Potatoes

I just started digging around the potato bed, just to see if there was anything edible.  I found the most beautiful little purple and red potatoes.  I had already planned to make cabbage, potatoes, and kielbasa, so I threw them in the pot.  They were SO good - so much better than anything that I have eaten from a store.  I even found one of the yellow variety growing eyes, so any of those I pick up will be replanted. 

I also picked quite a few long purple eggplants and green peppers and few tomatoes. I will need to make some sort of grilled veggie sandwich tomorrow night - or a stir fry or even a thai curry, actually.  I think I have some coconut milk in the cupboard. 

 The spiders, big huge ones, are taking over the greenhouse, so it makes my skin crawl to go in there - need to bring a broom and clean them out.  I know they are getting the bugs, though, so it is hard to get to mad - I am just afraid of spider bites in a big way, having had one once. 

I gave a few jars of my super hot salsa away.  The reaction has been, "Wow, it's good - but dang, it's hot.  I am eating one chip with salsa a day."  I actually don't think it is that hot - I have been eating it on beans every day for lunch, but I do also add cheese which tends to cool down the heat. 

It's been pouring off and on for days - I think the outer edge of the remnants of a hurricane/tropical storm are sweeping over us.  The windows at my new work are so big, it is actually entrancing to watch the rain pounding down.  My last job, the windows were both small and opaque, so I only knew if it was raining if the carpet got wet from the leaky walls, if the kids came in soaked, or if it was pounding so hard I could hear it. 

I am just glad the potatoes didn't rot under all that wet mulch!  This weekend, I am going to get some more! 

Work and Work

Since it is the beginning of the school year, my work out of the home is definitely tiring me out for all the work at home.  I really need to go out and weed the taro and attempt to pull up the potatoes.  The potatoes were an experiment, and I do think they may have gotten too much rain and are rotting under all that straw mulch.  If so, next time, I am going to have to put rain covers over the potato patch. 

To tell the truth, I am pretty exhausted today, too, so I guess I am going to sign off.  Very short today, which is about how much time I have to spend on my plants and animals.  Hope everyone is doing well today, because I don't have leftovers to feed the two legged animals!  If someone is sick or injured out in the barn or in the house, it takes time away from cooking and the little bit of straightening up I can get done after work. 

Making Salsa

Decided to make the 8 oz jars instead of the pint jars this time.  I also decided to leave more seeds to give a little heat -then I used the Kitchen Aide to cut up the jalapenos in order to avoid the three days of burning hands I had last time - which meant I used ALL of the seeds.  The salsa is pretty spicy. 

I will get it just right sometime or other, I suppose. 

I have about 10 lbs of bananas that are getting over-ripe so the next project today is banana bread and lots of it, too.  It freezes well, though, so no problems there.  I secretly want to just get into bed and read a book as the first week or two of the new job has been exhausting.  So many things to learn: just systems stuff, like how to do your time card online and sign up for benefits and get supplies and furniture and things like that.  I still can't figure out who to ask and the purchasing system is new; at least that is the one area where I do know who to ask.  I haven't met her, yet, but I know how to get her by email!  Progress! 

Also, my office looks good, thanks to my daughter.  She helped shelve books and arrange things to look nice.  I still have three or four plastic bins of books that don't fit on shelves, but we kind of tucked them into corners.  I am going to finish up a tiny cross stitch today that I did this summer and find a few old school pictures of my kids and put a favorite old painting one of my boys' did in 2nd or 3rd grade in a frame, and then I will have a few little things to put up for visual interest.  I also want a plant stand to have a place to house that crawling plant - the other plants can stay on the desk. 

I'd better go check the progress on the canning hot water bath.  Just wanted to check in a bit today. 

Peppers?

I overplanted the peppers.  Any one have any good canning recipes for peppers? I have a lot of jalapeno-so I will probably go ahead and make salsa and pickled peppers, but what about green bell peppers? Or, does anyone know if they freeze well? 

I bought new cucumber seedlings, but they seem to have the same fungus or virus as the ones I pulled out last month.  I am wondering what's up with the cucumbers this year, very discouraging, because I wanted to put up some pickles.  Whatever is happening with the cucumbers, it didn't stop them from producing, but it curtailed how long they produced and the quantity of produce, too. 

Please Tell Me...

That you know what predicate means.  Or that you once knew, back in school.  That you can find a verb in a sentence.  I am mostly talking to adults here, but if a kid wants to chime in, I am good with that, too. 

Yes, I do know that I just wrote a series of sentence fragments.  They were for emphasis, and sometimes that is okay.

I am not going to explicate on why my sudden obsession with predicates; I am just adjusting to my new job, and yesterday was not the most pleasant day.  However, today, my daughter and I went into school and put away books and tidied up and my room feels better. 

I swear the philodendron I bought last week grew two inches and turned itself around 90 degrees to head across the desk toward the window.  I believe I must buy it a plant stand before it decides to take over the desk and to start using the computer.  My daughter, who is 12, is nothing like her siblings (or, eh-hmm, me) in some ways: today, she cleaned the freezer for fun.  The freezer would have to be handing me a plea for help or a citation from the Department of Health for me to clean it out....I am only exaggerating slightly.  I have a schedule for cleaning the freezer based on the school calendar, but I certainly wouldn't do it for fun. 

I found the weirdest thing volunteering in my potato crop - wheat!  I do occasionally give my chickens scratch grains which include wheat berries, and I must have accidentally included some not completely composted chicken litter in my potato bed.  I had no idea wheat would grow here in Hawaii. It is definitely worth experimenting with - I read that some farmers tried at the beginning of the last century without much success, but they tried on Maui, and we're colder than most of Maui. 

I would so love to be able to grow some grain to make flour.

Happy Birthday Boy

It's my son's birthday today.  I had to work all day, although it really was a good day.  I had a few clarifying conversations with some teacher and had a "working lunch" with some of the science teachers who asked me to come "talk story" about reading and vocabulary strategies they could use in their classes.  I didn't get through my boxes of books, but I did get my syllabus done.  There are a few things I need to find out before I am really set, but so far so good. 

When I got home from work, I found that my ewe had indeed died, but there were also a large number of yound adults driving up the driveway.  I had to feed them, do the laundry for myself, and sort of do some straightening up because my family comes home tomorrow and school starts the next day.

I looked around the room at these very nice kids who have been my older two kids' friends for the past few years with some mixed emotions.  I was so pleased when they decided to over-ride my son's seeming desire to make his birthday low-key - they dug out the candles (little football candles from someone's 10th birthday years ago) and sang to him.  They tried to sing bad, but they have all had some training in singing, and it came out so nice.  In spite of a slight blush and abashed look, I think he secretly loved it.  On the other hand, there was a missing face with my older daughter living on another island.  I called her and put her on the speaker phone.  I could tell she was a little sad - she asked them to "pick her up".  It was meant to be a little bit of a joke, but I could hear that she was feeling like I was - I wished she could have been here. I had to go wash dishes to hide the fact that my eyes were tearing up.  You'd think I would be over it already. 

On the garden front, I seriously overplanted peppers of various kinds.  I did see a recipe on http://cookingwithveggies.com/, my sister-in-law's blog, for stuffed peppers that looked good, but this weekend I am seriously going to have to do something with a powerful lot of jalapenos.  I have enough tomatoes to make some jalapeno salsa, but there are more peppers to deal with.  Maybe I will just pickle them.  I love those, so they will get eaten up. 

The boys who came over today looked at out taro patch and said, "Wow, that really needs some upkeep."  I feel so guilty.  My husband planted so much and we're so behind in weeding. I need to mulch those potatoes yet again, too - forget Jack and the Beanstalk - it should have been Jill and the potato plant - hope they are making tubers as well as all these leaves! 

Awwh, My Ewe is Sick.

I thought she might be just hiding out in preparation to lambing and that I'd just got the timing wrong, but she is genuinely sick.  I gave her some antibiotic, some electrolytes, and covered her up to keep her warm (it's August, but it's cold up here on the mountain - even if we are in Hawaii).  I feel quite sad, and wish we had a better vet here.  I had to kind of build a shelter for her out in the pasture under thick trees with some feed bags, because I think I should keep her isolated from the others and we just don't have a way to do that as things are now. 

The half of my family that is gone (and who still live here) comes back in two days.  I am adjusting to my new job; I really am blessed to have this job.  I just don't like feeling this stupid.  There are so many new names and new ways to do things and I just don't know who to ask about things like getting bookshelves, etc.  On the other hand, people keep handing me things with the name of my predecessor on the package - I somehow got more index cards than I absolutely know what do with, and a load of pens (which is good) and a bunch of file folders (also hunky dory). 

I decided that after asking the principal where to get bookshelves, looking where he told me to look (nope, none there) and mentioning it to a few teachers to see if they had any that I wouldn't worry about it.  I have about 10-11 big plastic tubs of books.  My students and educational assistant packed them up, so they aren't in any particular order, but I can fix that.  They look messy stacked up in my office, but I figure if it bothers someone, they might be more motivated to help me find bookshelves.  I am not sure if that is passive aggressive or practical, but once I get them in the right tubs such as professional resources, novels, non-fiction, student references, poetry, I will be fine with them staying in the tubs, because I can just pick them up and take them to whichever classroom I am in. 

So between worrying about the ewe and having to trudge to the back of our land to find her make do place and trying to figure out the systems of the new place, I have my hands full.  I am very much looking forward to my husband coming home, if not to having to wake up my 13 year old to get him out the door for school the day after they get home, and to the students coming in later this week.  I got their names today.  Pretty exciting.  I will have to get the scoops when my kids come home - they probably know them from middle school: a benefit to teaching where your kids go to school.