More Rain, More Baking, and More Bad Bugs

Ghirardelli dark chocolate chip mix skillet cookie

On Friday, I decided that Saturday would be pizza day. And whenever I make pizza, I make brownies or cookie bars for dessert. My arthritis now affects my baking, so I am taste testing prepared mixes. I got a bunch of Ghirardelli mixes and tried the chocolate chip cookie mix but baked it in a skillet (which relieves me of much standing time on the knees). It was such a success! I love the mix and I can't do better from scratch. There is no boxed mix taste, either. 

I baked Saturday even though the weather was great. I got psyched out by bad bugs on Friday—by ticks again. I hate ticks and this year the tick problem is unbelievable. Lucy, despite her flea and tick treatments, brings in one live tick a day. In the past, it has only been one live tick per season. I need to photograph each one in order to identify the species. Fortunately, Lucy has only had one embedded in her skin and she was fantastic when I took it off under the new guidelines.  Thankfully, all of the ticks have been American dog ticks; not the deer ticks with Lyme disease.

Friday night, after our short bug walk in the gorgeous weather, I found a tick crawling up my leg. That was the final straw for me. Short of Lucy and I dressing in hazmat suits, I decided to never go outside again. Ticks give me bad dreams for nights and creepy crawly skin for days.

Soon after I found the tick, Lucy came in with another deer fly riding on her muzzle. Every year, the time after black flies is deer fly time and they love Lucy's muzzle. She seldom notices them until they bite and leave her with a muzzle dotted with red splotches of blood. One deer fly bite gives me real itches for days.

American dog tick

Deer fly

And that is why I stayed in and baked instead of bug hunting.

Next was the pizza. I decided to try Gemma Stafford's dough and sauce.  The dough was easy to do but somehow resulted in a leathery crust. It was such a disappointment. I don't know what I did wrong. The sauce had the exact taste that I wanted, but was much too salty. I can easily adjust that next time. I tossed out the pizza, and it is expensive to make. It was supposed to be at least two days of meals, including breakfast. I love pizza for breakfast. 

While setting my Google Nest hub display to time the rising for the pizza dough, I found you can do this . . . 

00:17

You get a different show for each different item you ask it to time.  "OK, Google, set the bread timer for 2 hours" gives you a fun bread display.  I smiled when the timer ended:

00:06

Now it is Sunday.

Flash flood warnings, flash flood watches, hazardous weather alerts

The expected rainfall today only is four inches. That is not good. Amy and I are so bored at this point with our indoor lives that we are sending each other rain videos. This is her slow-motion rain drop video.

00:35

I made six videos of the rain from the garage. Lucy won't go out in the rain from the back door but she will from the garage. All of the noise you hear is pure rainfall. It was very, very heavy. I combined all six videos to one video. 

1:28

Being an accomplished and talented obsessive worrier, I am now more concerned about my fairly new and very expensive leach field flooding than I am about flash floods or washed out roads. Perhaps life never will be normal again.

_/\_/\_