Today is Day 5 of our vacation in the Catskills, but it is a working day for me and Christian.  He is off doing some scouting and meetings regarding his inn project.  Me?  I’m going to be working on my dissertation proposal by a stream.  Yesterday, I read a book my advisor suggested.  I was inspired by my friend A who worked during the weekend when she was here.  I’m hoping the different environment will get me motivated and back on track with that whole ‘work’ thing. (It will also take my mind off of the job I interviewed for before coming here, which I really, really want.)

Yesterday, I wrote about how Chloe was running wild (literally).  Well, now she’s afraid to go outside.  Arg!  This dog!

On Monday, after dropping A off at the bus, we stopped at a roadside fruit stand and got strawberries.  Those things start to go bad the minute you hand your money over, so I made a strawberry bread yesterday.  The kitchen here didn’t seem to have any vanilla extract, which the recipe called for, so the taste was a little bland, but it was fun to bake.  The mixer in the kitchen is an old model that I remember my mother having when I was little.  The big knob has 10 different settings for different uses (e.g., creaming butter and sugar, cookies, bread, etc) and the bowl is set off to the side so you can scrape and turn, scrape and turn.  I felt a little guilty for liking the mixer a little better than my red Kitchen Aid at home.  I’ll have to go home and bake something nice to make it up to her!

This week, Christian and I are in vacation in the Catskills.  We rented a little house with an amazing backyard (pretty flowers, a stream running through, and a fire pit) and are enjoying the fresh air and stars.  I don’t know why, but whenever we go somewhere and we can cook outside, we do nothing but.  We have a barbecue in our backyard, so I don’t know why we don’t do the same when we are at home – maybe we don’t have the time.  But, last night, we had homemade pizza made in the fire pit.  It took a little bit of experimentation, but it finally worked.  We had to make the fire be pretty big and hot and had to put a piece of metal on top to keep the heat in the pit, but it worked beautifully.  We put sausage on the pizza that we got from a farmer’s market.  It was the best sausage (okay, not as good as the turkey sausage we get from our farmer’s market but it was still pretty darn good).  I wish I had taken photos, but we ate it really fast!

Chloe is enjoying the outdoors – perhaps a bit too much.  She’s taking the off-leash life a little too seriously.  Christian left this morning and we stayed here – she tried to chase him down the road!  She can move fast for such an old girl.  The other day she went into the neighbor’s yard and teased his dog which was tied up.  Last night, I had to go down to the stream and drag her back up the house after dinner when we wanted to go to bed.  Right now, she’s tied up to the porch and really has no idea what’s going on.  She keeps trying to pull on the cord, but it won’t go.  She never learns … I will always win!