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Summer with a Vengeance

Morning starts out cool-ish, but that sun brings the heat up quickly

Jack’s knee is getting better,  but the weather   .  .  .   not so much.

We spent last week sweltering in 100 degree heat. The longer the heat hangs around, the harder it is to bring house temperatures down with cool morning breezes. On an up note, wildfire smoke has not filled our air yet this year.

We did not make it far from home this week. Instead, we did some inside projects that were long overdue. There were also a lot of cold salad preps. No need to overburden the AC with a hot oven.

Summer is salad season at our house

In addition to the regular potato, tuna, chicken, and macaroni salads, we always include a side of sliced tomato w/ basil. JQ discovered an addition to the cold salad rotation  .  .  .  a Mediterranean Veggie salad (recipe below).

We’re up before the sun to open windows and prepare for the day

During these heat waves, we start our day early. By the time the thermometer hits 90, we’re back in the cool comfort of home.

The weatherman is suggesting a drop in daytime highs next week, so perhaps we’ll be able to venture further from home.

Print Recipe

Mediterranean Veggie Salad

great summer salad

Ingredients

Dressing

  • 3 Tbsp Lemon Juice
  • 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
  • 1 Tbsp dijon mustard
  • 1 tsp oregano
  • 3/4 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 1 clove garlic minced
  • 1 cup olive oil

Salad

  • 5 - 6 leaves Romaine lettuce chopped
  • 2-3 leaves Radicchio chopped
  • 2-3 radishes diced
  • 1 small cucumber seeded and cut into ¼ inch pieces
  • 1/4 cup fresh cooked corn
  • 1/4 cup red onion thinly sliced
  • 6 Pepperoncini seeded and cut into ¼ inch pieces
  • 4-5 cherry tomatoes quartered
  • ¼ cup cooked beans (your choice)
  • 3 ounces cheddar cheese (or your choice) cut into small cubes
  • 3 ounces Genoa salami cut into small cubes
  • salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  • Mix dressing ingredients together and allow to sit for at least an hour. Can be held in fridge for up to 2 weeks
  • Chop salad ingredients into equal sized pieces and add to a large bowl
  • Toss dressing with salad in stages until you have coated all the pieces, but it's not too wet ... no dressing in the bottom of the bowl ...
  • NOTE ... adjust salad ingredients and portions to fit your 'fridge.' Any leftover dressing can be used in the next mixing.

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A Week to Regroup

A wade in the stream is always Tip’s first move

As we brace for an upcoming heat wave, we have time to reflect on this past week.

Crooked River

The knee is improving and stitches have been removed, but not much activity occurred. For Jack, that means we didn’t go fishing.

However, we did set up some camp chairs by the Crooked River and watched the wildlife, while sharing a cheeseburger from the Tastee Treet.

So, I guess the week wasn’t a total failure..

Brown butterfly feeding on blooming yarrow

The weatherman is handing out “excessive heat” warnings in Central Oregon, and it looks like those alerts will carry through the week.

These type of temperatures are hard to escape even in the depths of a river canyon. Unfortunately,  river wading is off the list for now, so I guess we’ll hide out in the AC comfort of home.

Summer heat has cast a brown hue to the grasses

Although we are thinking about venturing to higher elevations of the Upper Deschutes  .  .  . we will just have to see.

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Full on Spring

On the Lower Deschutes.

This week was not as full as the last one. We did make it out on a river, but most of the week was focused getting the house clean. The internet is full of before and after images, but not here  .  .  .  we just don’t see any reason to take pictures of the mundane.

Oregon Sunflower (Balsamroot)

The days leading into spring, right up to full run off, are great times to be on the rivers. The flows haven’t started to fill stream beds and the warming weather brings more bug activity.

After a winter of dragging wet flies, we are starting to see surface feeding  .  .  .  dry fly fishing gets a brief burst.

The mountain snows have already started to fill up rivers, and now we wait for the summer season.

But in the meantime, we had a few great days on the river  .  .  .  and the house is clean.

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Indoor Reflection

Winter returns  .  .  .  again

The snow continued to pile up the first part of the week, so we stuck close to home. It was a good time to get caught up on our reading and in the process offer lap time for the cats.

Sharing the patio door

Some time in the spring of 2007, a neighbor in the 33rd street culdesac where we lived, abandoned a pregnant cat.

Now, we’d been fooled once by a bloated orange tom (a homeless male cat who looked pregnant, so of course we took him in) but we knew what we were getting into, or at least we thought we knew.

The cat, Mittens, a polydactyl (extra toes) cat  immediately was re-named Greta, and we got to witness a birth cycle. Four kittens survived.

Unfortunately, one of our kitten crew was a budding escape artist . While moving to Sandy she managed to slip past our confines. The other three, Lewis, Clark, and Boo have always lived indoors.

Boo and Clark chowing down cat greens

We’re are dog people and enjoy a canine’s company in the house or car. That said, there is nothing like a cat purring in your lap which can soothe the mind.

Boo got his huge front paws from his mom

Until recently, Lewis was really the only lap cat out of the lot. Boo would regularly climb up on JQ and literally hug her around the neck. After receiving his due, he would move on.

Gretta and Clark were tolerant of my existence at best, but would hang out with JQ and the dogs.

The boys, Boo and Lewis peering through a foggy window

Sixteen years have passed and two males are all that are left of our cat clan. Boo and Lewis have turned into talkative old geezers.

A year ago, we started treating Boo for Hyperthyroidism  .  .  .  the same malady that took his mother. Boo’s medicine, or rather it’s delivery system is more advanced than Greta’s, however it still has limits and I think we’re reaching his.

Napping champion

In their advancing age, a warm place to nap has become critical, something I can understand.

Usually after a bit of chin scratching you can return back to reading or scrolling and a warm knot of fur will lay calmly in your lap.

Recently Boo’s naps have included what can only be attributed to dreams.

These manifest as growls and small spasms that run through his body. I wonder what memories a cat carries to cause such fits.

Are cat dreams shaped by actual experience or can a they conjure up an alternate reality in their sleep? I don’t expect an answer.

Days are warming and as spring approaches, we’ll be spending less time at home. The brothers will adjust to different napping sites, but will continue to vocalize their dissatisfaction. It’s just another cycle of life.

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Weather . . . again

Making paw prints in fresh snow is good fun

Don’t mean to complain about the weather  .  .  .  but  .  .  .

Again this week we’ve been under mostly gray skies with a few inches of snow flurries thrown in.

One of the consequences of a wetter than normal winter is rivers are at or above capacity. Streams we frequent are running at April levels.

Un-fishable water is usually a product of run-off and right when ODFW opens the Upper Deschutes River as an alternative.

It’s really not all that deep

These dreary days mean we’ll fill the blog with more domestic tasks.

Oh there was activity, just mostly indoors and with fewer photos captured.

Not fishing doesn’t mean not thinking about fishing. Limited stream access just means more sitting at the desk spin’in feathers.

I even posted some of the patterns on Instagram. Winter is the season to refill boxes with patterns depleted last summer.

Books occupy another segment of daily activities. What an Inter-library loan can’t find, Hoopla and Kindle can.

Ken Forkish, owner of Ken’s Artisan Bakery In Portland, Oregon has written several books on bread. Evolutions in Bread and Flour Water Salt Yeast make for great reading.

There is always an eclectic mix of titles stacked on the living room table. This week that pile contained an inordinate number of cookbooks.

The other activity associated with dreary weather is cooking and we’ve done quite a lot of that. Soup Sunday returned this year and we’ve sampled and canned a couple of good recipes. JQ tweaked her chocolate pound cake recipe to perfection and fourth time seems to be the charm on finding a truly good chocolate chip cookie.

We didn’t get out much but that will change with the season. For now we’ll start a new book and wait for the real thaw.