I've had salmon, chinese food, left my sewing machine on the dining room table for 3 days in a row, and I'm tired of TV as a companion. I'm ready for Neil to come home!

Seriously, I've never really lived alone, and I'm just not cut out for it. I think if something horrible happened to Neil I'd have to join a commune, or get a housemate... I grew up in house with at least 7 people in it and shared a room for most of my childhood. I moved on to college where I always had roommates and/or lived in suite style dorms (I take that back, 2 semesters at BU my room mate was gone for days at a time, I was miserable there though, so my theory holds) Then I moved to apartments and houses with house mates, then I got married. I guess I'm just a social creature by nature.

I had a great 3rd/4th of July (it was actually a friend's birthday party, it was good) My parents' came to visit on the 5th (and we hiked to roundtop AND prospect rock, go Mom go!) So it's not even like I've been very alone.

I manage fine - I am, in fact, surprisingly productive. This weekend I:
Baked: an angel food cake, a loaf of bread, chocolate chip cookies
Gardened: finished the sunny tall perennial bed, worked on the shade bed, bought and put in big watermelon "seedlings" Weed-whacked the front lawn (including figuring out why the machine wouldn't run - turns out it needed gas, I like my reel mower better)
Sewed a skirt and cut fabric for a second, worked on some sweater knitting (the juno I'm reverse engineering) and prepped for my incoming big project.
And canned! I made pickled scapes, both standard and sweet and sour.
But I have no one to show all my successes to, except the dogs, and they just don't appreciate a new skirt. Moxy did, but only because she could sleep on the fabric on the table.

Several people asked (over the phone) what a scape is exactly. It's this:

The flowering stem and head of any stiff-necked garlic. It grows in that crazy loop-d-loop.
Those are my garlic plants in my garden - but I got some extra scapes from my CSA on thursday:

the bag on the left is full of them. I was the second to last person there, and the farmer suggested I "take them all, please" when I mentioned I was going to pickle them he asked me to bring him a jar in return.

So I will! I did have a new kind of problem with this batch:

That's never happened to me before. It was one of my older jars, so I'm guessing either the glass was weak, or possibly I screwed the band on more then "finger tight" and the pressure couldn't escape through the lid like it's supposed to. I remember hearing a pop while the batch was processing, so that must be when it happened. The rest of the jars all sealed just fine.

For two years I've been pronouncing these scapies, but the CSA farmer corrected me - scapes like the second syllable of escape.