Lessons from Living Alone

There's a few things you realize about yourself (or maybe about humanity) when living alone. First, I'm not sure there's much point in growing and preparing gorgeous food when there's no-one to share it with. Who is going to admire the crispness of the sugar snap peas with me? Or the way that the beets and carrots are perfectly complemented by dill and walnuts? To whom can I modestly gloat about the New Mexican-style squash soup I semi-invented? Also, does anyone else want to do the dishes, because I'm sort of sick of having to do them all.

Its a little hard to get really into gardening when you're the only one eating from a garden for numerous reasons. There's too much food for one thing, at least in ours. I was struggling to keep the fridge under control, so eating everything ripe in the garden? Puh-lease. Also, sharing is a great way of both showing off (modestly) and showing that you care about other peoples' well-being. Living alone makes this hard, especially since most of my social life is, in fact, my parents' social life (yes, I am the saddest excuse for a 23 year old that I know, but I actually like it that way most of the time). There is the additional problem that not only can I not eat all of the food, but in fact when I cook I then have to eat the same things for multiple meals over the course of a day or two in order to eat it all. Food becomes less exciting when this is the case. Also, its boring.

Luckily, my parents come back tomorrow (mom) and thursday (dad) to save me from myself. Hurrah! Also, the cat came back, but has now disappeared again. He seems to leave every time that I don't pay attention to him for more than a few hours, or when I leave the property. Apparently my occasional pets and feedings aren't enough for him. Well, soon enough I won't be counting on him to be the nearest living creature, so ha!

Finally, adventures. Well, I've mostly been working on getting mom's road bike back in working order so that I can use it, and doing other gardening/chore type stuff around the farm. So my life isn't terribly exciting. It did finally get hot enough yesterday for me to go to the river - we've gotten so much rain and only occasional sunny days that it hardly feels like summer. So I biked the long way to the bridge and had a luxurious swim in water that, finally, both wasn't completely freezing and had dropped to its normal level so swimming was fun again. It was so clear that it was almost like swimming through crystal. Finally, some summer in New Zealand!

Speaking of places that are not New Zealand, I realized today that I missed corn tortillas. I don't often dwell on things that I miss about Texas (friends, warm weather, not having to worry about getting fried in the ozone hole-intense sun), but a good corn tortilla would have raised the squash soup I made to the level of sublime. Sigh. Well, guess I'll just have to go eat some of the raspberry ice cream I made from our own raspberries to console myself. Its a tough life.