July 12, 2026

 Today was kind of a lazy day but that's probably a good thing because it seems so much of what I did was wrong! Ever have one of those days? I did put an end to three squash vine borer larvae so that was a good thing. :)

Right off the bat, before the stove got hot, I took the grates off, took the top part of the burners off and scrubbed everything. The stove was a mess. I had needed to scrub the stove before I started three days of canning so you can imagine what it looked like. Done. Nice and clean . . until I mess it up again!

I did fix egg, ham and jalapeno burritos for breakfast. I made bread . . finally. It was a new recipe for me - Honey Oat Wheat Bread and it was delicious!

Recently I ordered some of the Rouge de Bordeaux wheat from Living Sky Grains and this may be my new favorite wheat.

On the cross stitching front, I was going to set up the linen on the frame and get the floss on tags. That didn't go so well. I needed a piece larger than a fat quarter. Mostly I have fat quarters of linen but I had a few fat halves. I found one, got it cut down to size, served, sewn onto the leaders of a scroll frame. There's one spot on this project where I'm not sure the floss color was going to show up on my linen so I was going to make a few stitches using several colors. That's when I realized there was a flaw in the linen. I got a tape and was measuring to make sure I could find enough space around the flaw to stitch and I found four more flaws - broken threads, a hole in the linen. So frustrating. A fat half of linen is at least $70. I stuck it aside. I will find small spaces where I can stitch smalls so all is not lost but I had to find another piece of linen, cut it to size, serge the edges, get it loaded on the scroll frame. Doing all that is my least favorite part of stitching but I now have a piece that I can get started on later tonight.

While Vince was outside yesterday he found a cecropia caterpillar. This is the third year (not in a row) that we've found these. Year before last, we found three of them. They're so pretty and so interesting. You can read about them here if you don't know about them. I had never heard of them until we found the first ones in the yard here.