What a lazy day! Except for the laundry scramble, I sat around a lot today, and it felt good!

Supper tonight: pot roast with root vegetables, smashed potatoes (the girls dug them for me), mustard greens from Let It Grow, poached bosc pears with cajeta and cream. We ran out of propane in the middle of cooking , which necessitated firing up the wood cookstove. I got a little grouchy, but then I got over it. We finally got our Netflix thing worked out (long and boring story), and we watched our first movie of the season—-Starsky and Hutch. Predictibly dumb, but pleasantly mindless, which was a good thing for me tonight.

Tomorrow M* and I are back on the diet. The induction part of it. I think it’s going to feel good—I kind of pigged out this weekend in anticipation, you know, like Fat Tuesday before Lent. Yay M*! Let’s do it!

I thought I would sleep in today, being off the blasted breakfast shift and all, but I was up and washing dishes at 5 this morning. I also spent some time trying to figure out why the computer keeps freezing up. Turned out to be all those temporary internet files. I deleted them, and defragged, and all is well again.

All right—I’m dragging myself off to bed. Goodnight all!

This day is so lovely—it’s warm and slightly humid, and mostly sunny with some wispy clouds; it is absolutely gorgeous. So what, you may ask, am I doing stuck in the office at the Inn today? I guess I’m being the ant instead of the grasshopper. Bummer, huh?

Last night the girls spent the night at P* and M*’s (and J*’s and E*’s). Usually one or both of them gets terribly homesick and calls me crying at 9 or 10 pm which, needless to say, is heartwrenching for me! But last night they called around 8:30 to tell us how much fun they were having! And this morning they said they never got homesick at all. I could cry. Isn’t that the most pitiful thing you’ve ever heard? I’ve been waiting for this moment for thirteen years, and now every fiber of my being says,”No! It’s too soon!” I don’t, of course, say that aloud to the girls.

So DH and I had a night at home alone. After work, so we were both tired. And we had to do chores. And clean up the godawful house. But then it was nice. We had a delightful grown-up supper of an assortment of cheeses, beautifully ripe bosc pears, and a big fat pomegranite. The cheeses (I know y’all want to know this) were:



Shropshire– a sharp cheddar-type cheese with blue-green veins. Boldly flavored, though this specimen was a little too ripe for my taste. Still ok on the pears.

Three year old aged Gouda–the star of last night’s show. Spectacular. Incredible. Hints of butterscotch and caramel. Reminded me of amontillado sherry. Flavors that kept breaking in waves over my tongue—complex and wonderful.

Aged French Chevre–just enough goat tang to make me exclaim,”See?! That’s why we can’t get rid of the goats!” A nice balance of saltiness, goatiness, and creamyness.

Wensleydale with Cranberries–Wallace and Gromit notwithstanding, I don’t love plain Wensleydale. But add cranberries to it and it becomes sublime. Buttermilky tart, subsiding to a creamy finish, with the sweet-tart tang of the cranberries. Oh yes!

So I’m at work now, taking a little break on the computer, and in an hour and a half I’ll be meeting DH and the girls at W* and S*’s for a little pre-trick-or-treating Halloween party. I think tomorrow for Samhain we’ll stay home and carve a pumpkin and make an altar to our beloved dead. It’s a good time to reflect on those who’ve gone before, and it is also the first day of winter (can’t tell by the weather!) and the beginning of the dark half of the year. The light right now is about the same as it will be on Candlemas (Feb. 2nd). Hard to imagine, somehow.

What an insane day! After cooking breakfast at the Inn, DH and I needed to do some running around to try and get an inspection sticker for his truck. Which turned out to be one fiasco after another, but strangely fun. We ended up (finally) in Asheville, after getting lost on the way there (yes, it is possible) where, after a couple of tries, I found a hair salon who would take a late walk-in. After getting my hair cut and really, really styled (I felt so Atlanta) we tried to go out for sushi, but found ourselves spiraling farther and farther from the restaurant in a complex maze of one way streets, until we ended up at a new-ish Thai restaurant called Thai Basil, which we thoroughly enjoyed. And then we went a few miles out of our way when we missed our exit on the way back to Hot Springs to pick up the girls from P* and M*’s. Once home I sent the girls to bed while I milked the goats in the (of course) pouring rain and pitch darkness. My hairdo got wet—I certainly don’t look so Atlanta now! I’m sure that between my hair and my new (used—from eBay) Carhartt overalls I looked positively fetching out there with those goats.

This, by the way, was the very abbreviated version of my day.

Tomorrow is a full lunar eclipse, fully visible from here, and the last until 2007. It “officially” begins at 8:06pm EDT, but it looks like it won’t be visible until around 9:00. Thanks to Goddessing for a great heads-up, and lots of interesting information. And here is a good article about it: Your guide to the total lunar eclipse: Where and when you’ll be able to see the moon go dark

Yesterday the girls and I went to Asheville with a couple of goats. This is the third year that we’ve gone to the elementary school where DN conducts a gardening program, and talked with the fifth graders about life on the farm. We ground some colorful corn that the students helped grow, and made a batch of cornbread, and they petted the goats. It’s always an interesting experience, I think for everybody involved. My girls enjoy it, and I think it’s good for them to get a glimpse of how other people live. These kids are city kids, which was kind of a shock for me; I mean, this is Asheville we’re talking about. Not New York, or Atlanta. And yet a lot of the kids haven’t been around animals at all. Don’t know what hay is. Have never been on a mountain! They ask us a lot of questions about how we live, and it’s obvious that they think we are so different from them that we might as well live in another country. Like how do we celebrate Christmas, or Halloween. Do we trick-or-treat? For what—-corn? (Seriously–that was one of yesterday’s questions.) If kids in Asheville have no idea what life in the country is like, what does this mean for kids everywhere?

I am feeling thankful for the way we’ve been able to raise the girls. Sometimes (like especially lately) I really question what the hell we’re doing, and then an occasion like yesterday arises, and I watch the girls, and how calm and composed and self-confident they are, and I feel this rush of relief. It’s good, what we’re doing. We’re not nuts. My daughters are both very capable–that’s where their confidence comes from. Like DH put it the other day: they could both survive alone in the woods if they ever had to (god forbid); they are very comfortable with the world around them.

Hey—my pal F* has finally started his own blog. As y’all know, he filled in for me while I was at the beach, but he has way too much to say to be able to say it all in occasional substitute blogging situations! So for life on the next-door-farm, go check out Let It Grow! You can tell him I sent you.

Thanks to CS:

What no one seemed to notice…was the ever widening gap…between the

government and the people….And it became always wider….the whole process of

its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to

think for people who did not want to think anyway…and kept us so busy with

continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated…by the machinations of the

‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these

dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us…. Each

act… is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next

and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others,

when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow…. But the one

great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you,

never comes. That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all

reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the

concerts, the cinema, the holidays…. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once.

You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t

done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You

remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one

had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood….You remember

everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond

repair.



-An excerpt from Milton Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1938-45”

(1955, University of Chicago Press).