it onto the back porch (those things are HEAVY!) and I was walking backwards. I did not remember the wood attached to the cement on the ground an caught my foot on it. While I did not drop the door, it did tip and slammed into the post holding up the roof. I was convinced I had utterly ruined it. It was a very bad moment. It turns out it was only the top of the wood frame which was damaged and which J. assures me can be fixed. I hope so. I won't be entirely convinced until I see it installed and working. I'm still not sure I've quite recovered from the momentous financial hit that could have been. And I caught it between two of my fingers and I think I have bruised a good part of my hand because it's sore. As you can imagine, I'll go back to being excited about the door at a later date.

And that's about it. I will continue to recover by going and doing some knitting and reading my book... not at the same time, though. How awesome would that be to be able to knit and read at the same time?