Homemaking

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Red Spheres of Deliciousness

I asked a friend who has a small farm with greenhouse if he could bring me some tomatoes. Sure!

This is what I found on my porch last night:

Give a gal tomatoes, you feed her for a few days. Give her tomato plants and you feed her for a summer. 🙂

There’s already one on its way:

I was told to repot and stake the plants when they get bigger:

My outdoor shower lines up with the end of the porch, so the plants are in perfect position for watering. I was told to keep them nice and wet, so not having to deal with watering cans and whatnot will make it so much easier to get into the habit of keeping Larry, Curly, and Moe happy.

(yes, I’m silly, but I’m not going to change at my age. 😀 )

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And the verdict is…

Oh!

I like rhubarb!

I removed the outer skin on the stalks, chopped them into 1″ pieces, sprinkled them liberally with sugar, and nuked them for 10 minutes. They made their own juice and the whole thing tastes like a happy marriage of apples and raspberries. Tart, but not too much, sweet, but just enough. Over good, thick vanilla yogurt it is absolutely divine.

Thankfully, I have two huge bowlfuls and plenty of yogurt!

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Leafy Presents

The other day I noticed a note by the phone at work that look suspiciously like a Whitehorse shopping list. As an experiment, I penciled in ‘pineapple’ at the bottom of the list. When I came in to work last night, there was a pineapple waiting for me by the computer. Aw, they love me. 😀 (Pineapples are currently $7 in Dawson and nowhere near as pretty as the one I got from Whitehorse!)

Today, some customers offered me rhubarb. I accepted, imagining that they’d hand me a couple of stalks. Instead, I was the recipient of a ginormous pile of the stuff that I’m told was twice that size before other people helped themselves to it! I don’t have much experience in cooking up rhubarb other than as a filler in pie or muffins, so I think I’ll just stew up the whole lot with some apple and make a compote to serve over yoghurt or granola. I’m sure it’ll freeze well. Rhubarb is one of those things that I don’t think about until it’s in front of me. I don’t even know if I like it or just tolerate it or what. I’ll have an answer to that in about an hour, once I’m done peeling and chopping the suckers!

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A Very Full Day

I don’t know what it is about the long sultry summer days of the Klondike, but I seem to wedge twice as much into a day as would seem feasible. So, today:

A Ferry of My Own!

I was out at Gertie’s a little bit later than I should have been last night, so this morning’s awakening at 9:20AM by my iPod Touch alarm clock was a tad brutal. I’d promised friends across the river that I’d help them move back to Bonanza, so I was up and at ’em in minutes. In fact, I was at the hostel with the car nearly packed within a half hour, including a short wait on the ferry. Not bad!

We had to wait for the ferry to cross back, less than ten minutes. I had the ferry to myself, which was kind of cool. I would have thought that they would wait to load up, but nope. They take the passengers who are there, or at least as many as they can fit, and then they cross. Back and forth, all day, every day. What a service!

Once back at the motel, I checked them in, dumped their luggage, grabbed some toast, gulped down coffee at the office and started my day.

Beds and Bundles!

Housekeeping was shorthanded this morning, so I spent an hour stripping beds and then running linens and towels up to the rooms. I needed to be back at the office for noon, which enabled me to discover that I can make two beds in fifteen minutes. I’ll have to look up my record for last summer and see if that’s good or bad. 😀

Back in the office, it was the usual zaniness. During quiet moments, I continued to make little bundles out of our check in cards in preparation for inputting into our computer system. I designed and implemented a new database this week, so I have a huge backlog to go through. I don’t mind since I love data entry AND I’m doing it on a Mac! Yes! We’ve got a Mac in the office this year and I can do 90% of my work on it! Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!

I was relieved at quarter past two and headed home to play with my iPod some more.

iPod Breakthrough!

After getting in a little work at my contract (subject of a future post), I decided to focus on the iPod and try to get more ebooks on it. I put together a few semi-related pages and came up with a way to connect the iPod to my cellular connection! This finally gave me full iPod use, limited only by my bandwidth restrictions. I was given a huge cd filled with tons and tons and tons of wonderful ebooks and I transferred a few of them to the iPod. Then, I discovered that you can actually bookmark and annotate books in the Stanza app. Amazon Kindle? Pfft.

Oz!

I went back to work at quarter past five and it was the usual zaniness until a customer checked in with a bunch of dogs and the manager decided to adopt one. Well, she’s trying him out tonight on a trial basis, but they’ve bonded, so I know he’s staying. 🙂 Somehow in the middle of this, she and I agreed to coparent him this summer, so I sort of have a dog now! He’s a Jack Russell, the only breed I have any experience with since that’s what I had growing up, and we named him Oz! I will be taking pictures soon. 🙂

The Night Is Young!

It’s presently 8:40, dinner’s in the oven (chicken and lasagna), laundry’s in the washer, I have work to do, I want to play some more with my iPod settings, and I want to finish the short story ebook I’ve started.

Just another day in paradise and I’m lovin’ it! 😀

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Gift of a Salesman

We’ve had a fishmonger staying in one of our rooms for a few nights. He travels around in a refrigerated truck hocking frozen fish to individuals (restaurants have their own suppliers). I inquired about his wares and when he realised that I was shopping, not just being polite, he was quick to offer me a good price on a 5lb box of haddock.

Much as I love haddock, I knew there would be no way I could get through that much fish in a reasonable amount of time, so I asked a friend to split the box with me. By the time she had examined the fish and agreed, the fishmonger had dropped his price again, to $80, or $16/lb which is a good price for up here.

I’m just waitin’ on dinner…

In the meantime, here are some random pics that don’t warrant their own post:

no need to close the rear blind this winter!

c is for cat AND contentment

Dinner’s ready! And YUM! Best haddock EVER!!!