First time poster on these threads but read them all the time. Annie, I feel your pain! Hubby retired 9/1 of last year, we put our old home on the market 10/4, moved and arrived at our new home the night before Thanksgiving (dinner last Turkey day was hot dogs and mac&cheese). We knew that we were going to be downsizing drastically when we were house hunting down here so the fixing, tossing, donating, going thru everything, yard sales, getting the house ready for listing, packing and dealing with the moving company almost did us in. Dinner last night (Friday) was ribeyes, twiced baked potatoes and brussel sprouts with garlic and bacon, roasted in butter and a little bacon grease. The best part was that hubby did all the cooking, which is very unusual (but much appreciated). Ate in the living room while watching the latest Star Trek movie that is now on DVD. Tonight we're having a very simple dinner. With my new found skills with making a good meatloaf, we're having meatloaf sandwiches, which we both prefer over a meatloaf dinner. Meatloaf is in the oven right now. Hubby had wanted to go out in the boat today but I nixed that idea as I'm feeling really lazy today. Mainly because the lake is always crowded with out of towners during the weekends. Most of whom think drinking and boating are one and the same. So we're going out tomorrow as most of the boaters will have left or will be working. A late lunch or early dinner will be at a restaurant that faces the London Bridge after we get back. Haven't been out on the lake since August when we had a large almost two week long get-together with very dear friends and family. When we moved here we were told that there were a few months when it's actually too hot to be boating (unless you spend all of your time IN the water instead of on it) and that even swimming pools often get too hot to be enjoyable during the heat. We scoffed....but found out how true that was. Went thru our first monsoon season here and boy was that interesting. Now that the temps have cooled off somewhat we want to take advantage of it. Hope everyone had a terrific weekend. Lifting my mug of cold coffee in toast to everyone. Jenna

party_music, I've "downsized" to only growing zucchini, I had such an overflow of squash when I grew the yellow crooknecks, no way could we use it all! Dinner? I'll have the date pudding of neely's, party_music's squash, Suzi's salad.....aw heck, I'll have one of each, please! Here we also picked blueberries. The patch we usually pick at has become overgrown and needs pruning and mowing. The elderly couple who had it kept it pristine, but the kids who inherited it aren't so careful. Anyway, it took us about an hour and a half to pick 10 pounds, with Elery and I both picking, then we gave up. They are mostly washed and in the freezer now. Tonight we had baked cod, baked sweet potatoes and cole slaw, it was good but not very pretty. Elery cooked, and did a good job, it was delicious. Over the weekend, he smoked chicken, and we had that one night with baked beans and potato salad. Leftovers were made into chicken salad and served with cucumber salad. Before that we had beets, colcannon and roast chicken. I had an exceptional flounder sandwich while in Myrtle Beach watching The Princess cheer. This was the best seafood I had while I was there and it was from the little cafe at the KOA campground! I didn't think to take pictures of other meals, but they included pancakes and bacon, coke chicken with red potatoes and baby carrots, cheeseburgers, tacos, all cooked in a camper kitchen. Tonight Bud and I are canning pickles... Annie

Rebecca, Stink bug or leaf-footed bug damage on the tomato. I was wondering about C. diff too. My younger sister had it once a few years ago and had to be hospitalized for quite some time. Nancy, We've been hearing occasional fireworks for about a week already. I'm tired of them....and we aren't anywhere near the actual Fourth of July holiday yet. It makes the dogs crazy. Everyone is out mowing grass down short today. Between the heat, lack of rainfall and the fireworks craziness we always have out here in unincorporated parts of the county, people know the grass in the fields needs to be short in case fireworks set their fields on fire. Heavenly Blue is one of the latest MGs to bloom at our place, and they do better in full sun and poor soil than in part shade and good soil, so it helps if you choose them a 'bad' site to grow and don't baby them too much. Otherwise, they can just go on making new foliage forever and forever and forget to bloom for the longest time. Once they start blooming, though, they are so spectacular that you'll forget how aggravating it was to wait forever and forever for them to get their act together. Most of the basil I grow is for the beneficial insects. I ignore it and don't harvest it much, and just let it bloom for them. Our weather is awful again today. It was supposed to be around 97 degrees with a heat index of 103, which certainly sounded better than previous days. So, what have we had so far? An official high temp of 98 (so, very close to forecast so far) at our Mesonet station with a max heat index so far of 109 (oops, they were way off on the forecast for this). At our house is it 100 degrees right now. Our weather refuses to behave. Everything outdoors is just roasting. They had our Mesonet station (and Kenton's, I think it was) down for a while today, and when they brought them back online, both stations changed from a 16" soil moisture level of 0.14 to 0.40, so they either changed malfunctioning moisture sensors or they adjusted the data. Now I don't know what to think, but no matter what their data shows, the ground is miserably dry. The rain is bypassing us, moving from SW towards central OK, so some of you are likely to get rain. Hopefully, you won't get the hail. Jennifer, I hope the dinner is fun and that the animals do well without valium. Megan, There's so many neonics in use that I mostly just grow my own flower transplants from seed nowadays. I tried to buy some plants at HD this past spring, and they had Neonic tags in them (sort of hidden behind the standard plant tag, so if you weren't checking for them you might miss them) so I put them back on the plant racks. At least they are labeling theirs, which most places do not. I used to buy flats and flats of annual flowers in early to mid Spring for maximum impact, but don't buy many now. If I cannot grow them myself or find them at an organic nursery in the DFW metro, then I just live without them. It is hard for me to give flower seedlings the attention they need when I'm wrapped up in growing veggie transplants, especially during winter/spring wildfire season, but I'm getting better at giving them the appropriate amount of attention since buying them is less and less of an option because of the heavy reliance in the bedding plant industry on nionics. For me, growing transplants is easy if I'm not rushing off to fires every day, but almost impossible if we're having a bad fire season. We've been harvesting and eating tons of tomatoes for two months now, so you will not hear any whining coming from my lips. The fruit that set in March-April is mostly all harvested now. We had very little fruitset in May, but those are the ones that are still green now. With the heat cranking up, no rainfall in ages and tons of wind this week, the spider mites are flooding into the garden every time the wind blows and hitting the tomato plants hard. I'm now at the point where I look at the plants and think to myself that I'll be glad when each plant has ripened its last fruit and I can yank it out of the ground, thereby putting it out of its misery. I've been doing a pretty good job killing stink bugs and leaf footed bugs with citrus oil, but normally wouldn't spray it on the plants because it tends to burn the foliage. (Orange oil, at a high enough concentration will strip paint and varnish, so I have to be really careful to mix it up properly and to not spray it on any plant I don't want to risk losing.) It is just that with the plants declining so rapidly and drought officially in parts of our county now, I just do not care. I wouldn't spray it on the leftover tomato plants that I planted at the northern fenceline very late (to serve as host plants for tomato and tobacco hornworms found on the fruit-bearing plants in the main tomato rows) because they have not been hit by herbicide drift or spider mites yet, so they look ridiculously good and might survive until fall if the grasshoppers would leave them alone. I also wouldn't use it on the 8 new tomato plants for fall. They are in containers at the NW end of the garden, in as much shade as I can give them and still expect them to grow any at all. They can have more sun later after they grow and are established. I'm no longer dealing with tons of tiny grasshoppers in the garden. Now I have big huge ones flocking to the garden from the non-irrigated fields around us---thousands of non-irrigated acres. The differential grasshoppers are a huge issue as they really prefer forbs to grasses at this time of the year. I've started letting my Kong sunflowers wilt on purpose, which I'd rather not do, because the differential grasshoppers, which love sunflowers, will usually avoid wilting sunflowers. (Maybe the wilting impacts the leaves in some way the differential grasshoppers do not like?) So now, the dog's sunflowers that are self-sowing natives which border their dog yard are much more appealing to the differential grasshoppers than my garden sunflowers because I am not watering the garden sunflowers but am watering the dog yard sunflowers to turn them into an appealing plant for the differentials. Whatever it takes...... Tim just came in from the Great Outdoors and informed me it is hot out there. Thanks, I told him, I hadn't noticed. I think being at work 5 days a week somewhat skews his perception of the heat here because by the time he arrives home near 7 pm, we usually are a lot cooler than we were just 2 to 4 hours earlier. Today, for the first time in ages, instead of working on something at home, we went to the fire station and worked on various projects. I cleaned the kitchen, filled up the fridges with additional bottled water and Gatorade, inventoried firefighter snacks, etc. I noticed that, in our neighborhood between the fire station and our house, areas that are heavily shaded or that get shade at least half the day still look half decent. Areas that are in full sun? They look pathetic. My garden needs trees in it to shade the plants in hot weather, but I don't want the trees there all the time. Dawn

The mention of mules on Annie's mocktail thread reminded me of this treat.. Figenza Fig Vodka. Many of my holiday alcohol gifts are discovered while having cocktails in the midst of Christmas shopping. This was a perfect example.. we had delicious Mediterranean Mules and then purchased a number of bottles for ourselves and gifts. It's such a beautiful bottle-- perfect for gift giving .. and while looking for an image to share.. I discovered these little gems. This is the first I have seen them outside Top Chef lol.. so I have not tried them but I surely will! Balsamic Fig Pearls .. and they also come in other flavors like raspberry vinegar, lemon and plain balsamic.