Something's living under our house

Mock orange blossoms. One of my favourite fragrances.

Update on my Dad. He was discharged from the hospital yesterday, and is back home; he'll be seeing more specialists in the upcoming weeks. He's feeling much better, though the doctors still weren't able to figure out exactly what happened. We're going to visit with him later today.

Thanks so much for all the advice and support, everyone. It's much appreciated.



So it looks as if something's excavating a home under our house. The hole above was made in the past couple of days, and had a big pile of earth beside it. The hole goes in pretty far. We hadn't noticed until just recently because we've been distracted this past week.

Any ideas? Jeff thinks it might be a rabbit. My theory: a monster-sized squirrel, out for revenge. Anyway, Jeff's put a board over the hole; we'll see what happens now.


SLF = Squirrel Liberation Front.


Speaking of squirrels, I continue to find holes dug in my planters. The photo below doesn't show it very well, but I found a big hole in my peppermint planter, with one of the plants flung cruelly to one side.



It's been raining so much lately that the cayenne pepper has been washing away, leaving my plants vulnerable to the evil vandalistic squirrel-fiends in our neighbourhood.

The squirrels have left my Thai basil alone so far, though:



The ripped leaf is my fault; I tore off a little piece because I wanted to see what it smelled/tasted like.

Very cool to see all kinds of plants I've grown by seed reaching maturity. Now I just have to find some recipes that use Thai basil. :-)



I used some of my garden herbs when I made kisir recently, a salad consisting of bulgur, chopped walnuts, hazelnuts, spring onions, green and red pepper, fresh parsley, mint & dill, dried crush chillies, paprika, cumin, white pepper, olive oil, lemon juice and tomato juice. The recipe is from the Sofra Cookbook: Modern Turkish and Middle Eastern Cookery by Hüseyin Özer, which I discovered through my friend Justin's mother.

I served the kisir on pieces of lettuce, but you can also serve it on pita as well. Yum.

It's been a bit of a stressful week, and I've been finding sewing a therapeutic activity and hugely relaxing. Yesterday I re-threaded my serger just for practice and for the relaxation aspect. I know, I'm weird.

For those with serger fear: I've discovered that the main trick to threading sergers from scratch is to make sure that the lower looper thread is -above- the upper looper thread, else everything gets tangled up and the lower looper thread breaks. It can be frustrating, but I'm finding that the more often I do it, the easier it gets.



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