Spring flurry

Busy day yesterday. We were up at six (pretty normal, even on Sunday) and had a leisurely hour with coffee and the paper. I'd put in a load of laundry when we went to bed, so at seven I started another and hung the first load on the line. First time this year for hanging out clothes! Third load was up by 9:30, very satisfying. At 7:30 I started a double barbecue fire (two chimneys) and at 8 put on a huge chunk of pork I'd bought a few days before. It looked like a ham (shoulder), skin and all, and I had to buy it because it was only $13. Cooked it indirectly on our monster barbecue, adding charcoal every half hour or so.

In the meantime, we went to the basement and bearded the potatoes in their den. Very sprouty, time for them to go. I rescued about ten pounds of Yukons. This entailed a general basement cleanup, as well. Charlie is good at spearheading things I tend to put off. The potatoes live(d) on newspapers (under a sheet) on the sub-basement floor. I then went into the root cellar to purge onions. Amazingly, there were only 20 that had sprouted and needed to be tossed. This leaves a couple of hundred more, very rare to have them last this long. It's the first year the root cellar has been fully insulated, so I think that helped. And I made up a box of onions to send to Chris and Kay. Kay loves our onions.

Charlie vacuumed the upstairs (ladybugs), while I did some kitchen cleaning, and he took a bunch of stuff to recycle.

This was all interspersed with watching golf, of course.

Just before the meat was done we spent about an hour doing fence repairs, just the most critical. It tends to come apart some during the winter, and the March blizzard was very hard on the fence on the south side of the yard. Any day now the cattle will start to come, and then the fence becomes very important.

The meat was great, ready to eat at 1:30, making a late Sunday dinner. I usually use this method for a different cut, but this one worked fine. I sliced up some, then shredded the rest of it later. The crispy skin (of which I ate a few small pieces) will be passed on to Mom to do with what she will. Now we have pounds of shredded pork (good with barbecue sauce), most of which will go to the freezer.

Afternoon was spent lazing around watching golf and snoozing.

Anyway, it was good to get these things done, and it's wonderful to have line-dried laundry again!

On Saturday, after we'd cleaned up the tree debris in Mom's yard, we rushed back to SV before the post office window closed, since I was expecting books. Got them -- David McCullough's book about Panama, and Walt and Skeezix . What a delight!! Do you have it, Suze? It is very, very wonderful, particularly the 1921 auto trip from Wisconsin to Yellowstone. Chris Ware put it together (as you know, Suzy), and in the introductory material uses his typical tiny type and seems to think that no one minds turning a book sideways to read things. (I forgive Ware for everything, though. I positively love him.) The photos in the introduction are great. Frank King and his family were enthusiastic amateur photographers. The only trouble with the book is that I want more!

I'm eager to get the LaLa's baby book stuff, and delighted by the background info, Mom.

Hope your media woes are quickly resolved; I hadn't realized that everything was so interconnected!

Charlie is in the garage bringing down the golf clubs -- think we'll spend the morning playing our first round of the season!