2. corned beef and cabbage: this one relies on pickling spice, which you can generally buy; some brands pack the spice with the brisket. One brisket, corned beef. One large cabbage. Crockpot, again from morning til supper. Preparation: 1) open the corned beef packet and wash it thoroughly in clean water until the water runs clear. It is packed in salt: wash it! 2) locate the packet, or take 1 heaping tbs of pickling spice. 3) put the brisket in the crockpot: you may have to cut it in half. Add 2 cups water, add the spice, and, here’s the trick—add a tablespoon of black pepper and most important, a tablespoon of nutmeg. Cook on high most of the day, until bubbling gets frenetic, add more water if needed. 2 hours before supper. Slice up a head of cabbage and add it, and a couple of carrots and potatoes, if you like them. Serve with Irish Soda Bread, and butter, or hot biscuits, or a salt-baked potato (if none in the soup) and you have a fine supper.

3. salt-baked potatoes. Heat oven to 350. rub down baking potatoes with oil, roll in salt, place on rack in oven for an hour.

4. the family spaghetti recipe: 2 lbs ground beef. Sear with oil in pan until browned. Add 3 heaping tbs chopped fresh garlic [we're allergic to onion and preserved garlic]—cook with beef. Add one can of tomato paste—I favor Contadina. Add: 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp black pepper, 1 tsp clove, 1 tsp thyme, 1 tsp marjoram, 1 TBS oregano, 1 tbs basil (or more; 1 tbs comino (cumin, ground); 1 TSP celery seed: cook all day, adding water as needed, add fresh (never canned) mushrooms if desired: celery bits and green bell pepper are a matter of taste: I prefer not. Serve over pasta or use as filling in lasagne. Good with Italian salad and hot garlic bread.

I’m working, as when not?—and take breaks to go out and take advantage of the wind to use a plastic kitchen colander to sift rocks and gravel for the dry stream bed.

Which got me one of those odd drivebys—the usual chap out of work, wanting a job; but he sounded better than some. He swore without asking to get the roots out of the ground as well as the weeds, and offered to work for 10 an hour. Well, I’m out there sifting hand-rocks with a damn colander because we’re trying to save money and not buy rock, but there is one monster job he could do—moving all the gravel that’s grown up with weeds below the retaining wall, so I agreed for 2 hours. Naturally he had another job he had to get to, but would come back. We’re not so sure of that. We’ll see. He claims he’s trying to get jobs to get his electricity back on. We’d believe it except that the sales pitch is too polished and he started immediately waffling around on price and such. So…we’ll see whether we get the gravel moved. I did not pay him in advance.

The pond has developed a new algae. Lucky us. I’m going to do a water change today, though I hadn’t wanted to because of the temperatures, but this stuff is disgusting and I don’t want to let it proliferate.

And the writing is going well. Nothing like a rolling rewrite to recover your focus. It’s like trying to do patterns on a tapestry: sometimes you need to back off and view the whole thing to see how they relate and how you can make it better.

Been working, as you can see, on the rolling rewrite, which is going very well; and I threw on work clothes and came out into the coolth this morning to help Jane with the front yard, only to discover she’d just sat down, done in, by what she’d done. So I attacked a patch of new weeds by the rose bed with the mattock, my favorite weapon of small destruction. I’m really good with it, and it doesn’t hurt my back much. It hurts Jane’s so badly she’d rather try to dig them out by hand than use that implement, while I can peel back weeds and roots like a carpet when I get going—we can’t use the faithful Mantis there because it’s underlain by both roots from the hemlocks, and by irrigation hose. So it has to be the mattock.

Only about another 3×3 patch of that to go. We’re hoping to weedcloth a lot of the lawn soon and just leave it in that state for winter, finally admitting to ourselves that we’re not going to be able to do the plantings in it until next spring. Ground preparation is the huge thing with gardening: I’m learning that. You have to multiply the work you plan to spend on planting the bed by 10, in terms of time and effort, to prepare the ground, and then things go smoothly. We don’t have a weed or grass problem in the back yard because Jane insisted on ground preparation; and oh, are we glad now!

So—it will go to bed for the winter…strange to be thinking of that in early September, but we’re in the 40′s at night, and we will have to put the pond to bed too, maybe as early as late October, certainly by November, by which time it may be ice and snow, the way the weather has been going. This is a La Nina year, and that means heavy snow for us. For those of you who have a moderate snow problem, I can recommend the Toro electric snowthrower: it’s not very pricey for a snowblower; it can’t handle ice, but on new snow or even fairly compacted snow, it moves it, and being electric, it’s very light, carry in one hand, and easy to maneuver in tight places. Ours is about 18″ and handles a walk very easily.

Well, anyway, a tamer day. A deep breath. Sigh.

Then we have to move those trees.