It's A Curse

 It's a curse I tell you ... getting up with the chickens.  Those early days on the ranch, getting up and saddling your horse before daylight so you could be pushing the cattle into the corral by the time the light hit the horizon, have never left me.  The days were long and filled with hard work.  Maybe that's where my "I can't sit still" came from.  

It was another of those crazy days getting bank accounts straightened out, since I discovered ALL my automatic payments were deleted.  I frantically worked for another two hours making sure they would be paid on time.  I found one bill, to who else but the gardener, that the bank said had not been paid.  Come to find out it was paid ... TWICE!   Big sigh!!

And in a flash, morning time on the patio has passed by.  It's a chilly 52 degrees this morning, too cold to keep my coffee hot.

I had one moment of excitement as I ran through the game camera pictures of nothing.  My Foxy friend is still hanging around.  That's very cool since I now have three big dirt piles in my lawn, meaning the gophers are back!!  What a perfect tasty snack for them!

This kid of mine who really needs to take his pills that I just spent a fortune for, took up 30 minutes of my morning while I tried to fool him into TAKING that pill.  He loves scrambled eggs, so every morning he gets several bites.  I figured hiding the pill in that would be easy.  Apparently that oleander he licked in Indio didn't mess with his taste buds one tiny bit.  He spit the pill out four times before I finally got it down his throat.  

Then it was on to crossing stuff off my list.  I have sticky notes all over the house with things that need to be done.  First off .. hook the battery back up in the Jeep.  It was a tad slow to start, so I hope it's okay.   Sadly, both vehicles require some go-go juice, so I'm trying to be conservative when it comes to everything else.  Gas is now $5.95 and diesel $6.39.  I'm pretty sure that's DOUBLE what it was two years ago.  There's a word for that ........

Next up ... clean out the fridge and freezer.  Since I took the truck only this last trip, I left lots of things behind, including this bottle of balsamic vinegar.  I'm pretty sure this doesn't have a Use By date, since it's usually aged something like ten years before it even goes on the market.

This bottle came from the Astoria Market the last time I was in Oregon ... maybe seven years ago?  Maybe even more.  I stumbled upon a recipe for pork loin with garlic and balsamic.  It's time to put this to good use.

It's magic .... I found two big packages of pork loin in the freezer!!  The best part was the recipe that called for this to be cooked in a crock pot.  Of course browning them first is not my favorite part, but once done, I covered it with garlic (the paste variety), some Italian seasoning (I faked it because I couldn't find any in the cupboard) and poured on the balsamic.

While I waited not so patiently for it to cook and fill the house with wonderful smells, I began work sewing the binding on those quilts.   One anyway, as it takes two days to do just one small quilt by hand.

Soon it was time to extract that hunk of pork.  It looked delicious, but the taste would tell.  I thought it might be a little overdone, but after four hours on high, it came out perfect.  I think I didn't add enough balsamic because I could barely taste it.  Note to self ... make it swim next time.  All in all, a quite tasty lunch.

Why not dinner?  Because I had an Elks Lodge Trustee meeting to attend at 5:00.  No one wants to attend these long drawn out meetings, but most everyone does.  We laugh, tell jokes and sometimes even get some work done.  This one went on WAY too long for everyone's taste.  I held out on my coke since I really wanted to sleep last night.   It didn't work out that way.  

The nightmares were epic as I crawled through a window into the meeting of Generals, trying to find my way home.  I should write a book on these escapades!  The time before that I was sitting on the banks of the Nile. It's probably a curse or maybe a loose screw from my horse falling on me when I was seven.

Time to check the game camera.