A Sense of Satisfaction

The last two days have been busy, firstly with the bill paying and grocery shopping, and then, yesterday, with some "power cooking".  It came with an unexpected cost, however, when one of my good slow cookers died, mid-way through a batch of Daddy's Ribs.  In our last major purge, we got rid of the two larger slow cookers, both of which were old, and broken in some way.  After all, I had two good Cuisinart machines.  Well, now I have one.  I finished the ribs in the oven, which was the original way, after all.  Still, I'm going to have to give some thought to how badly we might need to replace the one that died yesterday.  When we power cook, it's always much easier to just put everything in various slow cookers and relax, than to be constantly supervising things in the oven, batch after batch, for hours.  Still we ended up with about 9 meals of spaghetti sauce, 5 meals of meatballs,  and 5 meals of ribs.  Today we're chopping up peppers for the freezer, and I did a larger box of strawberries late yesterday.  David is enjoying smoothies for breakfast, once in awhile, and prefers strawberries to the weird fruit I use.  Over the weekend, it's time for Rhubarb and Pineapple jam.

But even with all the work, it gave me a good feeling to see both the fridge and freezer filling up, and know that our bills are paid, and there's a bit of money in the bank.

Yesterday, we had heavy solid rain for hours.  Truly a blessing, after a very dry spring. 

In my efforts to remain true to my  health regimen, I bought an avocado, and am exploring the recipes in the book that call for avocado.  In the past avocados have been so expensive that I just by-passed those meals, but the Tuesday, price was right.  Yesterday, I tried making egg salad by mixing a chopped, hard boiled egg with 1/4 avocado, mashed.  Not too bad, but not terribly filling either.  But then, these days I'm ravenous, in any case, and it's showing at the scale.  Today, it was Green Grape smoothie, with avocado, instead of the coconut oil, I've used in the past.  A totally different drink, and one I plan to have again.

Still just finishing things, in the studio.  I will post things as they are done.  I've reached the stage of putting the hanging sleeve on the Tall Grass Prairie piece, but was so tired last night, that I had to give up.  Hand stitching black on black is difficult at the best of times.  I always feel a sense of panic when I finish a few projects, and don't know what to do next.  This time I have a couple of FMQ'g projects that I can fill time with while I do some detailed mental planning of the next piece--"Shadows of  My Mind".  But I had to scramble, mentally, to come up with those.