this and that

I've been running around trying to catch up from being gone for so long. I'm almost (but not quite) back to my routine. It's amazing how much work there is to do when you're out of town for a while. I made three batches of soap yesterday and two today. I cleaned out M~'s room and turned it into a soap room. Or I guess I should call it my business office. The garden has suffered from my absence. I think the potatoes are dead. The chickens got into the cucumbers and there are no more cucumber plants, they're all dead. In the same patch as the cucumbers the chickens scratched out all of the green onions. They obviously don't like to eat onions and we ate them all tonight in a lovely onion-y curry. My beans have a bad case of the bean beetles, but I feed the beetles to the chickens whenever I catch them. They sure like to eat those beetles. We had chinese yard long beans with dinner tonight. They are really good. I cut them up and used them like beans. They taste slightly different than beans, but they are very good.