Oh, my stars and garters!

Let's make sausage!

As part of my quest to constantly try new things in order to avoid acknowledging the terrifying vacancy that I imagine is at the center of every human life because there seems to be no real reason for any one of us to be here on this planet--just kidding, hahaha! ha.--I bought a meat grinder attachment for our mixer last week.

Eric and I then spent most of the weekend making sausage. First a basic breakfast sausage, which we left loose and found tasty, and then a much more exciting hot Italian sausage, which we made into links and found incredibly delicious. 

I hear the old saw about laws and sausage all the time in my line of work, and I can now tell you that watching legislation get made is the much more distasteful spectacle. I mean, sausage making is pretty gross, but in a very cool way, plus at the end you have sausage, which is great. When you make it yourself you have complete control over the ingredients and the cleanliness of your tools and work area, which is reassuring. The post-grinding cleanup freaks me out a little, though; how do you even begin to get things clean when almost every single thing in your kitchen is coated in raw pork? 

Pictures? Wanna see pictures?

Held up

The storm dropped about 3.5 inches at our house in a couple of hours. That wasn't nearly as much as other places around town--my sister's house got almost eight inches and water was lapping at her foundation--but enough that I felt the new beds were put to the test. 

I'd had visions of tons--literally* tons!--of granite washing out into the street and finding all the plants uprooted and crammed up against the back gate, but this was the only real damage.

It's a strip about two feet wide where water running down the driveway finds a spot to make a sharp turn down to the yard below. We'll put down some larger rocks and coarser, heavier gravel to give that water something to run through, then maybe top it off with some good old decomposed granite to make it look finished. No big deal.

Considering how much damage was done to other parts of the area, this is very small potatoes indeed.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and nice words, on the blog and off. You guys are nice.

*I mean "literally" in the literal sense of the word.