Fifth of July

I had Friday off as per usual until I got a phone call about 7:15 am, a bleary hello? "Dr. ___ needs something typed on a patient, is anyone coming in today?" Um, I don't know, give me about ten minutes. So got up, quickly put on some clothes (always a good thing in my case) and trotted off to work. I found the document they needed and transcribed that and noticed there were two more similarly high priority documents so got those finished as well. Just as I was nearly finished, my co-worker walked in. Gasp! I didn't know you were coming in on the holiday! "Yeah, we aren't traveling anywhere and I would rather work than use up PTO." Okay, I'm outta here.

Went home and made Kool Pickles. I have seen these mentioned on "Good Eats" twice, they look pretty and seem gross so I thought yeah, make 'em. Start with a largish jar of Kosher Dill pickles. Drain juice into a container. Pull out pickles and quarter the cukes. Add 1 pound by weight of sugar (2 1/3 cups) to the mixture as well as two packages of Cherry Kool-aid and mix well. Pour into glass jar containing the now quartered cukes and store in fridge for one week. It will take that long for the cukes to absorb the sugar and coloring and turn a rather pretty shade of red. Very poisonous looking actually. So I will post a picture of them once they have pickled appropriately.

I also decided to whip up a quick batch of potato salad. I got out about 12 red potatoes and boiled for 20 minutes in salted water. The last five minutes I dropped in 8 eggs and allowed them to hard boil. Drain, cool, chop into biggest bowl. Had some green stuffed olives marinating with a few small dill pickles so chopped them, chopped one onion mix well. Mixed about 1 cup mayo, 2 Good squirts yellow mustard, shake of red pepper flakes, couple shakes celery seed, 2 tablespoons chopped garlic, add some of the dill pickle juice, stir well, fold gently into the chopped ingredients, cram into a storage container for the fridge. Dang! It wouldn't all fit! Put balance of potato salad into bowl, get spoon, have lunch! Yummy!

We stayed home for the celebration and heard only muted fireworks off in the distance, didn't even hear the one guy who has a cannon or personal Howitzer fire the thing off last night. There are not many children living on this portion of the street to no locally irritating firecrackers. On a slightly different note, our little neighborhood is turning into quite the urban eye sore. The white triplex is empty and has a window broken out upstairs and the doors were open for a while until the police showed up and posted various warnings. Wish the out of town owners would at least get the lawns mowed. Then right around the corner,two more little houses are sitting empty either for rent or have notices tacked up. The economy I would guess however any one of those houses would be perfect for someone leaving a foreclosure I'm thinking.