We started our morning by jumping a neighbor's car, and then one of our work trucks as well so we could get Sheri off to work (covering for Dr. Josefina after her appendetomy--thanks Sheri!) Then we spent our day off today with our usual walk up to town, stopping in market to look for some basil and tomato paste for some spaghetti sauce. We made our tour around town and ran into lots of friends from Paxot and Mactzul. While knocking out the shopping, Kemmel headed over to Buen Samaritano hosptial to pick up some lab results for me, but turns out they weren't in because Dr. Hoak the surgeon, who was bringing them from the Capital, was stuck in traffic on the highway due to a mudslide. So we headed on home to get to get a jump on the yard work and relaxing.


As I didn't find any fresh basil, we decided to check out the local Natural Medicine shop to see what kinds of herbs he sells(they use a lot of common culinary herbs here for their medicinal effect as well) . We were greeted by a 10-year-old counter clerk who seemed to know his herbs pretty well. I asked for some basil and got handed a bag of dried stems, leaf litter and flower pods. When I said I didn't think it was basil (even though it was clearly labeled so on the shelf) he smelled it and said yeah, it is. I went ahead and bought a Q10 bag of it for kicks and also a bag of rosemary. The rosemary actually looks like rosemary and is stem free.

After Kemmel set out to sculpt our lawn, I got to work on my spagetti sauce. To my surprise, one of the little pouches of tomato paste turned out to be ketchup, so I had to quickly spoon that out and rinse off the tomatos and find a (almost identically packaged) tomato paste pouch. It turned out pretty good despite the trace amounts of ketchup still cliniging to my sauted onions. We decided against the dried basil addition to the sauce due to the high twig and stem content, but I did manage to harvest 6 fresh basil leaves from my tiny potted plants.

About 2:00 in the afternoon, all the buses that must have been stuck in traffic earlier came racing by, one after another, making up for lost time. It sounded like a speedway in the backyard. Now we are hanging out listening to the rain and the local marching band practice their monotonous salsa-style parade ditties. I'm pretty sure our Nocona High School band practices had to have sounded much better!