Some of our plants are finally fruitful, but I’m not sure I’d call them entirely successful. The first zucchini plant got dug up so many times it finally died; the second might be following suit. I’m not sure what’s digging them up, but suspects include the local bunnies, squirrels, and cats.

The medusa peppers were stunted by the overly-wet start to the summer I believe. Still, they have put out a fair number of yellow fruits. Unfortunately the most successful of them got hit by the weed-whacker. (Generally our lawn guy is extremely conscientious, so I can’t bring myself to be annoyed—just disappointed.) The others seem to be slowly ripening, so hopefully they’ll produce a few edible chilies. (Medusas are primarily ornamental, but they’re also edible.)

One plant was supposed to be a medusa pepper, but instead seems to be something similar but not quite the same. It’s producing smaller peppers with a rounded end that go straight from dark green to red, rather than spending most of their time in yellow. Unfortunately, that too got stunted. As you can see from the photo, it got VERY stunted:
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I have a second review up for today: John D. Husband’s incredible Maggie Again.

I also have some new pictures. (Speaking of which, I finally ordered a good-sized memory card for my camera! I won’t run out of room after 17 pictures any more!) Some you won’t see yet; they’re from the cookbooks I’ll be reviewing soon. One is of a cheesecake that came out surprisingly poorly. There are also some new cat photos up at the ErrantCats collection. Finally, here are a few pics from the garden today:

The medusa pepper plants are a bit stunted, but some of them are putting out chilies, although they aren’t ripe yet. The tomato plants got somewhat blighted, but we’re definitely getting clusters of green tomatoes. The particular ones pictured should end up being yellow pear tomatoes.

I went out to check on our tomatoes after neglecting them for a few days, and found we have baby tomatoes! Wheeee! It seems my first tomato experiment is coming along! In that vein, here’s today’s book review: How to store your garden produce, by Piers Warren. Great resource!

Totally unrelated, but read this post over at Stainless Steel Droppings about an art scholarship set up in memory of a young artist who passed away, and see if you can donate a dollar or two. If not, at least go and look at the amazing artwork and read about this young lady, and/or pass along the link on your own blog.

Since I don’t have any review cookbooks in hand at the moment (not that I need any more books to occupy my time!), we’re cooking from older cookbooks that we never got around to reviewing, and planning to review those. The lentil & hot dog soup from The Bean Bible was absolutely amazing, particularly made with a package of uncured, all-natural hot dogs that have SO much flavor! Next will be a recipe of lentil cakes with a date & tamarind chutney, and, from a different cookbook, a crustless cheesecake (yum!).

I think we’ve come up with a decision for approaching that possible moving quandary. We’re going to work on the house to get it ship-shape for putting on the market, which gives us time to make sure this is what we want, and keeps us from having to rush. (After all, we don’t lose anything by doing this—if we decide not to move it just means we’ll have our house all cleaned up and properly landscaped.) When it’s ready, we’ll call up a realtor and get it listed. When/if it sells, since there are so many houses for sale around here, THEN we’ll go buy a house. I’d love to buy a house sooner rather than later, while there are so many foreclosures that can be snapped up for almost half their usual sale value, but everything’s a whole lot easier if you sell your own house first—particularly in this market, when it could take a week or two years.

In that spirit, I finally planted butterfly bushes out front. I wish I’d thought to take a “before” picture of the jungle of brambles in that area by the street. The last owner planted some fairly high-maintenance stuff down there, and there were wild raspberries going crazy in the middle. We ripped everything out, and this morning I laid out the bags of soil and worked them in a bit, planted the purple butterfly bushes (three), put down heavy-duty twenty-year anti-weed landscaping fabric (not plastic—I hate trying to clean that stuff out of a garden), and put pine bark mulch on top of that.

I’ve also gotten a few reviews done since the last post: of Annette Blair’s Gone with the Witch (fun, but it has some issues) and Katherine Shay’s Taking the Heat (which I didn’t like all that much). Next up, a non-fiction book, although it won’t be ready for review today.

And finally, I’ve also put up two new designs at cafepress: shirts, buttons, stickers, mugs, etc for tabletop roleplayers. The first is ‘Drow are people too’:

The second (and my personal favorite of the two) is, ‘I always fail my save vs. pun’:

First, two new book reviews. I had a chance to read the advance uncorrected proof of Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose. Books like this are why being a reviewer makes me so happy. I might not make much money, and I might be fighting a losing battle against my review stack, but who could resist the delight of getting to read their favorite authors’ books whole months early?! I also read Tess Mallory’s Highland Rogue. I still don’t understand why the Scottish Highlands time-travel romance sub-sub-genre is so surprisingly populous, but at least I can now appreciate it properly—this was better than the other two I read! Tomorrow’s review should be of a slow cooker cookbook.

Second, a new cafepress design. This one is still in our gardeners & outdoorsy folks section, and is aimed at women. Phloxy lady is a variation on ‘foxy lady’ for phlox lovers. Although it might be a little tough to tell in the image below, the letters themselves are filled with real phlox flowers:

It took a little work to get it just right; I had to make sure the image would show up well on both light and dark backgrounds, and that the flowers would be recognizable in the image.

Next, we put up a small bookcase in our dining room. Normally this would not be worth sharing photos of, but I think you’ll understand why I’m doing so when you see them:

Yes, that’s Cahlash, trying his best to be a bookend. Or maybe he figures I’ll not notice he’s there, and put something yummy on the shelf. Yeah, right!

I’m a little behind in catching up with comments and blogs, but hopefully soon!

First, in non-furniture news, I have a non-review of Patricia Rice’s Mystic Rider. I almost never do this, but I just couldn’t get myself to read the whole thing. While that means I can’t review the book as such, I think it’s reasonable to explain why I didn’t read the book.

Wheee! As I mentioned earlier, IKEA did make things right by us. They replaced everything that was damaged without argument. The only minor annoyance was the couple of weeks it took to get everything taken care of. Here’s an idea of how things were damaged; this is a corner of a bookcase shelf:
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Oy… I meant to post a bunch of stuff today. I put up some new designs in the Gamers’ Heaven cafepress shop, finished a book to review, wanted to chat a bit about a 48-hour reading marathon coming up in June (and some friends who will most likely be guest-posting here as a part of that)… lots of stuff like that. I also wanted to do more agave nectar-baking today, although I think that’ll have to wait until Sunday.

Anyway, at least I did get some gardening done, and I’ll post a slideshow of the latest pics at the bottom. I’m also going to see Ironman tonight—usually I try to avoid opening weekend, but it’s one of those ‘meet up with a bunch of friends’ things. It’s also at 11 pm, which is rather late for me. And tomorrow there’s a friend’s retirement picnic…

But I’m babbling, so I’ll just post those pics and go. Have a great weekend!

Sorry about the lack of reviews. It turned out there’s a gluten-free baking mix recipe in the gluten-free eating book, and I wanted to test it out before reviewing that book. I just made a final recipe from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey, so I hope to review that soon. I also plan to make a final recipe from the superfoods cookbook tonight.

Wednesday was the upper endoscopy. Apart from a killer headache that I couldn’t take anything for (no food, water, etc. for 6 hours before the procedure) it was quick and easy (not to mention I was blessedly unconscious for it). No ulcers; it looks like I just had acid reflux masquerading as gallbladder trouble, etc. A month on an acid-reducing proton-pump inhibitor med plus an improved diet has definitely helped, so, looks like I’ll be taking an acid-reducer for a while. Meanwhile they’re doing biopsies just to make sure there’s no h pylori infection or celiac disease (since the latter runs in the family and the former is often a cause of acid & ulcer problems).

Then I spent yesterday gardening, since my tomato seedlings arrived Tuesday. I planted nine seedlings (three each of three varieties), and six medusa pepper plants that I bought at the last minute (a decorative but edible sweet pepper with a bush growth habit). Some nifty new furniture that we got also arrived yesterday.

Here are a few gardening photos:

The red thing around the tomato seedling reflects red light at the plant, which is supposed to lead to a larger harvest. It acts as a mulch so you don’t have to weed around the tender roots. And if you pour water into the tray, it directs it down toward the roots of the plant, so they grow strong and deep instead of shallow.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve gone crazy with the camera.

I was hoping to review The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Gluten-Free Eating today, but it looks like my tomato plants are about to be delivered and I’m not ready for them. Eeeek! So I think I’m going to get into gardening gear and go do some digging. I’d like to say it’ll be up tomorrow, and it very well might be, but tomorrow afternoon is my endoscopy so I’m not sure what all I’ll get done. I apologize in advance for the slow pace of reviews (and everything else) this week. Hopefully I’ll make up for it on Thursday and Friday!

Edited to add: *groan* Apparently the former owner of the house buried landscaping fabric all around the roses I’m trying to dig up. It’s under a couple inches of soil, and it’s thick enough to be a real impediment to digging things up without being thick enough to stop some tough things from growing up through it. I spent a while loosening up soil around the plants, but I’m going to have to appeal to that husband of mine to do some digging.

Or to be more precise, rose bushes.

Like a high-maintenance acquaintance, they’re prickly and painful and demand tons of attention. If I leave them alone, they’re liable to simultaneously grow out of control and die off, leaving a grotesque monster of a bush, skeletal and yet so thick I’m liable to lose the skin off of my hands while trimming it back.

I’m a hands-off kind of gardener. In part this is due to the weather where we live now. I could garden happily in New Hampshire, but Maryland summers are much hotter and more humid. Then there’s the tendonitis—I never know when I won’t be able to garden for a week or two due to my hands and arms hurting. Leave the roses alone for a few weeks and before I know it they’re snatching greedily at my husband’s coat and tie when he comes home from work. And even if by some miracle they do grow beautifully, it isn’t as though they’ll look like those elegant roses you get in the florist’s shop. Instead they have smaller flowers that look much like dozens of other, easier-to-take-care-of flowers on the market, except that you’ll have to go to greater lengths if you want these flowers to last through pests and blights.

The obvious question right now, I’m sure, is why on earth, if I hate the things so much, I have so many around the house. The previous owner, you see, was the kind of person who would spend time gardening every single day, and she just loved a high-maintenance garden (she also loved pink popcorn-painted walls on her bedroom, though, so she and I obviously are already at odds when it comes to taste). There’s a loooooong line of rose bushes out in front of the house, right along the front walkway. There’s another line of them out back.

Finally, this year I’m reclaiming some of that space. The line of bushes out back is getting ripped out and replaced with tomato plants. The ones out front will probably get replaced with something lower-maintenance next year, and in the meantime I’m just going to ruthlessly cut them back any time they put up a peep of resistance.

I’m no careful, detail-oriented gardener capable of dealing with high-maintenance rose bushes. I’m more like a gardener’s paratrooper: drop in, slash and burn, and get out again in time for dinner. Preferably one that includes tomatoes.

Today’s review is of Leslie Bilderback’s Complete Idiot’s Guide to Good Food from the Good Book cookbook.