| | I see it has been a while since we posted anything here. I don't have a particular focus for this post this morning, so I guess it is just a catching-up blog. Last week, from Wednesday pm through Saturday am, Sheryl and I attended the Wild Food Summit at White Earth. Basically, its a camping-out experience in your tent, sharing a common dining shelter, sampling the common food cooked over the common fire by Francios and, this year, Randy.
We learned a few things about edible mushrooms, but we haven't spotted any chicken of the woods, shaggy mane, puff balls, or morels on our walks around Fargo, and the other mushrooms would take more investigation, so we haven't gone so far as to harvest and prepare any independently. We also reviewed the uses of cattails and burdock, learned about the medicinal uses of yarrow and plantain, and relearned the art of making char cloth. Upon returning home, we tinkered around with our backyard fire pit, having observed some interesting setups around the fire pit at the summit. We have also started making no-knead bread as a break from the whole wheat bread Sheryl makes religiously every week. We figured if Francios could bake it in a cast iron pot over a fire, we could do it in our oven.
This week, the weather has finally begun to feel like summer, and the days are at their longest of the year, so we have spent quite a lot of time outdoors during the long evenings, painting adirondack chiars, weeding the garden, putting in a few pavers next to the shed, and just enjoying the out of doors.
I had the English department's annual report to write this week, the one administrative task that just had to be done this week, and I was able to get that done Wednesday afternoon. Now I'm reading chapters for a book on memory that Bruce Maylath and I promised to get to the publishers by the end of summer. I hope to make pretty good progress on that project before I take two weeks off from all forms of school work.
Blaise, Nicole, Alex, and Conor are supposed to arrive here from Yakima on Sunday evening. We plan to spend the next week and a half with them here and in Kansas City and in Nebraska and finally in Colorado. We plan to meet Ember and Drew in Kansas City (for a Royal's game) and travel on in caravan fashion to Belleville to visit Sheryl's mom and Leo, and then on to Grand Island, Nebraska, where we expect to meet Phil (and maybe Abbi if she can arrange to get off) for a mini reunion with Sheryl's family. Then it will be off to the western slope of the Colorado Rockies to visit my brother Dean and his wife Margie. Blaise and his family will depart for Yakima from there and we will return to Kansas to stay with Jim and Loretta and go on to my 40th high school reunion in Holdrege on July 11. It will be a busy couple of weeks, but seeing family and taking a break from school will be good.
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| | Posted 6/26/2009 6:54 AM - 14 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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