“Remoted” – Day 110 (Saturday)

Happy birthday America! The day had nice weather, a variety of activities, and driving to and fro, (but not from the sea to shining sea or from the mountains to the prairies, just from Lowell to Gardner and back.

Lemon bar. Yum!

The morning was busy with baking, but not a birthday cake for the country (or anything/one else). The baking involved grating lemon rind and juicing a lemon for a lemon bars recipe, inspired by the results of a recipe search for something starring the lemons that came in my produce delivery. The baking was fun. I always forget how much I enjoy it when I haven’t done it for a while. After making the recipe with separate steps for a shortbread crust, a lemon layer, then an icing layer, I went online for the usual news and social media check and a one-step layered lemon bar recipe popped up. What the heck? Where was that recipe yesterday when I was actively looking for recipes?  

After the completion of the kitchen duties, it was yard time to dig up some of the rapidly spreading lily of the valley to bring to Mom’s so it can spread rapidly in her yard, too. Elsewhere in the yard, the dirt that was recently dug up for the fence post holes that I asked to have tossed in the back yard to fill a low spot along the back is full of chunks of slate in a pretty blue color. Now there is a growing pile of slate pieces in various sizes and I’m wondering how to put them to some sort of use. This is how weird little collections happen. Pieces of blue slate will join the assortment of oddities found in the yards of my various dwellings which include some pottery shards, clay marbles, turkey feathers, and a shed snake skin.

By 10:15, it felt like I’d already lived an entire day, but there was more to come. The traveling phase was next, thanks to plans to go to Mom’s, an hour westward. The dogs came with me, which involves setting the dog beds on the floor in the back seat, gathering the leashes and attempting to corral the suddenly hyperactive pups into the car, along with the lemon bars, the lily of the valley, some books for Mom, and a refrigerator wine bottle rack that didn’t fit into my fridge that might work in hers.

The star of the next recipe is lobster.

At Mom’s there were steamed clams and boiled lobster, grilled burgers, multiple pasta salads, cole slaw, marinated vegetables, and lemon squares. There were four of us, so it was quite a lot of food, but that’s how we roll. The drive home was accompanied by a cooked lobster, so now the recipe search will be for the best way to use leftover lobster. Lobster salad? Lobster mac and cheese? This kind of research is fun. 

The pups had fun exploring Mom’s yard and being fawned over and petted. Moose stayed glued to my side as usual while Winston worked the screen house for some loving from Mom, Butch, and Butch’s sister. All the attention must have worn them out because they were chilled out in their beds the whole ride home and have spent time crashed on the couch since arriving home. They’ll need the rest. If the past few weeks have been any indication, the neighborhood fireworks competition and the accompanying noise will probably be a little extra tonight. It seems like a good time to run the A/C and the dishwasher, which runs forever and a bit loud. That will necessitate jacking up the volume on the TV, which increases the baseline of house noise. If needed, I can add the washer and dryer to the mix. It's not enough to drown out the big booms, but it might help with the smaller ones.