Day Seventy-Two: A Sodden World

It poured last night. I'm not sure how many inches of rain fell but it was a lot. The hole Jeremy and the kids dug to put in the new frost-free hose spigot was completely full in the morning (he hadn't filled it back in yet because he wanted to make sure it wasn't leaking... but how will we ever tell if it keeps raining like this?). William immediately got dressed and went outside to play in it. Thankfully it is right outside the window where I sit to work, so I could watch him and his dinosaur toy play in the knee-deep pond while I worked. He was out there for at least an hour.

Since the days have gotten so much longer now, I have hardly any time in the morning before someone wakes up and wants breakfast. It is already light when I get up a little before six. It's making it harder for me to find alone time to focus. Less than a month to the summer solstice. When we started it was right around the spring equinox. William was born on the winter solstice, and when we told him there was a summer solstice too, he was astounded and amazed.

I had a phone meeting at 9 am and though it was still drizzling I went outside and walked up and down our road for the entirety of the one-hour meeting. It was great exercise. I learned that the puppies we gave to the folks in Mississippi are doing very well in their new home. It was an enjoyable call, and the exercise felt great.

Jeremy went to the post office after I got back to get a package that had arrived. I ordered some food items from Nuts.com, since I've been having trouble finding the things I need at the local grocery stores. We got a 25 lbs box of organic rolled oats (Taiya saw that and shouted, "Oatmeal for life!!"), three different kinds of lentils for some new Indian recipes I want to try, wheat bran for a digestive biscuit recipe I found (digestives are a lightly sweet cookie-like item from the UK, if you're not familiar), garbanzo flour for socca and our salmon cake recipe which I invented (just canned salmon and garbanzo flour, fried), and sesame seeds for more bread. Oh, and figs, because I love dried figs. It such a bounty of food, and I can't wait to try moong dal khichidi.

Another newsworthy event that happened in our house was that I sewed Taiya a dress in the afternoon. I am not a seamstress, and so the emphasis is on the stress part of seamstress whenever I try to sew something. But, my great-aunt-in-law Kathy had helped me cut out the fabric B.C., and so all I had to do was sew it together. It turned out so, so ugly. The sewing part went fine, but once it was all together, it looked like a drab pillow case, and the colors were not at all summer-dress appropriate. And it was way too big. I tried to convince Taiya it would make a good play dress, but I couldn't put much effort in the argument since it really was ugly and way too big. She has way too much fashion sense to believe me. I tried it on, and even I could wear it, but even I didn't want to. Maybe I'll turn it into an actual pillow case. The plus side was Taiya and I laughed so much we cried, and I got more sewing practice.

Because it rained so much, the creek was a brown and rolling mass of water. In the afternoon, we heard trucks driving down to the creek, and sure enough, this year's first whitewater kayakers were there. I have done a lot of flat water kayaking in my day, and had a brief stint in college doing whitewater kayaking but it was a little too high octane for me. Fun, but terrifying. So we thought it would be fun to watch them give it a go. The group was still getting ready so we had time to play while we waited. Taiya found some interesting sticks and started collecting wildflowers to decorate them. William wiped out in a puddle and ended up soaked from head to toe. Daisy was thrilled to be out and off-leash (though if a nice birder had asked me to put her on a leash I would have happily complied), sniffing everything, dipping her toes in the edges of the water. We sat and waited for a while, and finally the five kayakers took to the water and we got to watch them in their brightly colored, zippy little boats go down the brown, roiling creek. They pulled in and out of the eddies, surfed on some of the bigger waves, and plowed through the rushing V's as we cheered them on. One man was in a single-person canoe with big inflatable floats in the front and back. He capsized twice while we were watching. I hope he got the hang of it further on, or he'd have been in for a long walk. 



As we walked back, Taiya said, "I thought this was just going to be a watching thing, but it turned out to be an adventure!" I love my kids so much.

For dinner, Jeremy had prepared a big venison roast, rubbed down with tomato paste and spices. He cooked it in a dutch oven, along with potatoes and veggies, on a little cast iron grill out on the porch. Taiya gobbled it up. William said, "I'll try a taste tomorrow," and ate a few bits of sweet potato.