Brighter Days

Well, the flooding rains are gone. (For now?) We celebrated by steam cleaning the nasty half of the family room carpet, but to no avail. It still stinks. I know conventional wisdom says steam cleaning won't do a thing for pet odors if they have penetrated the pad, but we thought we could do some good. Nay. I am more convinced than ever that we need to get a hard-surface floor down there, after we trash the fifteen year-old blinds, clean and paint the walls, and tear out the mess that we walk on daily. Then we have to scrub the cement floor and baseboards with some odor annihilator; no small task, I imagine. After all those preparations, we can install (or can we afford to have a professional do it?) a wood laminate floor, I guess, although that laminate stone is awfully pretty. Awfully expensive, too. "Laminate." That is a funny word when you say it a lot.

My annual July 4th peach pie is baking in the oven. I am incredibly lucky to live a hop and a skip away from Highland Orchards, a long-running family farm that isn't officially organic but shuns pesticides and chemical use. Their peaches are now coming in and I selected white ones this year. I've only used the yellow ones in the past. I follow the two-crust peach pie recipe out of How To Cook Everything (although I'm hesitant to plug the guy since he dissed Julia Child). The following will be our little secret: I use Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust. P.C. (pre-children), I would've donned my dark glasses to buy a small tub of Crisco (gasp) for the homemade crust.

Yesterday (Sunday), D, N, AC, and I had an outing to the Kalmar Nyckel Ship Yard, which hosted "A Gathering of Tall Ships." We toured the Kalmar Nyckel, our own tall-ship-in-residence here in Wilmington. There were other ships there, too, plus some pirates, live music, and vendors. An all around fun day.

D works today, but is off tomorrow for the fourth. We don't have much planned except that D will take N to his first fireworks show, on the riverfront (near the Ship Yard, in fact). AC will be in bed already (we hope), so I will stay here with her and the dogs.

I suppose that's our news of late. Nothing fancy, nothing too exciting, but I think that's good for me just now.