For the last week I’ve been on a Liver Detox Diet. I have 2 more weeks to go. The point is not to lose weight, it’s to let your liver get rid of toxins so you feel better. There are a lot of things I cannot eat: wheat, corn, beef, pork, sugar, caffeine, alcohol…I know there’s more, but those are the big ones. Are you wondering what I can eat? Most vegetables, most fruit, chicken, fish, and other grains.

Things I miss:
- ice cream
- soy sauce
- butter
- sugar (I’m eating fruit instead)

Here’s breakfast, dinner, and dessert from yesterday. Breakfast (after making 2 detox drinks first thing in the morning) is usually a smoothie of blended fruit and almond milk.

Dinner yesterday was salad with a sliced peach, green onion, and sunflower seeds. I made a little dressing with olive oil, water, 3 raspberries, and a bit of frozen apple juice concentrate. All together it wasn’t bad, but it could be improved.

Dessert consisted of fresh raspberries and a strawberry with puffed brown rice cereal and a little bit of almond milk.

Don’t worry that that’s all I ate yesterday! I also had a mid-morning snack of puffed rice cereal/almond milk. Lunch was quinoa with sauteed onion and celery, and chicken. Afternoon snack was celery with homemade almond nut butter. I was hoping to have lentil soup and bean soup this week until I realized legumes aren’t allowed in week 2. This afternoon I must go buy fish and some more veggies as my choices at home aren’t sounding that good right now!

Yesterday we had a typical Fall day. Rainy, wet, a bit of clearing. I spotted this doe jump out of the woods when the neighbors had a load of gravel dumped. When even the deer look wet and miserable you know it’s rained a lot:

And then there was our messy barn construction project:

This morning, SURPRISE, we have snow. It’s not going to stick around long as it’s nowhere near cold enough. As you can see in my photos it’s already a sloppy mess.

Discovered weak spot in horse trailer ramp. Took ramp apart.

Horse trailer now looking like this until we do repairs. To be honest, I’m just glad I found the weak spot now because after we fix it I will have confidence the ramp is solid. And I went in to this purchase knowing full well at 12 years old this was a likely repair maintenance item we would be doing.

Then a kid backed into me in the parking lot as I was leaving work. I saw him coming, laid on the horn, he. . .well. . .as you can see the horn didn’t slow him down. It doesn’t look like much, but the first estimate was $2200 to repair. Our insurance will be paying because, can you guess? He has no insurance.

I came home to this. As you can see we have some work ahead of us. Truthfully, I probably won’t be doing much of it. That’s 15 tons of washed gravel and almost three hundred 60 pound blocks.

Finally it’s Friday. It was requested that I stop and buy lottery tickets. I did. You can always use more beer, and heck, with the week I had I figured donuts before dinner was justifiable. Or is that donuts FOR dinner?

Now I’m going to sit on the couch and knit!

Montana? No, this is Winter in western Washington. Check this out.

Five inches of snow at my house in Washington. This same day in western Montana I was enjoying 50 degrees and partial sun while letting Blondie look for the first shoots of green grass. We are expecting a few snow showers this week in Missoula, but the temperature is expected to be in the mid 40′s so it won’t be sticking around long.

Last Friday and Saturday I ended up working a bunch of extra hours. That resulted in today as an unexpected and much appreciated day off when I would normally be working. It’s amazing what one can do with an extra day…

- I got the oil changed in the car.

- I went shopping. I have been putting this off for months. My only pair of everyday shoes is really worn out and is going to give out permanently any day. I’m not exaggerating – the elastic strap that connects the buckle to the shoe already broke once. I spread the love between the 2 high end shoe stores at the mall with a purchase of 30% off Dansko’s at the first and Keen’s at the second. Dansko’s are a tried and true favorite; Keen’s are new to me. I’ve drooled over SmartWool socks before, but seeing as how I’m a knitter and they cost like $17 I’ve resisted. This pair was 50% off.

- I bought a birthday gift for Ty.

- I gave in on my boycott of Joann’s and bought buttons for Wisp. The checkout line was only 3 people deep with 2 checkers.

- I stumbled across Napa which was good because I still needed a new air filter for the car. Oil change place was out of stock. The first Napa didn’t have one either, but the other location did and happened to be near where I was going next. By the way, if I had purchased the air filter at the oil change place the cost was $22. My cost at Napa was $20. Next time I won’t bother picking it up myself.

- I went to the post office to pick up my mail and ship a package.

- Finally, I splurged on lunch. Raw fish. Yum.

All in all, I’d call it a very successful use of half my day off. Now I think I’ll sew buttons on Wisp and finish up the Go Cougs socks.

Tom Kha Gai is my favorite soup of all time. Why am I bringing this up in a random post? Oh just because Sunset magazine recently published a recipe for it and it turns out the recipe is both delicious and easy. The first time I made it, it came out darn close to how it tastes from my favorite Thai restaurant.

You do need a few specialty and a few fresh ingredients. If you cook Thai food you probably have everything you need already.

Note: don’t substitute light coconut milk. If you want it to turn out restaurant style you need the full fat version.

And did you see where I said it was easy? Super easy even for a slow, inefficient cook like me. So easy I can make a quick batch at lunch if I want. Sunset’s recipes are available online; get the recipe for Tom Kha Gai here.

I know this is my second “random” post about food, but I really intend for my random posts to be just that! That said, over the weekend I made Parmesan Risotto for the first time using a Sunset recipe. I was very happy with how it turned out.

Best beverage on a cold Winter evening: Harvey’s Butter Rum Batter.

You could say I’m biased because the product comes from very near my hometown, but I tried that other product – the one that’s not refrigerated – and it was disgusting. It looked and tasted like what you would expect from an unrefrigerated batter.

Yes, I will have knitting to show this week! I’m having a button dilemma for GYC which is blocked and dry, and then I knit a bunch of swatches over the weekend that are drying as we speak.

Come on, you know you do. Even though you all have snow too. In fact, you may have more snow there in Western WA than we have in Missoula. What’s wrong with that picture?

I haven’t been outside since Saturday and I have to say, I underestimated how much had accumulated with the steady stream of small snowflakes we’ve had since Sunday. I measured the height against my Winter riding boots after I came back in: 8-10 inches. The first few inches fell a week ago during high winds so it had all drifted around.

Thanks go out to my snow removal service! And no, I’m not lazy for not doing my own snow removal – I’m supporting a local business. They’ve been here 3 times in the last week. They use a quad with snow plow to do the sidewalks and then a truck to back blade the snow off the driveway. Worth every penny.

Hope the fish make it through another Winter. There’s no way we could have netted them out (even before it snowed), plus they survived out there last Winter. Gave us quite a surprise in the Spring as the pond was frozen when we rented the house.

Don’t think we’ll be using the back steps any time soon.

The trees in the yard look lovely. This little tree is only about 4 feet tall.

I’m thankful for Winter riding boots. They may not be stylish, but they are taller than my normal Winter boots. The snow is likely level with my other boots now. It’s still falling too.

When it looks like this outside:

Okay, fine. It doesn’t *look* that bad, but the wind is blowing 23 mph (less than it was earlier today) and the current temperature is 6 degrees Fahrenheit at 4:30 pm. Tonight’s forecast low is -3 degrees Fahrenheit.

The only sane thing to do is stay inside and do this:

I’m working on the last chart!

Even though the first official day of Winter is not until December 21st, it’s taken a turn for the bitter cold here. This photo was taken at 2:30 pm local time. The sun is finally coming out and the temperature is only 26 degrees. The forecast is for a high of 40; something tells me that’s not going to happen.

The plants and lawn are all still frosty. The goldfish pond is frozen over. Luckily the ground isn’t frozen yet. The extra mist you see in the air is the water being blown out of the sprinkler system on what is likely the last day this task will be possible this year.

Tomorrow and the next 5 days are supposed to be really cold with highs in the single digits and lows in the NEGATIVE teens. Not including wind chill. Up until now it had been unseasonably warm with most days reaching 40 degrees and no real snow to speak of.