Lily of the Day

This beauty is "Sorbet", and I was very lucky: we had a cloudy day, so the blossom is still pink at the end of the day. Sunshine turns this flower lighter and lighter, so that at the end of a sunny day they are more like the snow of a snowcone that has had all the syrup slurped out.

I wasn't as vigilant as I could have been at squishing lily bud worms, so these stems have a spot or two of damage, and I lost a couple of buds.

My husband is doing extra Annual Training sessions for the National Guard this summer, which means I've seen him a day or three out of the past two weeks. He is finally back today, so we bought take-out lunch from the Viet Namese market and had a little picnic, then he and our son walked around the electronics store, and I looked in the Michaels craft store next door.

What is this stash diet doing to me! I looked at the yarn they had there, and I didn't even want any! The closest thing Michaels had to sock yarn was that acrylic Moda Dea. If I want acrylic, I'll buy "Soft Baby". Twice as many yards of yarn for half the price!

It felt very odd to be walking around in a store full of "stuff" and to not really want any of it. They didn't have a knitting needle smaller than US size 2. Goodness knows I have more scrapbooking paper for origami than I could fold in six months of winter.

So after a side trip to the pet store, petting another customer's cute fuzzy puppy, checking out the fish, and looking at the birds and rabbits, we headed home, and to the farm market.

Strawberries are in season here. We bought a whole flat (8 quart boxes). Yum. First we eat strawberries until we are completely tired of them. Then I don't freeze them, I can them, just like peaches. They look completely unlovely when canned, bleached out and ghostly in their syrup, but they taste heavenly, especially in January, over vanilla ice cream. And I don't have to worry about canned fruit when the power goes off.

I had never thought of canning strawberries. Then one Christmas my husband's aunt gave him a jar of canned strawberries she bought at a Polish grocery store. They looked white and weird in their reddish strawberry juice, more like something on the back shelf in a mad scientist's lab than something you'd want to eat. But my husband opened them, and the next thing I knew, he and our son were eating them. And they smelled so good!

So that summer, we tried canning our own. Good thing we had the example of the boughten jar, so we knew how weird they would look, because they did. And when November came around, they smelled fantastic when we unsealed a jar. They don't look so nice -- but looks aren't everything!