Frankly, I’m overwhelmed. I have too much work and too many deadlines. Too much gardening to do. Too much little-dogs-need-play-and-cats-need-food. Too many weeds. Too much to cook with my whole "slow food" mania and al fresco dining fetish. Too many ideas!!! My head is spinning!!!
If all the projects I already have weren’t enough to keep me up at night worrying and scheduling, I’ve committed myself to learning to make cheese. MAKE CHEESE!!!! Like there’s not enough of the d%*! stuff in the store? I have about $100 worth of cheese making supplies that will arrive, oh, about Thursday. I was even thinking the other night about getting a goat so I could make some delightful goat cheeses. A GOAT!!!!
Which got me to thinking how much I’ve always wanted chickens. How nice would it be to have some lovely fresh eggs for my homemade quiches. CHICKENS!!!
And while I’m at it. I haven’t yet mulched up a bunch of branches from a storm a while back. As I was out walking (exercise) this morning, I had the fleeting thought of twining them into a rustic rose arbor!!!
It’s this idiotic book I’ve been reading Julie and Julia. (Don’t worry. I’ll post a review very soon.) It’s about a woman who decides to make all 500+ recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year.
I’ve also got all sorts of other ideas. I think it’s this Marthaesque competitive streak that I have.
I need a support group to walk me back from the edge.
–Bumblebee (Robin)
Robin
After my walk this morning I took a few minutes to assess the rain damage in the garden. And what did I spy? More bluebirds moving into house #4!
The bird experts at Cornell tell you to clean out a house after birds have fledged or when there has been a loss of eggs or viability. I did that the other day. Now, just two days later, here they are!
I took a few minutes to sit on the bench and watch them at work. Mr. Bluebird perched on a branch above the house and sang and sang. (That, apparently, was his contribution to the project.) Mrs. Bluebird made multiple trips into the fields and woods to find just the right bits of grass to build the nest. (Clearly, she was doing all the work.)
The photo is of the previous nest that I had to destroy, as the birds had apparently abandoned it and the eggs were three weeks old.
Keeping my fingers crossed!
By the way, if you’re interested in butterflies, head over to Bird Chick’s Blog for Saturday, June 2. She has has posted a fabulous series of photos of Monarch butterfly eggs and caterpillars. I have been peaking under leaves all day!
–(Bumblebee) Robin
Robin
We are finally getting some much-needed rain. It’s supposed to rain through tomorrow too. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
All I’ve had time to do aside from a bit of dead heading is watering, watering, watering. There’s not even much need to mow the grass because even the weeds are dying.
As you can see, though, the watering is working. The garden is starting to kick in, including all the little flowers. I pull out spinach this week and have ordered some summer lettuce seeds from Cook’s Garden. I’ve never grown lettuce in the summer, so it’ll be an interesting experiment to see if they actually grow worth a hoot.
Ben’s trash can potatoes are also growing like gangbusters. There’s not a lot more room for soil, so I suppose we’ll just have to let them be after we put in a couple more inches.
Yesterday we traded in our garden gloves for opera gloves and headed on into town to see the Washington National Opera’s production of MacBeth. It was hard to drag ourselves away because the weather was so balmy and we enjoy tremendously dining al fresco on these types of evenings until almost bedtime. It’s a happy state of affairs when you have to trade one pleasure for another, don’t you think?
It was a great production. The set designer for this opera made extravagant use of scrims on which he projected various images—castles growing from gnarly woods, red blood smears, wicked visions and such. It created a fabulous cinematic effect.
Now, I LOVE the opera and even fantasized for a while about being an opera singer when I was in high school and college. (Yes, it was a long fantasy). But if you’ve never seen Verdi’s MacBeth, you should be prepared for some lulls during which people wring their hands and pace about a lot. The set design and those scrims helped, I think, give you something to look at for the nearly three hours of the opera.
I did struggle in parts though. For example, throughout a good part of the last act, when MacBeth and Lady Macbeth go on a killing spree to ensure his throne, it looked like they were stuck inside a broken wire basket. Afterward, Harry said he thought it was a crown designed to look like a cage, which, if true, I think is very clever, but a bit of a stretch for an image to project onto a scrim.
And then, at the point near the end when MacDuff returns to fight MacBeth for the throne, the designer staged the battle in huge circus-style fake horses on wheels pushed by little anonymous men. The audience actually laughed when they were rolled onstage, which I don’t think was the designed intention.
The designer also dressed everyone in pretty much the same costumes with a kind of Spider Man pattern. He said his reason for dressing everyone alike was to encourage us to view ourselves as MacBeth and his lady—that anyone could do what they did.
Well, I beg to differ, but I believe these two represent an extreme element that doesn’t much describe me and my family or most of the folks that I know.
I’ve been slow at posting this week because my clients actually expect me to WORK for all the money they send me. Well, that’s it for now. More report writing to do…
–Bumblebee (Robin)
Robin
