What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.


-- Jane Austen

Shakin'

Please tell me that we're not the only family that looks at each other around 6 p.m. on a sweltery July evening and decides that the only possible thing we manage for supper would be milkshakes.

And not the good-for-you kind with fruit and frozen yogurt and bran....otherwise known as smoothies.  We wanted big, ugly, thick chocolate milkshakes.  The kind where the blender protests and grinds, even at the end of the mixing.  The kind that you get out a spoon and a straw...the straw mostly for effect.  With embarrassing amounts of chocolate syrup mixed in, and perhaps a little drizzle on top to make it fancy. (Even though you intend on covering that up with whipped cream.)

Angus was enraptured....drinkable ice cream! He's probably only seen a milkshake twice in his life. (He IS only almost 4. So don't be scolding me about depriving my children....) And he couldn't believe his good fortune; he didn't have to eat any vegetables or meat before working the milkshake over with gusto.  Maggie is nearly 6...she's seen a few milkshakes in her day and commenced to sucking her little cheeks in with the effort of getting it up the straw, then stopping to comment knowledgeably about the ingredients to her brother who didn't even know she was in the room.  He had milkshake love. 

Both my babies were born in July, a hellish month to be pregnant.  When I was pregnant with Maggie, I was working in town and even though I packed my lunch, that last month I usually didn't eat it. I'd get a blueberry milkshake almost every day, if you can imagine, from the Tastee Freeze or whatever the name of the drive in was at that time.  My doctor had been quite strict about my weight, so I'd been on the straight and narrow, fretting about each visit and the big weigh in.  But that June and July, I felt like a hippo with a glandular problem and I just went ahead and had milkshakes.  It was glorious!

I think in July, the blender should probably sit out on the counter, ready for action.  Not just for milkshakes, but also for those wretched smoothies and the occasional dacquari. The rest of the year, my blender languishes, forgotten, in the cupboard...but in July, that baby is coming out!

My favorite milkshakes are actually not chocolate, although I can bravely work my way through one if the occasion requires me to.  I adore pinapple shakes, any sort of berry shake (blueberry being my absolute favorite, STILL) and shakes with crazy ingredients that make you go, "hmmmm...." e.g. caramel banana nut, which sounds hideous but is really quite good.

What about you? Do you shake it up in July? And what is your favorite milkshake?

Meet me on the deck about 6:30.  We can gnosh and slurp, throwing our flip flops over the railing and calories to the wind....

More garden dirt...

Gardening makes people weird. Or weird people garden.

Either way....

And I think vegetable gardening must bring out the most eccentricities.  Particularly raising tomatos. I have seven remaining tomato plants that I'm nurturing along, pouring rainwater carefully on their tender little roots.  They get only the best tomato food, worked into the soil, balanced with the perfect mix of nitrogen and phosphorus to help them flourish.  They've been dusted with Sevin, like so many little tea cakes, to keep the grasshoppers away.  When the weather looks a little inclement, they get covered and guarded. 

There are three little tomatos, so far.  I coo over them and measure their growth daily.  Sometimes twice a day.  They are firm and healthy, and I have pictures of B.L.T.s dancing in my head.

Something about the smell of tomato leaves just oozes summer, doesn't it? Especially in the mid part of the day, when they are all warmed up, soaking up the sun.  I'll walk past them on my way to weed another flower bed and run my hands over the tops of them to release that smell. Then, as an added joy, I pet the basil and rosemary.  I can see why cats love to roll in herbs.

The grasshoppers are eating everything but the tomatos.  The leaves on most of my plants, flowers and vegetables, are lacy and drying.  The hoppers prefer hollyhocks and beans, so far, and steer clear of peas and lettuce.  That's odd to me, but maybe they are just having appetizers before the main course...

How does YOUR garden grow?

At last....

(Is that song running through your head, now?)

The advance reader's copy of Homer Hickam's new novel, set in Fillmore County, MT is HERE!!!

It's not available to buy in bookstores, hardback, until November 9th, so if you run right out to Barnes and Noble, all you can do is pre-order it. And I highly recommend you do so.

(Because the librarian is noteworthy....extremely fictionalized, but noteworthy.)

Homer graciously allowed me to read the manuscript last winter, editing the ranch stuff. I was sworn to secrecy about everything, and the Farmer didn't even get to look at the manuscript while I was working on it.  Some of the edits were taken into advisement, I see, but there wasn't a lot to work on because Homer did great research.

I'm going to reread the whole thing tonight.

Yes. The whole book. I can hardly wait!

So exciting!!! 

Beauty Forecast

I checked Weather dot com this evening, to see what sorts of surprises lay in store for us this week.  In Montana in July, it could be anything from snow to 100+ degrees; or both in the same week.  As I was waiting for the page to load, I looked at the little blurb of choices at the bottom and honest to goodness, cross my heart, here was one of the choices:

NEW! Beauty Forecast!

You have GOT to be kidding me.

Have we gotten so dependent on the computer to tell us everything that we can't do simple deductions from the weather forecast? For example:

Winds gusting 10-20 mph = bad hair
70% chance of precipitation = runny mascara AND bad hair
Humidity 60% = deodorant failure
High temperature -20 F = hat head and blue extremities (not just your eye shadow, girls)
Tornado warning = who CARES what you look like, get into a basement with your curling iron and makeup bag, for heaven's sake!

The other thing that came to mind is that there is no way to forecast personal contingencies beyond the basic weather.  e.g.:

Colicky baby = black bags under eyes that no concealer can touch
Branding = farmer's tan (not attractive with a tank top the next day)
Overflowing tank in farm truck = muddy high heels, grrrrrrrr
Broken dryer = damp, slightly wrinkled apparel

And so forth...

I can pretty much fortell this stuff on my own, without the help of the Weather Channel. The beauty forecast is usually pretty dismal before I've had my coffee and a shower....

Changing Gears

At one of our bookclubs, we had the rare privilege of hosting the author of our selection that month, John Moore.  He's a rancher that writes or a writer that ranches....I'm not sure which.  Anyway, we asked him if ranching hindered his writing process and he explained that actually he did most of his writing horseback, in his head, hurrying home after the work was done to get it down on paper.

I have to say I can completely relate to this.  I write blog posts by the bucketful when I ride my 4-wheeler, moving cows. I write letters that never get sent. I change recipes and write cookbooks. I make "to-do" lists that are quite grandiose.  And I revisit memories, hitting the re-wind button in my brain; enjoying some and cringing at others, of course. 

The other day, when we were moving the yearlings...the coming twos....I recalled my first "ranch" date with the Farmer and the guys of Pluhar ranch. 

I grew up where we rode horses to gather cows and work, and my dad made fun of motorcycles and wheelers. I'd truly never sat on a 4 wheeler until I started dating the Farmer....golf carts, yes, but never a wheeler. And it had been some time since I'd moved cows at all.   

The guys were going to move yearlings from Grants, where our house now sits, to across the road and I guess they thought it couldn't hurt to let "the girl" come along.  I got a crash course (not literally) in riding my own 4-wheeler. It sounded something like this: "Here's the start button. Shift up with your foot like this, shift down with your foot like this, here's the brake, let's go."

 And they took off, going at what seemed to me to be 50 mph, but in reality was more like 25 mph.  Pluhars are great guys, but they don't baby girls along very much, so I finally figured out the shifting up thing and caught up.  Sort of.  By the time I was getting to cruising speed, they were shifting down to turn.  (How do I shift down?!!! Think, think, think. Think faster!)

I've told you about moving yearlings, how they are the hardest bunches of cows to manuver, because they are flighty and silly, like junior high girls.  Yeah.  And me on a wheeler.  I don't mind telling you that I was a little nervous.  But I really wanted to prove that I could do it, so I followed along and went where they told me, feeling like I'd tip over the wheeler on any little incline, fighting the gear thing the whole way.

Looking back, I give the guys huge credit for their patience and willingness to even let me go.  Or perhaps they just wanted something funny to watch for awhile. 

The one little instruction they neglected to impart was how to put the wheeler in reverse. 

On a horse, you pull back the reins and pivot.  It's pretty intuitive and quick and you don't even really think about it. 

On a wheeler, you have to shift all the stinking way back down to neutral, push down a little red button on the left handle by the brake and pull back, shift the gear down into reverse, THEN hit the gas to go flying backward after letting go of the brake you've been holding on the left-hand handle.  Who the heck is going to figure THAT out on their own?  Especially someone as mechanically impaired as me.

Pulling back on the handles does nothing. And believe me, I tried that.

I got a little heifer into a corner, and there we sat.....she didn't want to leave and I couldn't.  I couldn't go forward, I couldn't go backward, I couldn't turn.  She finally tossed her pretty little head and left me sitting there, MAD.  Mostly because I could hear at least two of the guys (one was the man I was dating) laughing. What I wouldn't have given for one of my Dad's horses right that moment....

Finally, after pulling himself together, the Farmer (risking life and limb) came over and showed me the complex system by which one puts a wheeler in reverse. Is that all? He politely backed my wheeler out of the corner and got me readjusted, headed the right direction.

I was finally able to rejoin the guys and the herd and follow them across the road to the next pasture. Vern very kindly told me he liked that I didn't get all excited when moving cows, waving my arms and hollering.  Well, yeah.  I was pretty much immobilized in the corner during most of the project.  But let me tell you, it was getting pretty close to the waving and yelling stage.....

I didn't realize at the time that it was a pretty big deal to go with the guys.  Pluhars have always had ample male help and sort of discouraged women around the cows, because as my father-in-law told the Farmer one time, "Cows just work harder with women in the corral."

But that's another story....