Sunday, Bloody Sunday

I woke up to the 5:30 a.m. alarm on Sunday. Why? Because I had a 9:00 a.m. make-up massage appointment. Margaret beat the hell out of me, but I felt better when I left.

From there, I went to Home Depot. I got four 2x4’s, one pressure treated 2x4 and a 2x4 sheet of half inch plywood. I got me a cat house to build! I went home and unloaded the wood.

Inside, I stripped the bed and started the first of two loads of weekend wash.

I had to go to the Post Office, which doesn’t open until noon on Sunday. So, I drove down Beech Daly to Joy Road and that little grocery store I don’t like. I had completely forgotten on Saturday that I wanted to build a tomato salad. I planned on heirloom tomatoes from Westborn, but settled for vine ripened tomatoes, Italian (Roma) tomatoes and some weird, tiny pear shaped ones.

When I got back, I left the truck outside, in case I had the time to build the cat house I had not yet designed in my head.

Inside, I treated Caley and then made the salad. I cut up the tomatoes into bite-size chunks. I drizzled them with extra virgin olive oil (you need more than you think) and added coarse sea salt (a lot). I went out and picked some herbs. I went with basil and oregano (tomatoes’ best friends). I simply stripped the oregano off the stems. For the basil, I ripped the small leaves in half and then rolled the big leaves into a tube. I thin-sliced the tube in a chiffonade. I carefully mixed everything together and let it sit for 30 minutes at room temperature.

Note: You want the ripest tomatoes you can get!

While I waited, I called B___ back (he had called while I was out this morning getting my massage).

Then I ate a big helping of tomato salad for my late lunch. It was delicious! But, I couldn’t help thinking how much better it might have been with the heirloom tomatoes.

My daughter Melissa called and we talked for a while, catching up.

I went out to the garage at 4:00 p.m. I got things set up to do some woodworking. I finally picked up all the scrap wood left from the rocking horse and burned it up in my little fire pit. I didn’t have any charcoal lighter fluid, so I used a little diesel fuel left from the Bobcat incident. I would have sat and enjoyed the bonfire, but it was sprinkling, on and off. So, I took a nap instead.

It finally started raining for real about 7:00 p.m. here. So, I ran outside and pulled the truck in. The weather radio was screaming about possible hail.

I took the two un-breaded chicken breasts (you thought I forgot them didn’t you?) and cut them into chucks. I threw them into a can of drained chow main vegetables and slowly warmed them up while I made two servings of brown rice. I put the chop suey over the rice, added soy sauce and had a decent dinner.

I watched a new Poirot episode on PBS and then went to bed.