Into the Frying Pan

I was about to roll the dough for a birthday blueberry pie when I discovered I'd never gotten my three pie pans back after Thanksgiving. So I baked it in a frying pan which cooks it a little too fast. Premium dog foods these days have extra ingredients like blueberries in them, which is why Molly looks so intense. The day wasn't so great.

Dinah called from the airport in Costa Rica. She and her boyfriend are there for ten days. The rental car company was insisting on a $1000 rental car deposit which they couldn't come up with and still continue on their way! She was using the desk phone at the rental company. I spent two hours on the phone with Bank of America trying to get her some money, and in the process cleaned out my account and then some.

I was lucky that I had a phone tech person who was smart,nice and patient, because it was a tricky thing to work out and it would have been so easy to lose my temper. I stayed on the line afterwards to participate in one of those stupid surveys because this woman was so nice.

So I was mostly sleepless last night.

Today we took an easy hike at one of our favorite spots: Woods Lake.

But I checked the weather in Costa Rica instead of Placerville. I won't do that again.

We got caught in a tremendous thunderstorm at our picnic destination.
Thunder, lightning, tall trees, open meadows, hailstones, the works!
So instead if eating our nice lunch of fried chicken and watermelon under the pine trees, we stood soaked and huddled as big hailstones wailed down on us, turning the ground white. Molly hated the hail, because it hit so hard. We were completely drenched.

We'd left our rain parkas in the car, and brought a book on flower identification instead.

It's four hours later, we're home and dry and I'm still really cold. We had to run past a whole FIELD of wild strawberries without stopping. On the drive back we saw that the storm had left actual snow, not hail, by the side of the road.