Humidity drops, and bread returns

So the humidity has dropped, you can breathe, the temps are still hot, but manageable, and bread baking has returned.  I will be making a birthday dinner for Handsome Son tomorrow, and needed homemade bread rolls as part of the deal.  I plan to make a couple of rolls into garlic bread, to go with homemade spaghetti sauce with meat balls made from farm sausage, good mozzarella shredded over, then home baked chocolate cake with cherry sauce in, sort of rustic Black Forest cake, and ice cream. Not too shabby, and not too hot to eat this way, either.

So I hauled out the breadmakings, and made one small batch of rolls for instant use.  

Today since something that was to happen isn't after all, illness, someone else's that is, caused cancellation, I have a slot of time to make another, bigger, batch of bread rolls for the freezer.  

The same old wholewhat bread recipe as always, from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, easy, makes good bread with a lovely crust, and you just shape the dough however you want it -- loaves, flat cakes, breadsticks, rolls, it's as adaptable as clay.  

I love a handy roll to stuff with cheese when I can't be bothered fixing anything more complicated, and I will have a nice supply in the freezer by this evening.  If you bake bread in or on a nonstick pan or tray, it makes a great crust, better, I find than the regular metal pans.

Officially the birthday is Monday, which also happens to be Handsome Partner's anniversary, so Handsome Son tactfully opted to have Friday night, as well as better fitting his schedule.  

It's an annual very mixed day, August 8, because of the major birthday coinciding with the major death, so we handle it each year one way or another.  We have sometimes celebrated HP on his birthday in late June, but what with weather and work schedules, that hasn't happened yet this year, is still to be decided. 

Monday will be a plein air art morning, and I think of going to the labyrinth after that to walk it in memory of Handsome Partner.

Labyrinth visit, pix shown despite Yahoo's best blocking efforts...

Today was time for a visit to the labyrinth, in honor of a recently departed husband of a friend.  I got lost getting there, because one of my landmarks had changed so that I overshot the place.  I navigate by landmarks, since directions and the sense of direction are foreign to my hardwired brain, and when they change, or as in this case, cover them up as they demolish behind them, well, I ask you.

So I wheeled around and got found again, wonderful light and blowing leaves and then found that the labyrinth is ankle deep in beautiful leaves, impossible to walk it.  

So I had a change of plan and did a sitting meditation on the bench there instead.  

And my alarm telling me when time was up defeated my efforts to turn it off, because in bright sunshine the screen's unreadable.  Eventually I managed it, quiet returned, and I did take a couple of pix to send to my friend.

And then once home, spent upwards of an hour trying to get them to upload. Yahoo in its wisdom, has changed the app on my tablet, so that it's no longer possible to simply send images to my regular email for uploading.  Noooooooo.  I managed after numerous efforts to get one uploaded and sent.  The other not so fast.

So I figured the culprit was Yahoo, who have put out a buggy app instead of getting it working before installing it, as in ready! fire! aim! so perhaps I could send it to another email address.  

But my backup email, good old Juno, used it for thirty years, one single crash in all that time, no bugs, just a simple email that works, well, my tablet won't talk to Juno. Won't even list it.  So I sent to yet another email I never use, and forwarded on from there.  And now it finally works.

So thanks to Yahoo's yahoos, it is now a multipart process: take pix, send to one email, ship to another, download to hard drive, upload to thumbdrive, download to blog, lie down, have a cup of tea. But the pix are nice to see, a good memory of a quiet meditation period.

And, on the principle of the Shakuhachi effect, I learned a workaround instead of just getting all irate and arm waving.

 

Labyrinth walk and reminders

I walked the labyrinth, mainly for the family of a recently departed friend, but other dear friends got added in as I walked.

Entering the labyrinth
 
And on the path, as always, there's a significant object to find and carry to the middle of the labyrinth.  This time it was a beautiful carapace from a cicada.  Beautiful, and now empty, it had served its purpose.  

A great reminder to us, when people go on before us.  They're complete now, no further need for their body.  So I carried it to the center and left it as an offering.

Return to the Labyrinth

Finally, after months of delay from storms, kneedeep snow and ice on the labyrinth,it's all cleared up, and today I was able to keep a number of labyrinth promises, for two departed people and their families, and for various other intentions.  

This included the life of Oliver Sacks, who wrote recently that he was nearing the end of his life.  I had the joy of being part of a book he wrote a while back, after we had an email correspondence, and felt that this world famous thinker and neurologist and totally gentle man, was himself still so open to learning that it was a joy to cross paths with him even briefly.  So, wherever he is on his journey, I walked for him, too.

Always at some point on the slow pilgrimage around the labyrinth, there's some tiny object waiting for me to pick it up and see its significance and add it to the center of the circle.  

Today it was a little ring of blue plastic stuff, very narrow, which fitted on my finger, and was so emblematic of the various points in life of the people in my intentions, and the unbroken whole of us all, that it was the center of thinking today.

This is it, lying on that rock in the foreground.  Never fails. Always find an inspirational object, always get answers to my own puzzles, while the birds sing unconcernedly and there's street noise, all part of the day.

Over the winter the storms and the squirrels have made inroads into the Tibetan prayer flags, but they're still there, more or less.As are we all, in one way or another.