The retired life on a Monday......

 

With the temps getting up there, dog walks are now taking place at 7am.  It is still nice and cool.  Still plenty of shade.  The dogs love the cool grass (and all the trees, haha) in the parks.  I had to take this photo, with the sun just coming up over the mountains.  This morning there were so many other dog walkers, Romeo asked me "Is there a holiday today that I don't know about??"  I thought maybe people who don't work take the weekends off in order to avoid the working folks that are out in droves on Saturday and Sunday.  

Then I had to feed the tomatoes, water some of the other things in my garden, water the strawberry garden, water my crazy lavender plant, and oregano, then the yard.  I had such high hopes for my Greek mountain tea (sideritis, or ironwort), but there are only three of the five seedlings left.  One is growing ~wow it grows rather slowly ~ the others just seem to be hanging out.  If I can't get it going, I'm going to turn that raised bed into a veg bed.   My yard isn't big enough for unproductive gardening beds.

I usually have a lizard that lives in the wisteria near my garden, and I'm happy to have them!  A few days ago there was a large roadrunner standing on the fence, going after the lizards ~ one of their main food sources.  She was too big to make much headway into the wisteria to make the catch.  Now my lizards are rather shy.  I haven't seen them out sunning themselves like I used to.  As I am writing this, she was just now out there, so I think she has put our yard on her route for breakfast.  

 

Yesterday our team at church (we make the meal for fellowship hour about twice a year) had a fish fry, and unfortunately there were about 3 grease fires.  The kid working on frying the fish was putting it into the hot oil too fast.  It totally freaked me out!  I was yelling "fire!  fire!", and couldn't figure out why no one else was freaking out.  They were not small fires either.  Finally he figured out he needed to put the basket in very slowly to avoid the flare ups.  I'm surprised we didn't need the fire extinguisher.  If Chuck wants to fry fish again, I'm going to say no way.  Just buy the fish already fried and heat it up in the oven.  I had a hard time falling asleep last night, having flashbacks on it.  

I was so stressed out that I forgot an ingredient in the cornbread I was making ~ although I didn't realize I forgot to put the melted butter in until that afternoon.  I just couldn't figure out why the recipe worked without it, but it did!  I had quite a few compliments on it too!  Weird, right?

Well, gotta go fold laundry and other drab, boring stuff.  This is the life of a retiree most days!  I must say, I really love it.  :-)

Love, 365