The Great Egg Disaster and Other Stuff

One of my friends invited me to a potluck last night. I decided to make deviled eggs (after checking with my friend). I love deviled eggs. Everyone (almost) loves deviled eggs. But I rarely think to make them because they don't travel well in my lunch thingy, and if you're going to make one, you may as well make ten, and who eats ten eggs... unless you're taking them to a potluck!

I boiled up the eggs. I'd heard that you can use hummus rather than mayonaise and mustard to mix with the cooked yolks, so I did about half the eggs with hummus and they were good, so yay.

I put all the eggs on a plate, and then covered that with a mixing bowl that can sit on the plate nicely, and put that on the floor of the passenger side front seat of the car. And off I went.

And the first curve I hit (which is at the corner of my street), of course, the eggs slid. A bunch of them slid right off the plate and onto the floor; they slid without rolling at least, so only the egg white part was on the floor.

I felt almost like crying. You know, you just want to take some deviled eggs to your friends' house, and they slide off the plate. I've learned to realize that when something totally unimportant makes me want to cry, I'm either tired, low on protein, or stressed. But then I thought, these friends, they'll understand about the great egg disaster.

So I moved them from the floor to the mixing bowl, and drove carefully home. Then I re-covered the ones that hadn't slid off with another bowl, and piled jackets around that so the bowl and plate were immobile. The eggs could slide around on the plate, but they couldn't get out. And they now had plenty of room to slide around on the plate, since most of the eggs I'd fixed were in the first mixing bowl.

When I got to my friends' house, I explained about the great egg disaster, and we laughed, and then before the other people got there for the potluck, we cleaned off the ones that had fallen and ate them. And they were good. And if I get fatally sick, well, that's that.

Thus the great egg disaster wasn't so disasterous after all. I appreciate having friends who can laugh at the egg disaster.

The other stuff: It's fall.

My little lone maple tree (see above) down in the "prairie restoration project" (which is sort of more a woodland restoration project, actually) has turned colors. The photo doesn't quite do it justice.

I have some tiny blue/purply flowers in the restoration project area. I think they're some sort of aster? Any thoughts? (Also above; this one has a bug on it!)

I also have this weed thing, but no clue at all what it is. There are a LOT of bugs on it, though, so someone's happy. It's got these pod things, and then there's fluff in there (and probably seeds, which is what I'm guessing the bugs are eating).

When I first moved into this house, about 7 years ago (wow, can it really have been that long ago?), I planted seven trees in the yard. (It's a fairly new neighborhood where they've taken out trees to put up the houses, except in the back area where it's steep enough that they won't be allowed to put up more houses, or so I've been told.) In the front, I put a hawthorne and two tamarack/larch trees. On the side, a river birch. (Yes, I live at the top of a hill, so why did I put in trees that like water? I'm not the brightest gardener.) In the back I put two pines, and in the far back (the prairie restoration area), I put the maple. The trees up top get water when it hasn't rained for a while. The maple doesn't, because I'm a bad gardener. But it's a native, and is doing fine. (Plants have to be pretty tough to live with me, I'm afraid.)

More recently, about three years ago, I put two small pines in the prairie restoration project. They were pretty small, because that's what the tree farm had available, and I didn't protect them very well, so the deer really hit them hard that first year. But they survived the winter, and have been doing better each year. This one is further out, and really got eaten the first year. This year, when I bought a weed whacker, I whacked some of the weeds from near the little trees (and the maple, too), so maybe they'll have a little less competition and will grow better. (I whacked a path down to them, too, and wore out a whole weed whacker spool doing it. A machete would have been a LOT more efficient!)

This one is closer in. I'm hoping that in 20 years or so, they'll provide a tad more privacy for my deck. It's funny to think about 20 years down the line. I'll probably be retired, and may well have moved. So I'm really planting for someone else's privacy. And who knows, those people may think that the pines get in the way of their view and cut them down.

Back in June, I took a photo of one of the older pines that I'd planted, which was growing its first ever pinecone. Look here. And now, that pine cone has done it's pine cone thing and opened up. (I'm not sure the seeds would have been viable, since there may not be other pine cones around spreading pollen, but maybe they do that younger, so the other tree might have had some? Do they self-pollinate?) It's sort of cool, if you look from one picture to the other, you can get a sense that the tree put on a lot of new growth in that area over the summer. The baby cone is pretty easy to see, but the open cone is more hidden by foliage. In the June picture, the growth coming off right above the baby cone is really new and looks it. In the current picture, it looks much more hardened.