Category Archives: General

Miércoles

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I have mentioned before that Leah and I go to Los Portales Mexican restaurant almost every Wednesday for a lunch of huevos rancheros, and then on to the grocery store. I have also mentioned that we have done it so often that almost every waiter/waitress brings us a sweet tea for Leah, an unsweetened tea for me, chips, regular salsa, burrito sauce and ranchera sauce, without our having to ask. Then they ask, “The regular?” And then they bring us huevos rancheros, which mean ranch eggs, which means fried eggs. We get them with the yolk runny and the edges crisp.

Here’s Leah enjoying lunch.

The sauces are, from left to right, burrito sauce, regular sauce, empty ranchera sauce bowl, and full ranchera sauce bowl. One taste of the ranchera sauce and we knew we would need a second bowl.

Here’s a closer look at the ranchera sauce.

Seeds! Chilis!

The burrito sauce has onions.

And here I am, also enjoying.

I managed to eat my entire meal without getting any stains on my shirt.

Way, way back, we started with just regular sauce and ranchera sauce, but the ranchera sauce was so often so hot that one waiter suggested burrito sauce. That turned out to be a good suggestion. The three sauces are have distinct and quite different tastes. The regular sauce is close to what you might buy in the grocery store. Burrito sauce is a deeper and more flavorful sauce. Ranchera sauce can be very hot, but it almost always seems to have a nice, sharp flavor, not just heat.

We usually ask the waitress if the ranchera sauce is hot. Today the waitress said she hadn’t tried it because she gets heartburn. So we dipped one little edge of a chip into it and tasted. Oh, boy, was it good. It had a little heat, the kind that shows up pretty quickly on the tongue, as opposed to the kind that seems to burn the back of the mouth as well and get more intense as it lingers. The taste was more piquant than picante. Sometimes we just dribble a little ranchera sauce over the eggs, but on Wednesday we spooned it over them.

Then I added burrito sauce over the eggs. And the burrito sauce was also good. This time it had a roasted, smokey flavor.

We take pleasure in simple things.

Visit to the garden center

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Tuesday I had to get a few things from our local Lowes. I went through the garden center. These caught my eye, and whose eye would they not catch?

They’re mums, right? These are very commonly planted around businesses that maintain landscaping. At the office building where I used to work, summer flowers were dug out in late summer or early fall and replaced with cold-weather plants, usually including a lot of mums. Although some mums (apparently) can survive as perennials, around here they are treated as annuals. They’re pretty, but I have problems with planting something that I know won’t live beyond a few months.

Red surprise

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When I walked the dogs on Thursday, this caught my eye.

And no wonder. As you can see, the leaves and twigs at the side of the road were almost monochromatic. This red fungus was a surprise.

I’m almost completely ignorant about fungus, so I don’t know what this is. The closest I could find online is Sarcoscypha dudleyi, which, this Web site tells us, is microscopically different from Sarcoscypha coccinea, a similar cup fungus found on the West Coast.

Maybe someone who knows their fungi can say for sure.

Pet sitter tales

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I’ve learned a couple of things in the last few days.

The first is that a whole lot of people who want to be pet sitters read the local newspaper. We really need a pet sitter, so we bought an ad for a month. So far more than a dozen people have responded. We have met four so far.

There’s the divorced mother of one who lives with her own mother down at the other end of Texas Valley. Then there’s the young woman who just moved to town. She works part time at a chain bookstore and plans to give her two weeks’ notice on another part-time job. She has a degree in meteorology and geography. Another young woman does bookwork for her brother’s business.

We just talked to a woman who also lives in Texas Valley who lost her husband in a car wreck last year. She went to a pet store to buy some cat collars and ended up adopting a black lab mix. She said she thought when she heard the dog’s story that she was going to rescue the dog, but the dog ended up rescuing her.

Another woman had rescued about 40 cats some years ago. She got them spayed and neutered and then took care of them until, one by one, they all died of old age.

I found out when I worked as a reporter many years ago that everyone has a story, and they all want to tell it. All you have to do is listen. They aren’t necessarily big stories, but they’re big enough to them. And, sometimes, it really is a big story. I used to live down the street from an older couple. I usually spoke to them when I walked my dog past their house. Eventually I learned that the man had been on a Southern Airways flight from Huntsville, Al, to Atlanta in 1977 when it ran into a severe thunderstorm over Rome, lost both engines, and then crash landed on a rural highway in the little town of New Hope. He told about walking out of the plane, shielding his face from the flames with his hands, while other passengers sat in their seats, struggling to get out without realizing that their seatbelts were still fastened. Seventy-two people died, including seven on the ground.

So, if you listen long enough, you hear the story, big or small.

But that’s not the other thing I learned. That other thing I learned is that I would really like to say yes to all the people who want to pet sit for us, or at least most of them. Unfortunately, we just need one. We’re leaning toward the divorced mother of one, but we still have five possibilities to interview.

I wish we could get someone to find a pet sitter for us so we wouldn’t have to say no to anyone. But then we wouldn’t get to hear their stories.

Daffodils

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What are they looking at anyway?

Every time I go past them I have to glance over in the same direction to see if there’s anything worth looking at. Oh, that’s south. They’re looking at the sun.

I planted the bulbs just a few weeks ago. I was surprised when they started coming up, and here they are, all flowery and everything. I hope the freezes we have coming up in the next few days don’t damage them.