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eight-year-procrastinated gutter
Tuesday, September 15 2020
I saw a headline in either the New York Times or the Washington Post saying that the smoke from all the forest fires on the west coast had finally made it to the east. This reminded me that the skies had been weird last time I'd been outside. I went out again and looked up. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, but the sky wasn't blue. It was a greyish-white except in the north, where it was still somewhat blue. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that the world is completely falling apart after nearly four years of Donald Trump's presidency, even if he's not directly responsible for all that is going wrong. (Though if the increasingly-Trumpified Republican party hadn't policiticized global warming, perhaps the skies would still be blue.)
At some point today, I decided to do some long-procrastinated yard work down by the greenhouse. There was a vinyl gutter I'd intended on installing on the greenhouse roof soon after creating its second floor back in 2012. But when I'd gone to install it, I'd been driven back by hornets. That gutter had lain on in the grass next to the septic field mound ever since, slowly being surrounded by encroaching forest. Today I pulled the gutter loose (disturbing at least one ant nest) and then attached it to the greenhouse, using a stepladder to get high enough. The original plan had been to collect water from that roof, though that's less necessary these days given that there is always water available in the greenhouse's cistern of a subbasement. Still, I may yet find a use for that water, which is probably more potable than anything from the greenhouse subbasement (especially given the proximity of the septic field).
This evening Gretchen decided to make pizza, though all she did initially was make a bunch of dough, which she warmed on the woodstove. (It was cold enough for me to have started a fire.) Her vision was to cut the dough into three pieces and then have us all make our own individual pizzas. With that in mind, she proceeded to make a tempeh crumble and have me fry up some mushrooms and red onions. I also cut up some poblano peppers. I'd recently gathered a ghost pepper from my ghost-pepper plant, whose fruit had proved disappointingly mild. So I sliced it into pieces and tried the tip piece. It was about as hot as a green pepper. So then I tried the next slice in and, oh Jesus, that fucker was hot! I ran some water and rinsed out my mouth, but the heat was hard to wash away. It lingered for several minutes (to the amusement of Gretchen and Powerful) and caused me not to make my personal pizza particularly spicy.
Our pizzas took longer to cook than expected. Mine was the first in the oven and took a full sixteen. Since only two pizzas fit in the oven at once, Powerful's pizza (the last one) was delayed by that amount. And even after sixteen minutes, it wasn't quite done (probably due to how thick he'd made the crust). By the time his pizza came out of the oven, mine was cold and I had to put it in the toaster oven.
But damn, that pizza was good. Not only was it great in terms of quality, we each had a lot of it. I managed to eat less than half of mine, putting the rest under an overturned bowl on the kitchen island. We'd each be eating a lot of pizza tomorrow, and there was still leftover chili. (I had one burrito with those slimy bolete mushrooms and decided to throw the rest of the boletes away.)
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