Outside the sky is on fire. It looks orange in the picture but is really the color of cherry mead. Speaking of which, damn, my cherry mead now aged for over a year, is spectacular. I can’t believe I was trying to drink the stuff when it was raw, green, not ready, whatever the fuck that’s called. That was just nasty, what I was swilling before. Too bad I only have 2 bottles left, and gosh I’m really sorry to have offered it to guests and talked it up like it wasn’t worse than cough syrup.

So it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, but what I’ve been doing is eating green bean casserole. I ate 2 or 3 pounds of green been casserole in honor of our week of Thanksgiving. That’s right 2 or 3 POUNDS. That’s fine though because normally I eat a lot of brown rice, tofu, and leafy greens, completely neglecting the Campbells cream of mushroom and Frenches fried onions part of the food pyramid. I ate green bean casserole until I was full and happy then waited a couple hours and dove right back in.

Today Bagpipe Man made a whole new green bean casserole which I promptly ate a third of oblivious to the cries of my poor hungry offspring hoping to get in on some seconds. That’s it though. I am sated. I need no more green bean casserole. Strangely, unless I wake up tomorrow with an extra 5 pounds on my ass as punishment for my optimism, I think I’ve actually managed to kick start my metabolism again. I added weights to my workout, but that’s really the only thing I’ve been doing differently. That and eating green bean casserole, the miracle food of the Pacific Northwest.

It’s pretty. It has red stems. It’s the only thing still growing in the Marvelous Plot of Awesomeness. A while back I made chardtinis and wrote about it on this very blog but now I can’t find that post. I think some archives are missing. Every time I go looking for it I start just reading my own blog and laughing at my own witticisms until eventually someone catches me at it. So I can’t link to it and I can’t pass on the recipe to Burley Girly’s friend but perhaps I’ll try to recreate it now that my sink is full of chard.

It sure is dark out for 4:00 pm. I keep blaming daylight savings time, but the fact is it’s been dark all day. The yard is full of wet rotting leaves and it feels like I haven’t seen the sun in days. We went to The Portland Art Museum today and being around so much color was marvelous. The paintings drenched in deep hues made me want to crawl inside them and take a little nap. It was toasty warm in there and fairly quiet which makes for a nice napping environment but there was just no way to slip into any of those paintings in my current solid state.

All the walking around getting some culture on made me super hungry so when we exited and found people giving away gardenburgers with all the fixings, lemonade, and some sort of healthy pringle type chips, I momentarily forgave Portland its gray november suckiness. I also woke right up because it was only 17 degrees out there, although everyone kept telling me it was 55.

The Peepertons are eschewing their coop in favor of this stick perch at night. They belong to a different, but not rival, gang than the Pinkertons and don’t want to share the clubhouse. I explained to them their faulty judgment but they don’t care. We have raccoons, possums, neighborhood dogs, and tool thieving junkies skulking about at night so sleeping under the stars is unwise. The Peepertons think they’re invincible though and when I couldn’t catch them to put them back in the coop, their high opinion of themselves was validated.

We really do have a problem with tool thieving junkies. They broke out the side window of the work van the other night and made off with Bagpipe Man’s tools. This is the second time the tools have been stolen but last time we were burglarized more professionally with the whole van being whisked away and emptied. This time there was broken glass, a bent window frame, and a much less thorough scouring of the contents. Frankly I’m a little miffed that our quality of criminal has tapered so drastically. I hope Obama is able to do something about this.

That window is going to be a bitch to fix since the frame’s bent. We went to a junkyard this afternoon and stomped through oil puddles looking for vans that matched but when we finally found one, extricating that little triangle window proved very difficult. Bagpipe Man approaches all tasks with a can do attitude which you would think would be a feature, but it’s not. It’s a bug. It was clear to me within a few minutes that the damn window was attached in many more places than were evident and that some really long metal piece was stuck to it that was going to have to come out too. My amazing powers of foresight also predicted that should we somehow manage to get this window out, installing it in the work van would not be easy at all. Finally after upwards of 40 minutes messing around with it, Bagpipe Man freed the window and then promptly decided that it had been worth the $4 entry fee to practice the taking out of windows on 1995 Chevy vans but that he didn’t really want this particular window. So we left, carefully avoiding the crazy guy driving around in a front loader randomly picking up cars and smashing them. $4 buys 4 beers at Dollar Pabst Night at North but whatever.

Then we went across the street to a taco truck where I bought a burrito that was made of soup encased in a tortilla and cunningly stuffed into a foil wrapper. On the way home I spilled burrito soup down both my sleeves, dribbled it down my chin and onto my shirt, and squirted a bunch out onto my lap. When I was changing my clothes I noticed a bean in my sock. Clearly I need to eat my food at the table.

While I was watching election returns and reveling in my new 39-ness last night,a horrible bug was snacking on this lettuce/choi/broccoli/cabbage plant that I was growing in my “winter garden". My winter garden consists of whatever goes to seed over the summer and emerges triumphant after the first rain. I think this is a pac choi because its ravaged stalk is in the general vicinity of the Asian greens side of garden town. My choi crop saw nary a pest this year, and actually did quite well so I hope whatever it is that’s marauding about out there doesn’t stick around. I should go out with a flashlight later and see what it is but I probably won’t.

Strangely whatever is eating the choi has absolutely no interest in the mustard greens next to it. Actually maybe that’s not so strange after all. I once picked a large basket full of mustard greens and lovingly created a beautiful salad for my family and since I wanted the salad to have a little kick to it, I also added nasturtium leaves and watercress. That salad has since been referred to as “that disgusting fire-mouth salad” and no one wants to have it again. That was back when I used to just throw a bunch of seeds out there and make very little effort to remember what the hell I was growing. Mustard greens are really quite nice, and when steamed aren’t spicy at all. A couple of torn up leaves in a salad is a good thing but they cannot and should not be the salad. Now everyone’s afraid of mustard greens which is too bad because although I never planted them again, they come up all over the place.