Early this morning: Lenten feet with ancient (as in 1995, maybe) REI thermal base-layer leggings, which I had slept in. It's coolish today, though not unpleasant, and raining.
Yesterday I began a ritual I revived last year, after a decade's hiatus: The Making of the Dandelion Wine. Here again is the recipe I use, though I generally adjust it, because I don't have that many dandelions all at one time. Being a non-lawn-spray kind of household, we always have a lot of dandelions, but we just don't have a lot of land for them to grow on, which limits us a little.
Anyway, here's a shot from yesterday's initial steeping process:
I'm not sure I followed the recipe's steps in the precise order indicated, but all of this was before I added yeast -- I strained it before I did that. Here I was just making a kind of tea of dandelion flowers (minus the green sepals, which make things bitter), oranges (I squeezed them into the mix before I removed them), and raisins, which I did not use last year, but which the recipe does call for. Later I added sugar and yeast. I'm contemplating adding an additional dose of warm simple syrup today, though -- the yeast is active, but not that active.
This is only a very small batch, so I can afford to be a little experimental. The ten-year-old bottles we opened last year -- aged roughly five times past the recommended limit, because I had put them in the cabinet and forgotten about them -- were really eminently drinkable, and I'm feeling that we can't go too far wrong, as long as we observe the basic process.
Today's progress:
Again, not much yeast activity yet. It may be a little cool. I did just make some dandelion/orange-infused simple syrup, and once it's cooled to a touchable temperature, I think I'm going to add it as a jumpstarter.
Wearing today:
My wool Camellia dress, thrifted blue Loft cotton sweater, purple leggings, Xero Colorado sandals.
I've gotten a lot of sun, sitting out in the yard the last couple of days:
Blue helps even out my over-flushed skin tone, and it just makes me feel good. That's the thing that's always worth paying attention to: not what somebody else likes or thinks is cute (especially if they just think it's cute on the hanger and assume it would therefore be cute on anybody who wore it), not what's on trend, not what you love on somebody else, but what actually feels good on you. Of course, it probably feels good because it looks good, and you feel that you look good in it. Generally, I think, your gut feeling about these things is accurate.
In other news, I've thinned all my garden seedlings that have attained a height of two inches, and am praying that they live another month so that I can start hardening them off to plant outside. I need to plant some more arugula/rocket seed, because I think the freeze last weekend zapped those seedlings, despite all assurances that they're SUPPOSED to be a cold-weather crop. My beet greens and butter lettuce are hanging in there, however, and I need to remember that they are and use them.
Still fiddling at the Lenten sonnets and having spasms of terror about the novel, which I want to get out and rewrite. Fortunately I will still have opportunities to fix stuff, though at some point I'm just going to have to let it go and resolve not to read the reviews. I'm also doing a revision of my poetry manuscript, moving sections around and looking hard at each poem as I paste it into a new document. In fact, that's what I'm just about to get back to doing.