Now That's Dedication

I usually am not the type of blogger who shares the ups and downs of her personal life with her audience. While I understand the fun of reading such things, I've never been able to get myself to blog regularly about broken toilets or car repairs that destroy the budget or health issues, unless they somehow impact sustainable living. Thus, you would be excused for thinking that somehow Mr. FC&G and I roll along here smoothly, rebatching our soap and roasting our chicken and preserving our harvest without a blip.

For the past few days, however, it has been nothing at all like that, and for once I'm willing to admit it.

Last week I had knee surgery.  Now, this has been a long time coming.  I was so thrilled to finally get a doc willing to do something about my lousy knee that I actually did a victory dance in the parking lot. This probably didn't do much to further my case that my knee was a piece of painful crud most of the time, but hey, I was already on the schedule! No backing out now!

I'm not kidding when I say that one of the things on my surgery prep list was "make pickles."  Now, the surgeon didn't specifically say "make pickles" as part of the prep; my list from him was more focused on arrival times and finding someone to drive me home, but I was nobody's fool.  We went to the grocery, set up an area for recovery, and I made pickles.

Because, of course, the cucumbers are coming in fast and furious right now, and of course I knew I wasn't going to feel much like standing over a hot canner on a couple of crutches in the first few days. So, pickles it was.

The first batch of pickles got me through the first three or four days of my recovery, until the counter was taken over by cucumbers once again. (Fortunately, I felt good enough from the first day to crutch my way into the garden and point at things I wanted Mr. FC&G to harvest.) So, last night, I hobbled out to the kitchen and made pickles.  Luckily, the knee was feeling good and a small batch of pickles didn't seem out of the question. So I made them.

Because you'd better believe that I'm not letting those cucumbers go to waste.  And you can bet that I will think with amusement on my antics hopping about the kitchen on one leg making pickles this winter when I'm eating them, hopefully right before I head to a dance class and dance on a knee that finally works as it should.