both feet

Yesterday, we closed on the sale of our house in California. We didn't make a dime on the place, but it was a very good day indeed.

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY.

I celebrated today by digging a fall garden bed next to the south side of the house. My seeds will be sown a little late, but I figure it can't hurt to spend a couple bucks to see what happens. And I like playing in the dirt.

Getting the top layer of grass off was the easy part.

Getting all the rocks out was not.
Wait til I show you my rock piles (yea, that's plural) in a future post.

Needless to say, I accumulated quite a few blisters today.

I've had this cheapie soil test kit for probably ten years now, so I wasn't sure how accurate it would be.

It said our pH was fairly neutral, but I'm skeptical about the NPK analysis
because none of the resulting colors were even on the chart.

That motherfucker right there required the wrecking bar to get out. I hate that rock.

Next time we're at Lowe's, I might pick up another soil test kit, but there's not really any doubt that I need nutrients, so I might just buy some bagged mushroom compost for now and work it in. It kills me to buy packaged compost, but I could only find one source of bulk mushroom compost, and that's southwest of Knoxville, so it may be another week or two before I get a bulk load in. The Tacoma bed only fits about a half cubic yard of material, so we're trying to figure out whether to rent a dump truck that will be able to fit several cubic yards (for building spring beds).

Ideally, I would have sheet mulched this area instead of digging and planted some crops that will loosen the soil without the need for back-breaking work, but I needed to get this done quickly so I can get a fall garden going. It sure didn't feel quick, though. And I still have about a third of it left to de-rock.

Sure feels good to now have both feet firmly planted on Tennessee soil! Literally and figuratively.

laundry the old-fashioned way

We've mostly been using the laundromat in Jonesville, Virginia since we arrived, but if you remember, I was determined to acquire Matey, the abandoned Maytag wringer washer, that sat abandoned and unloved on our neighbor's property. Matey was manufactured from the mid-1940s until around 1983, if memory serves correct.

Well, turns out that Maxine, Matey's owner, was happy to hand her down to the newcomers in the 'hood. We were delighted to discover that Matey is in relatively good working condition, save for the crusty, extremely leaky, deteriorated intake/drain hose, which Jay quickly replaced.

I scrubbed down the whole machine with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (an indispensable tool, I tell ya), but the paint is flaking off to some degree, so I plan to lightly sand the body down and spray a light coat of bright white spray paint on it. Really though, it's not hard to avoid getting the flaking paint on the clothes I put in it.

The agitator pull at the front of the washer doesn't work, so the agitator always spins as long as it's plugged in (there's no on/off switch either, so it's' either plugged in or not), and the wringer doesn't exactly get the clothes wrung out completely (I found myself doing a lot of hand wringing), but I figure it costs us 15 to 20 bucks for each laundromat run (including gas), so if I just do a load every other day or so before the laundry gets totally out of control, we'll be saving a bit of dinero.

Besides, standing out in the sun doing laundry the old-fashioned way (at least mid-century old-fashioned), breathing in the crisp fall air, the breeze rustling the surrounding foliage, and feeling the fabric getting clean between my fingers is a lost and quite pleasurable art in my book.

Come winter, I might be making more runs to the laundromat than I originally envisioned, but I plan to use this baby as much as I can before my fingers start freezing off.

how to build a small pond in 10 easy steps

Wait until it rains a lot.
Then find a spot in the grass that is beyond squishy (aka, a spring).
Stomp on it in front of the dog and let him have at it.

Observe the awesome power of water.

Get distracted by the faltering rose bushes.

Realize that they're not done blooming yet.

Get real muddy digging. (And make a note to do some laundry tomorrow.)

Save all the rocks you found for a future waterfall and edge liner.

Make sure you don't upset your spring.

Give the dog a kiss.

Introduce him to his new watering trough.

Eat some killer potato chips and drink some whiskey! A good day!

martha's salisbury steak recipe

I make some killer mashed potatoes. And dynamite sauces and dressings for various salads, vegetables, and the occasional unprocessed meat mass (aka, steak, chicken breast, pork tenderloin -- all those high-end meat pieces). Low-budget animal mass, however, generally throws me for a loop. I don't normally look to Martha Stewart for recipes because I have a Recipe Arsenal that usually fills our nutritional and salivator-y carnivorous needs, but I was at a loss for dinner fixings this evening and remembered seeing a pin on the almighty Pinterest that peaked my interest a few days ago.

Salisbury Steak With Onion Gravy. (So I figured mashed potatoes and corn-on-the-cob were dutiful accompaniments.)

My mashed potatoes exceeded all tastebud expectations. The corn was buttery, salty, hot, and well, what more do you expect from corn. However, Martha's salisbury steak recipe, was quoted as followed by my dear husband (honestly, he said A LOT of salisbury steak/Martha Stewart comments, and I didn't write them down, and then I couldn't remember them, and then I asked him to repeat them again, so these might or might not be in their regurgitated format):

"Martha Stewart knows some shit, but she doesn't know salisbury steak."

"Martha Stewart might know Chow Chows, but she doesn't know salisbury steak."

"I might make salisbury steak out of Martha Stewart's Chow Chows."

Oh yeah, and:

"Fuck Martha Stewart."

So, I realized after making Martha's labor-intensive recipe for salisbury steak that I never really liked salisbury steak to begin with. See, Jay has been buying Banquet Salisbury Steak TV dinners for as long as I've known him, and it's something that he gets genuine culinary joy out of but something that I've tried maybe twice in my lifetime. Because they're pretty fucking gross. But he likes salisbury steak, and like I said, I was at a loss for what to concoct for dinner, so I figured what the hay.

In my defense, I absolutely followed the directions to a T and the only change I made was to halve the recipe. The onion gravy was a greasy, sloppy mess. The final product was basically hamburgers with no bun or condiments. I doused it in barbeque sauce (due to the lack of an inedible onion gravy) and managed to only finish half a patty (while finishing off my mashed potaters, corn, and then a little more potaters).

Jay polished off two Salisbury Steak patties. I asked him for his honest opinion (because I needed to know whether this was something to add to my dinner repertoire, even though I didn't particularly care for it), and he said that it was decent. This won't be appearing on the dinner menu again.

The moral of this story is, if it looks like a hamburger patty, it might be made of Martha's chow chows. And it doesn't taste good.

seriously overdue

Screens are important out here. Large bugs are constantly trying to invade.

Post-Clinch-River-outing. This dog was made for swimming.

I killed a wasp and a Red-Spotted-Purple butterfly by
mistake the other day. I only feel sorry about the butterfly.

The Nekster venturing out.

Wedding gift from days ago courtesy of friends Arlo + Jasmine (RIP)
and family. Now permanent garden art at the holler. 

I could seriously knit a sweater from the Clyde Dog fur. 

bread! and registration!

I made what I thought was a pretty kooky salad last night, but it turned out to be pretty dang delicious. It was mostly based on the canned food I brought out with us in Komfy because I figured that it would be incredibly wasteful to throw out perfectly good food just because we were moving across the country. So this salad consisted of fresh cabbage and celery (purchased here), garbanzo beans, pineapple, pickled banana peppers, and water chestnuts, with a homemade dressing consisting of peanut butter, rice vinegar, garlic, mirin, and some Dave's Insanity Sauce. I was shocked when the bowl was emptied after dinner. We also had Rice-A-Roni with ground beef. And some feta. Because we're poor, but I put feta on everything.

Then I made The Bread. Flour, yeast, salt, and water (and a dusting of cornmeal in the bottom of the pan for that gritty goodness). Perfection in a loaf. My first batch of homemade carbs. It exceeded my expectations on all counts.

(Also, that's a random shot of turkeys in the driveway this morning. My ISO was set too low, so it's dark, but I got some flight feathers!)

We got our Tennessee plates today. We came to the County Clerk armed with passports, birth certificates, a marriage license, CA titles, CA registrations, our mortgage contract, and our social security cards for good measure. The Tennessee state website put the fear in my belly that we wouldn't have the documentation necessary to make our vehicles official (there was a list on the state website of these required documents, so I am not completely crazy showing up with a file folder full of them). Turns out, all we needed were the titles. No proof of residency needed. No proof of insurance. I drove back to the holler with a shit-eating grin on my face. (Forgive my filthy car -- it really is impossible to keep them clean out here. I don't know why Jaybird's truck is so much cleaner than mine.)

And, finally, the Nekster. I'm pretty sure he's a good three-feet long stretched out. (Also forgive the brassiere. I don't clean up before taking impromptu shots.)

cocktails make us do weird things

After a few cocktails the other night, we decided to do an interpretation of the American Gothic painting. Resembles nothing of the original, I realize this, but I thought one was in order.

We finally got our mailbox sorted out, and it was fun to get our first couple pieces of mail, even if was just the local grocery flyer and the form that we needed to fill out for the postmaster confirming our delivery information.

Jaybird cleaned the 12-gauge after a few squirrel expeditions (scored some beer coozies at the local DG, which have been used a lot since because it's been pretty toasty out).

I made some red potatoes for dinner last night based on some vague recipe I remember seeing in Sunset. I quartered and boiled them mostly done, then smashed them on a baking sheet in groups, then seasoned each serving with butter, salt, and pepper, and threw them under the broiler for about 15 minutes. The nice thing about our place is that regardless of how hot it gets during the day, it almost always cools down to a comfortable temp in the evening and at night. Even so, broiling things in the oven is a little much in late August.

The animals have become fleabags, so we had to resort to fumigating the house. I don't like the idea of everything being covered in chemicals from a Raid fogger, but I dislike sleeping with fleas even more. Freshly laundered bed linens make me happy in ways I cannot fully express.

Faucets are something that I also get really anal-retentive about. The previous one pictured was mounted very crookedly, the two handles were installed backwards, and it had a separate sprayer instead of a pull-out, one-piece unit. Jay was kind enough to install a new one for me today, but we couldn't do the bathroom faucet I picked out because there is no shut-off valve there, and it would require us to drain our water lines, which is a ridiculous waste of water. So that will need to wait until we get some more rain first.

After it cools down in a little while, I'm going to attempt to make my first loaf of crusty bread based on this recipe. The really awful cuts of steak I bought a while back were too tough to eat last night after grilling them up, so I sliced them paper thin after we decided they were not worth the vicious steak knife action and prolonged chewing required. They will make great sandwich fixings, but we need some bread on which to place said meat.