Domestic Disaster Area

The house is a mess. It isn’t magazine-worthy even on its best days, but during canning season, it looks like a tornado went through here.

I hauled in a wagon load of zucchini yesterday and shredded enough to fill two gallon zip bags. Someone has been hoovering down zucchini fritters. I think we’ll get about another week’s worth off those plants and then they might be done. I took a peek at the jungle of squash growing on that nuclear waste site—the spot where the load of pig manure ended up before planting—and there are squash in there that I cannot identify. And a lot of them.

One of the cabbages that survived the ground squirrel attack is about ready to harvest. That one is a variety called Early Dutch. I should have some red cabbages before long, too.

I started working on tomato sauce. We’re going to need freezer space for pork in a few weeks and one of the chest freezers still had about a dozen bags from last year’s harvest. I am mixing those with what I brought in from the garden this week. The tomatoes are simmering in the roaster. I’ll process and can them this afternoon.

Sarah has helped to expand my gardening horizons this year. She started quite a few dwarf tomato varieties and a few of them ended up in my garden. (I did Dwarf Chocolate Mocha last year.) This is Atomic Sunset:

The tomato patch is extra colorful this season.

We had pork for dinner last night. I put it in the crock pot with some salsa verde yesterday morning and let it cook all day.

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The husband is determined to figure out what is wrong with the BMW. He spent a few hours on it yesterday afternoon and evening but it’s still shifting erratically. I am not sure that turning cars into computers on wheels was such a good idea. Repairing or replacing mechanical parts is one thing. Bad computer modules are another story. He could replace the part he thinks is bad, but the module has to be programmed. With BMW’s proprietary software.

I have no doubt he can solve this problem—as stubborn as I am, he outshines me—but I also told him that he needs to decide when he longer wants this particular albatross around his neck.

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I took in the sides of that black ponte dress so that it fits better. I may tweak the sleeves a bit because I’m not entirely happy with them. Overall, though, the dress fits well and that pattern will go into the tried-and-true pile.

That Jan Minott fitting book has a great section on reading wrinkles in clothing. Wrinkles can point to fitting issues. However, solving those fitting issues isn’t always as straightforward as one might like. Take the problem of a gaping front armhole. When the sleeve is attached, that extra fabric causes a fold at the side of the bust. That issue could be addressed by shortening the front bodice, making the bust dart larger, slanting the front shoulder line, or some combination of all three. (The wrinkles section of that book reads like a flow chart.) See this blog post for a good example of this problem, and the solution.

I still feel like I am stumbling around blindly, but I’m getting better at fitting my own clothes, at least.

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Yesterday was overcast and we never got above 75 degrees. It felt wonderful. As I write this post, it’s raining—drizzling, really—but at least that’s something. Unfortunately, such a tiny amount of rain won’t help put out fires. And the number of calls our rural fire departments are having to make to homeowners to extinguish campfires is astonishing to me. We are now under stage II fire restrictions, there are fires burning all around us, but some people still think they can roast hot dogs in their backyard.