A month or more ago I showed you a picture of my garage wall and a patch of dirt in front of it. Now it is covered with pea vines falling off their trellis and last night we had peas for dinner, along with baby carrots thinned out from the rows. The meal (mashed potatoes, hardboiled eggs, new peas and carrots) was simple and clean and reminded me of my childhood, which often featured meat and two veg. No meat nowadays, though.
Ella particularly wanted to plant peas and carrots this year. She helped me sow the seeds, and she's been checking the pea pods everyday for the past week or two to see if they're ready. She even enjoyed shelling them, and worked out a system for getting the little stalk off each pea. I don't remember being that into gardening when I was younger. Maybe because it tended to be men's work in my extended family. Father, uncles, grandfathers - the veggie garden was their domain.
We have this awesome observatory near by. It is on a big hill out in the countryside and they do lots of science workshops for kids. Last weekend was Rocketfest, where we learned about rockets and then built one ourselves from a kit. Michael was excited by the possibility of a rocket mislaunch and explosion, but it was raining insanely hard, so launch was postponed until this afternoon. In fact, it rained so hard we had to take an alternate route home because the creek had come up over the road.
Timm's birthday always creeps up on me somehow. Why do I always wonder if perhaps it is in July after all? Then there's the fact that it is tomorrow, because of the international date line and all. My dentist asked me the other day how old my brother was and I just couldn't figure it out because I was so tense from an accumulation of too many painful tooth treatments this year and the anticipation of yet another. But I'm not as confused as many people are about the Southern Hemisphere. Someone really did once ask me what we call summer. She thought maybe we would call it winter. I have lots of stories like that, but I won't share them, because you know, there are many countries in the world I have no idea about.
Last week Michael was contacted by an independent chocolate maker in Massachusetts, asking if they could be the official chocolate of Rex Parker. Well, hell yes! Today a parcel arrived with the most beautiful chocolate. It is organic, stone ground (!!) and directly traded with independent cocoa growers. So far, there isn't anything not to love.
Taste Test:
Unlike the Rapunzel chocolate we tried last night, this doesn't smell like rotten fruit. In fact, it smells beautiful and earthy. The texture is grainy but not crunchy - I guess that's the stone grinding. It was, as Michael said, very eatable, not at all waxy, like some dark chocolates we've tried (and we've tried quite a few). The Guajillo Chili was rather spicy and lingered. The vanilla was a little too sweet and I couldn't really taste the tiny-Costa-Rican-plantation grown vanilla. The 70% was good and I'd finish off the whole bar if I was younger.
We've finished all our school work, but for the next week, we all have a legal obligation to keep showing up anyway. So we're doing fun stuff. Starting with public transportation. It turns out that more than half my students have never taken the bus anywhere (apart from the big yellow school bus, which doesn't count). So this morning we walked down to the corner of Main and Willow, each clutching a dollar and a quarter, and picked up the #25 over to Binghamton University. We goofed around there for a while, then headed back. On the return trip we had the same driver, who was curious as to what we were doing, so I told him. He then very kindly explained to the students that if they ever had any questions, they should ask the Bus Driver, because the Bus Driver was There To Help.
Days like this, I love my job. Sure, there are two more weeks of school left before summer, but for scheduling reasons, we had our "graduation" tonight. We get together with the other classes in our program (those are the ones who want to be engineering and medical professionals - mine want to be teachers and lawyers) and handed out compliments and certificates. My guys got me flowers and thanked me on stage, then I got to tell all their parents how awesome they are, and mean it. People might complain about "kids these days," but from where I stand, the future looks like it is in the hands of some smart, funny, compassionate, and motivated people. I couldn't be prouder.
This post is mostly for Donna, 'cause we're dog sitting Baxter this weekend and she'd like to see pictures of her baby boy.
And just one more, even though I could go on and on:
We had a little rough spot there, brought on by the pressures of winter and work, where soup just wasn't happening. But Kim got her act together last week and made gazpacho. And egg salad 'cause she thought the soup would be too much like drinking salad. Although the egg was also salad, so I guess we had two kinds of salad. Here it is:
This is exactly what happened to my last phone too. Because I keep dropping them. So, now I'm wondering if I really need a phone at all. I'm not going to go into any long philosophical rants about technology, but honestly, do I need one? Actually, I'd kind of love an iphone, but what if I dropped it? At least this one was "free" after the $50 rebate. So, what I'm saying is, if you need to get hold of me in a hurry, call the land line.
