July 1st

...I think. I'm calendar-challenged, but I checked two of them just now, and if today is Sunday, it's also July 1st. Calendars remind me of wondering throughout my childhood why teachers told students to look up words in the dictionary, when they asked how to spell them. I couldn't figure out how someone who couldn't spell could look up a word in a dictionary. Similarly, what good is a calendar if one doesn't know either the day or the date? Just as Webster's book contains a whole lot of words beginning with duh-duh-dee, there sure are a lot of squares and numbers on a calendar.

Global WarmingNot isn't helping my calendar whine, and I wonder if I need to flip the calendars back a few pages. Should I have been wearing a sweater the past three days? I have been. At 3:15 this morning, I had to unload the top of the antique toy chest which serves as a coffee table and pull out a quilt, because I was getting awfully irked over waking repeatedly with a shiver.

Capitalizing on the WarmingNot, I baked my first ever fruitcake yesterday. [A few months ago I bought, after checking expiration dates, quite a stash of candied fruits from the rotting rack. I'm awfully suspicious of contents when a food doesn't expire in the coming 3 years, but I did it anyway.] It's a good thing I didn't read the entire fruitcake recipe before I embarked upon this project, because I didn't know it would still be requiring my attention at 10:00 p.m., and it just wouldn't have happened. Open a box and dump a cake mix into a bowl at 4:00 p.m., and a couple of hours later, one can be snarfing a frosted cake. Not so, a fruitcake.

Plopping all these fruits and nuts into a bowl was easy enough, but what's bourbon, and do I have any? There's a cubbyhole in my pantry where I store tall bottles of what's this, so I began rifling through the bottles. Red wine vinegar, port wine, burgundy something-or-other. Ah, Jim Beam. "Charles, is Jim Beam bourbon?" I think the label said "whiskey," but he gave an assenting response, and I hadn't found a bottle with "bourbon" on the label, so I went with it. I can't for the life of me remember what recipe called for Jim Beam, but we don't drink from any of these bottles, and there sure wasn't very much in it. Come to think of it, maybe that's why I can't remember what I made out of the stuff. That's a chilling thought; maybe I need a recipe monitor overseeing my cooking. The fruits were supposed to belly up to the bar for 2 hours, and when I learned that startling fact, I decided to read the rest of the recipe. Oh, this thing has to bake for 3½ hours. What have I done!?

As it turned out, Granddaughter was still chasing the dog, building block towers, and requesting Nana-songs when the oven timer beckoned me to the kitchen, so the fruitcake didn't keep me awake. And in this WarmingNot climate, I would have slept better had the oven run all night.

I cut/crumbled a piece of the hot fare when it came out of the pan, and it's not too bad, but don't expect Son3 to parrot that perspective, and Son4's discriminating palate and artistic eye for beauty brought him to a quick decision that he wasn't even interested in trying it. Granddaughter happily accepted a bite from my plate, and summarily deposited it, with a noisy phfloop, back where it came from. Maybe it was the whiskey.

Charles and I have one whale of a lot of fruitcake to eat...in July.

And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;

Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,

singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;

Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father

in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 5:18-20