A Fine Day In Lloyd Land

Here we have an approximately eight-pound turkey potpie that I made today to use up the very last of the turkey. Don't worry. The meat was in the freezer part of the time. It has potatoes, onions, celery, mushrooms, broccoli, peas, and carrots in it along with the turkey. I will be baking it here shortly. 
And Thanksgiving will be officially over. 

I've had a very decent day. I have no idea why. It was Candie's day to come and clean but she now has the puke virus that her kids had so she didn't come. 
Kids. They are just here on earth to do the bidding of viruses and bacteria, as far as I can see. Wouldn't it be funny if viruses developed humans in order to have a way to replicate? Like flowers developing stamens and pistils. 
I swear to you, I sometimes think this is a possibility. But you know me and my theories. 

So since Candie did not come, I decided to unleash Ralph, my Roomba. Poor Ralph has been sorely underused since Candie entered my life but he cranked right up today and did fine until he mysteriously parked himself in his little port and shone his red light. He needed a check-up and a little work done so I got out my robot-doctoring stuff and gave him an exam and he had a few problems going on that I was able to diagnose and fix. This included a transplant of the three-armed little brushy thing that Roombas have which spin around. One of Ralph's brushes' arms had been completely ripped off by something. 
Anyway, after his surgery, he got right back to work and then this happened. 

The determined little robot dragged that size fifteen sneaker all the way from Glen's closet which is, in robot terms, about nine miles away. 
Okay. That's a bit of hyperbole but it is a seriously long distance. 

I unwrapped the sneaker's lace from one of the rollers, and once again, Ralph sprang right back to attention and finished up his work. 

So you know, I was busy all day making sure that Ralph was healthy and doing his job and I did some laundry and...what else did I do? It took me awhile to make that potpie because it involved vegetable chopping and steaming and sautéing and then making the pastry and all that stuff. I picked some arugula to make a nice salad with apples and craisins and sliced almonds. I generally use pecans in that salad but I used up every pecan in this house making the fruitcakes. 

I also fed my sourdough starter. I have not done that in a shamefully long time. So long that I think it's going to take a few more feedings before it's really up to the task of raising bread again. I just haven't been in the mood to bake sourdough. It makes me sad for various reasons, one of them being that my loaves are just not the things of wonder and beauty that they could be. 
I just checked the re-fed starter and there are two, TWO, tiny bubbles in it that are probably the signs of dying gasps. 

I had the most interesting dream last night. It was not like any dream I've ever had before. I was a young woman and had traveled to an island somewhere far, far away from everything where there was an indigenous culture who had been living there for eons. I was with my family- a group I did not recognize- and the father of the family was somehow working for the US government which was doing something on that island and there was a large number of other Americans also involved in this work. It was not unlike the colonialism of India by the British. Whatever the Americans were doing was polluting the ocean surrounding the island and the indigenous people had developed strange markings on their skin due to the poisons in the water. 
So that was going on and I was trying, as the oldest daughter in the family (which I am in real life) to get the living quarters arranged and set up and the food organized which was going well but then, I had an encounter with one of the native people and somehow, I inadvertently insulted him and the entire indigenous population. 
I was horrified that I had done this. There appeared to be many customs and rules involving the accepting of food and rituals that had to be observed and no one had educated me on these and I had offended them. 
I felt so horrible. There appeared to be no way at all that I could explain myself or make amends, much less ever be part of the community. And that was how the dream ended. 

I can see that probably some of the dream came from my visits to Cozumel, which is an island where many, many Americans now live. But I have never felt as if I had offended any of the Mayan people who live there and have always tried my hardest to be respectful of everyone I've come across in any sort of interaction. 

This may be an incredibly easy dream to interpret but my awake brain is not really making the connections. 

Here are two pictures of what the Japanese maple tree looked like today against the sky which was so blue it looked impossible. These photos are completely undoctored. 

They almost hurt your eyes, don't they? 

But in such a very, very good way. 

Love...Ms. Moon