Busy bee

Now is the first true week of my summer employment. Last week I used up the last of my vacation time before I lost it. And I think it was one of the busiest that I've had in ages. Between the garden, prepping for the tag sale, rearranging furniture, cleaning, wasting hours on the phone with insurance and pharmacy, and wrangling the minions, the week flew by.

This tag sale is a long time coming. We've been in this house for a touch over 10 years. It is time to shed the miscellany that accumulates in one's abode in that time. The MS has me examining what is important to me. I'm longing to simplify things, as life can be complicated enough without the added entanglement of chronic illness. We have so. much. stuff. Sometimes it is just overwhelming. People often take advantage of the fact that neither my husband or myself like to see things go into the dumpster. We acquired much of our furniture when prop storage did the pre-move clean out. The props master and his assistant knew that if I were told "If you don't take it, it will end up in the dumpster," I would yield. We also have a habit of keeping things out of guilt; mainly gifts given by people who really don't understand our taste. I'm attempting to break that habit. Now if I can just stop some of those gift givers from shopping for us.

The other big task is to prep for my Dad's visit. My Stepmother is coming with him to coordinate the garage sale for me. But Dad and I have a mission for ourselves. Sausage making. Dad is a superb amateur gourmet. He watches the Food Network nearly nonstop and before retirement had the firehouse as his test kitchen. A few years ago he decided to start making sausage. Then I caught the bug. Last year I made some breakfast sausage patties and they turned out rather well, but we both admitted we preferred the links. In comes Dad and his handy dandy sausage stuffer to the rescue. We'll have both Kitchen Aids going for the grinding and we'll be making Italian sausage and breakfast sausage. And luckily PriceRite has pork shoulder on sale for 79cents a pound. The fates want me to make sausage.