WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY FATHER?

I can hear our daughters saying that when they read this blog post. After years of religiously avoiding anything to do with barbecue grilling, I am becoming a CHEF!

We brought home a neat grill a couple of weeks ago (on clearance at Lowe’s) and since then we’ve bought books and tools, and next we have to buy a storage cabinet for all the books and tools.

Right away we started digging up recipes and ideas, although the first thing we grilled were brats and chicken breasts without any fancy stuff.

But Saturday dinner was grilled tilapia with an orange-walnut sauce. Suzy made baked potatoes and coleslaw. What a feast

That’s the orange-walnut sauce in the skillet.

Sunday evening we went even further, marinating a 3-lb pork roast all day, then putting it on a spit for nearly two hours. It was delicious served with a blackberry sauce, and Suzy is threatening to make me the chef every night!

Also this weekend, we did some gardening. For our open house, I had built a planter box and filled it with three potted Mock Orange bushes and four potted geraniums. Because the pots were small, I had to put concrete blocks in the bottom of the box, then filled around the pots with decorative bark. Now it was time to really do some planting. We emptied the planting box, then refilled it with top soil and planting mix, and bought another planter for out front. Suzy took charge of that planting.

First the geraniums, then the mock oranges.

Then I took over, planting a Gopher Spurge we bought a couple of weeks ago. It’s now part of our cactus and desert plant garden.

Now the final part of the post ---

Have you seen this glass or its twin? Saturday evening we had six of them. Sunday evening we used two, then one got broken and we pulled out another one. After washing dishes and putting everything away, there were only three! I looked EVERYWHERE, high, low, in all the cabinets, out in the casita, on the patio. No glasses! Kokopelli must be at it again. Do we have to go to Wal-Mart and buy six more, only then to find the lost ones so we’d end up with eleven?

Wait, Suzy just suggested “Look in the oven.” Say what? “Look in the oven.” I did, and sure enough, there they were, all clean and sparkly. When I wash and Suzy dries, she sits at the counter to work. Since she can’t reach the cabinets from the sitting position, she opens the oven and sets dishes there until she finishes and can put them away properly.

From now on, when anything seems lost, I know where to look first!

And that’s this issue of … Our Life on Wheels.