A surprise in the henhouse

Hello, everyone.

As I think y'all might remember, we have a few pet birds. Just now, "a few" means 3 hens and a pair of guinea fowl. (Mr. Guinea and Mrs. Guinea, who live alongside Ms. Silver, Ms. Red, and Princess Stripey.) Today, as we have been for the last several days, I let them out about 6 pm for a walk.

The walks in the evening let them get away from each other for a little while, let them eat bugs and seeds in the yard, and let them not notice me getting into the henhouse for the eggs.

When I opened the "people door" and went inside the henhouse, I found the usual two green eggs

Ameraucana egg. (Tastes just like the brown and white ones!) For size, the tiles are 4 inches square.

and an unexpected three guinea eggs. Mrs. Guinea must have been hiding them under the straw, because yesterday my sweetie looked for eggs and didn't see any of the small, brown, speckled looking guinea eggs.

You have to be cautious about collecting the guinea eggs. The hen is very attached to them. And her mate is very attached to her happiness! A few days ago, after collecting eggs, I was sitting outside watching the birds at their activities when the guineas went back over to the pen. Mrs. Guinea went first, calling "Good luck! Good luck!" as she went. Mr. Guinea trailed after and made little screeches. She went inside the house and looked for her egg (now collected) and came out hollering her head off. "BUCK WHEAT!" (There are multiple ways to write down the call. She had definitely gone from concerned to screaming upset.) Mr. Guinea, hearing his lady yelling that "it's GONE!!!!" commenced to giving out his alarm call, too. It was all very traumatic for them.

But if I allowed her to collect a clutch and set, her mate would make the three hens' lives a living hell. He already chases them around when he thinks there isn't enough food for his lady, or that she's wanting peace and quiet to lay an egg. Imagine what he'd be like if she was setting all the time on a clutch of eggs? It would be simply impossible. And so I collect her egg every time she lays one, just like I do with the hens.

I have boiled the guinea eggs, and after you get the shell to open up and peel it off, they make perfect deviled eggs. If weighed to get the amounts to match up, they are fine for baking with, too. And they make good fried eggs, though there is about half the amount of goodness in a guinea egg compared to a large chicken egg.

Another thing you can do with eggs--after you blow out the goodness inside the shell!

Just a few thoughts

Hello, everyone.

I will have an update on the shell beading project soon--have scanned the interwebs and discovered ways to do fringe. Also, expanding on the fringe for the Autumn Leaf amulet pouch on a web site (slips my memory just now) I have sketched a design for the fringe at the bottom of this square pendant with a scallop shell. Bonus points: I can use some of the blue enameled crosses that I have lying around in my (large) bead stash.

And one more thing--
When my sweetie and I first felt the pull of the Camino de Santiago, we didn't know what it would be like. What it would involve. And the depth of the roots that is would grow into our souls. Every day I think about the Camino--what it was like. What I wish I'd done a bit differently. What I'd do now if we were doing it again. (Not quite the same as the previous.) What routes I'd like to walk if we are so blessed as to go again.

Not only do I miss the good foods we discovered in Spain--ham cones! Pulpo a gallega with pan! Gambon al ajillo with pan! etc. etc.--but I have begun to make my own baguette bread so we can eat some of the wonderful foods we ate one the Camino, and during the days at the end when we were exploring and waiting for the date of our return reservation home. (No, I'm not recreating the airport food from the 1 day flight series that turned into a 3 day flight series.)

And periodically, like a growing crystal that is discovered by a gem hunter, I find a new lesson that the Camino has taught me.

It's not only the urge to have shells everywhere. The urge to create jewelry of shells and Crosses of Santiago. The every-morning feeling that it's time to walk, even before the alarm goes off.

The Camino de Santiago takes root in a pilgrim. I'm still a pilgrim. I don't think I'll ever stop being a pilgrim. And that itself is probably one of the lessons of the Camino.

Just after the stairs at the entry to the city of Santiago, studying the map of the city. I never felt sorry for the bicycle pilgrims until tha tlast day, when I witnessed them toting their bikes down the stairs alongside us. But at the bottom, they got to ride again. We walked the couple-three miles from those stairs to the center of the city on our feet.

This was another of the approximately 2200 pictures we took on our pilgrimage trip. :-) Enjoy.

Update on the Camino themed bead project

Hello, everyone.

Today I think I'll update y'all on the progress on the bead project.

I think I had posted a couple of early-stage pictures of it--which will reappear in this post.

I wanted to design a scallop shell bead project, a woven picture really, using peyote stitch. And I had the free beading-design graph paper from Fire Mountain to use. So I sat down and used my pencil to make a sketch. Actually, three sketches, but two have not been started. The one I tackled first is the scallop shell.

The scallop shell is possibly the oldest symbol of the Camino de Santiago (Jakobsweg in German) (Way of St. James in English, at least before everybody started just using the Spanish name.)
The medieval pilgrims would travel to Santiago, and sometimes also another week to the coast, and they'd pick up a scallop shell as a souvenir. They'd proudly display their shell on the return trip.

These days, pilgrims get their shell when they start out, and then after they arrive, they use more modern, more convenient transportation to go home again. A few walk the reverse trip--we saw them. I had a lot of trouble understanding why they'd do it. But they'd pass us, going the other way, with their backpacks, probably not even one percent of the number going west to Santiago.

I don't remember if they still display a shell as they go the reverse direction.

At any rate, I was inspired to make a peyote-stitch shell.

The early stages:
This was just the, um, tag at the top of the shell.

At this point I'd begun the shaping of the body of the shell. (In the background, you can see the arrow and the Cross of Santiago on the graph paper sheet as well.)

Now the shape and the shadows of the channels begin to show up.

At this point, the shell is done. You can see that the angles of the channels don't quite match the angle of the beads as they lie. But it is still a scallop shell.

I plan to fold over the top part to make a tube, and then make it the centerpiece of a necklace.

Maybe I'll expand the concept next time, after making a Cross of Santiago, and place the Cross of Santiago on the center of the shell. That was a common way to place the two items in souvenirs that we saw in Santiago. It's the way my pin is made, too.

I still don't know what I'll do with the arrow after I figure out how to make that. Possibly I could hang it from the base of the shell? Or maybe just have it be a separate piece altogether.

For the curious, the beads used in this are Delicas, from Japan. They have very regular sizes and a really nice, big center hole that the needle can go through again and again.

Chores, chores

Hello, everyone.

We're on our second day in a row without rain--still partly cloudy, but no raindrops--and my sweetie has been on a tear in the yard. He mowed yesterday, and cut the grass shorter around the pecan trees, too. That way if a nut falls, we'll be more able to see it.

The nuts have been falling already, too. I'm a little surprised. Most of the nuts on the tree still look like this:

But we opened the first one and it was very sweet.

It's been a cookin' mornin' today

Hello, everyone.

I have been busy in the kitchen today--first, because I needed to take four dozen cookies to the funeral home for a parishioner's wake, and second, because I was almost completely out of yogurt. I took pictures of the cookie making, so that's what I'll write about today. (Maybe another day I'll do yogurt. Or not--there are a lot of sets of directions for good yogurt online.)

Last night I was muddling around and thinking about what kind of cookies to make, and found this recipe:

An oatmeal cookie recipe that promises to turn out 4 dozen. Well, either 3 or 5 dozen depending on the scoop size. Good enough! This is my King Arthur Flour baking book.

Then I rounded up the oatmeal canister, the raisin box, a can of honey-nuts, and semi-sweet chocolate chips from the cupboard. This morning I added to the collection 2 sticks of butter, the eggs (guinea eggs this time), flour and so on and so forth.

The dough bowl looked like this:

I took this photo after I'd already filled one cookie sheet full of cookies. I used an iced-tea spoon to drop the dough onto the cookie sheets.

The spacing used, and the results from that spacing:

I wish I'd been more careful with dough placement. These particular cookies were fine, but I got a number of the later ones too close together. They came out of the oven fused on one or more edges. I had to cut them apart with the spatula to get them onto the rack for cooling. Oatmeal drop cookies need to be separated by at least 2 inches. Even when they're small cookies.


And the packaged cookies, ready to go:

You can see that I recycle my containers!

Update on wall decorations

Hello, everyone.

I did some more looking around after my last post, and found this: a poster of the old-time route from St. Jean to Santiago de Compostela. It's mostly the route we walked, so it will be perfect on the wall between our Compostela certificates.

You didn't think we'd neglect to frame those, after all that walking, did you?

This morning I worked on a new sewing project--took a break from the quilt squares--this one is a case for my pastry board. I knew the 2-D measurements of the board, and guessed how much to add for thickness. Oops. Not big enough. I will now add a gusset to the sides of the 19x25 inch silver taffeta bag. Maybe I will put carry straps on it, too, as long as I'm messing around with it and have to remove the side seams anyway.

A picture for today: it's been so very, very dry for so long in south Texas, and now the fall rains have returned. (Last year they were a no-show.) A fruit of the returned rains:

The big mound of Duranta shrub, formerly a lot of mostly-bare sticks, is now covered in blossoms. And new leaves!

(Updated to add the link to the map poster)

Ideas for projects, maybe

Hello, everyone.

The last couple of days have been pretty calm around here. We had rain--and in Texas that's a welcome thing--and my birdies have been getting a walk in the yard most evenings. They're laying--green eggs for the hens and brown for Mrs. Guinea--and so most days we have home-made eggs for breakfast.

I have been wondering about what to make the centerpiece of our wall display, now that the Compostela certificates are framed and hung in the living room.

There was some thinking of maybe putting a poster of the Camino route, but there aren't a lot of those floating around in our neck of the woods.

Then I wondered about possibly putting one of our pictures from the route in the middle of the grouping.

Another pilgrim took a picture of us both, standing with a really cool carved waymarker on the outskirts of Santiago.

My sweetie's photo of the Cathedral doors.

The Cathedral, which is undergoing restoration just now. (The Portico de la Gloria is all blocked off by the scaffolding.)

My sweetie's photo of the Botafumeiro swinging on Corpus Christi Sunday.

There are other photos, as well, perhaps less exact to Santiago de Compostela--the zero kilometer marker in Fisterra and suchlike. I'm not sure which I like. 

On another note, I learned at our Altar Society meeting that the cauliflower salad was a hit. I will write down how I do it, in case anyone wants to try it out and maybe ring changes on the idea.

The idea started with reading low-carb fake-potato recipes. One of which was a "Mock Potato Salad" made with cooked cauliflower. Now I must say that while the creamy cauliflower puree that passes for mashed potatoes isn't bad, I don't think anybody will think that the chunks of cooked cauliflower in a salad are pototoes. People are smarter than that. So I don't call if Mock Potato Salad. I just call it:

Cauliflower Salad. I cut the washed cauliflower up in to little bite size pieces and cook it in the microwave. Then I transfer all the tender little white things into a mixing bowl and add some onion (red or mild white, either grated or chopped up) and some celery bits and some bell pepper. Maybe some dill pickle chopped up into little green things, too. And then I put a dressing that is pretty much like the one my sister-in-law uses for potato salad: 3 parts mayonnaise and 1 part mustard. This whole ensemble is stirred gently around until mixed and then covered with plastic wrap while it waits in the fridge for serving time.