'homework'

My birthday fig, now portable.

There are many things I enjoy about summer—with specific reference to work though— I will say that I give myself a bit more relaxation time and a less rigid schedule, which allows me to do other fun things, such as playing in the garden and completing projects on the house. The past two weekends have been a combination of both as we ripped out carpet, installed new floors, built a cedar box and planted, picked and pruned in the garden, made some delectable foods and enjoyed some deliciousness too.

I must also say, that it helps significantly to be actually in the country during the summer. I missed last summer quite a bit.




To maintain consistency with the existing floors we purchased a light shade of laminate wood flooring for the bedroom and our office. It pained us a bit to do it. We're coming to the latter half of our residence and ownership of this home and the decisions we make now are more about what fits with the ranch house, our budget and in a 3 to 4-year trajectory, which is, at times, in conflict with our social, environmental and otherwise long-term planning. I do think though, that it is rather funny to be worrying about laminate floors when we simultaneously seasoned our cast-iron pan, (over the same 12-hour period) by rendering pig fat from our 1/2 pig, purchased back in February, made a couple jars of tomato sauce from some CSA Brandywines and picked hops from our vines to embellish our evening libations.

 

Taking down the office...this is the before shot.

Anytime we make a significant change to this house we are met with some fantastic surprise of leftover goodness, circa 1972. In this case, there was evidence of two different carpets and some super awesome vinyl, that really wins the competition for crazy vinyl in this house overall.

 

Cat damage from move-in day.

Look! More vinyl!

"this is ridiculous" --Joe on removing the moulding

Oh vinyl, you are much better as a record.

planning.

Completed floor.

Reconfigured office

Bedroom, sans carpet

Half-done, the bed migrated as we worked

Finishing touches

Bedroom: same same but different

Before: frozen, chopped fat

As I mentioned above, we also took the opportunity, being home all day, to render fat. No, not like this.

When placing our order with the butcher back in February I asked for the fat from our pig. It has been in ziplock bags in the freezer, I took out about half and consulted with Rosanna to see how to go about it. I have to admit, at this point I was most excited about seasoning our cast iron pan, which has sat lonely in the cupboard for over a year.

After.

Without going into too much detail, I can say that it took longer than expected. I cut the fat up into too large of chunks, which lengthened and complicated the process and made all of the neighbors likely hate us. We used the homebrew burner and propane outside, which allowed a smell reminiscent of 1000 pounds of bacon being cooked to waft over our fence for 12 hours.

Lard.

I also used my new food mill to make the first tomato sauce of the summer. Although, since it's reached almost 90 degrees here every day for the past week, I do slightly regret opening the bottle of red wine to season the sauce with. It will likely be vinegar before I'm in the mood to drink it again.

What I really want, is one of these:

A mix of hops from the garden