'Tis the season

Shhhuuush.  Be verwy, verwy quiet.  It's tax season and that always make Mrs. Phactor a bit edgy, so on those few occasions when we do see each other, TPP tip toes around. This particular weekend TPP  \mainly tip-toed around the kitchen.  On Saturday he was cooking the main dishes for a quite nice Cuban menu for our dinner group: ropa vieja and Moros y Christianos, beef stew Cuban style and rice with black beans.  On Sunday TPP harvested his annual batch of corned beef a few days late for St. Patrick's Day. You simmer it until it's quite tender, and somewhat de-salinated. And then it's baked with an orange marmalade-whole grain Irish whisky mustard glaze (yum!) served with a lovely mushroom soup, colcannon, and apple sauce.  This year's batch came out quite well  according to those what were fed (hint: don't hurry the process; use good spices). You cannot buy corned beef like this in a store. That was a lot of cooking, but TPP did stay out of trouble by keeping the kitchen untrashed more or less and making some nice cocktails: Irish whisky - sweet vermouth (1:1) on a big rock and a dash or two of bitters.  There won't be any more entertaining until after April 15th!

Leave us alone; we be gardenin'

Spring garden cleanup is no small chore. The primary salvation is that lots of pretty narcissi are in bloom everywhere.  Now that the bun-buns have tulips to eat, the various shrubs can be released from their cages.  By now swelling buds pretty well reveal where and what requires pruning.  An ancient Nanking cherry died and had to be removed. It's lacy white flowering was always so attractive. It was massive and now an area about 20 x 25 feet is in need of a new plant(s) that can deal with the semi-shade and a large black walnut's chemical warfare.  Perhaps a new magnolia, or an Asian lilac, or a magnolia, or the new Exochorda racemosa (image courtesy of Nadiatalent, Creative Commons) already ordered, or a magnolia, or a Pterostyrax.  What do you think?

 The perennial beds, the herb garden, and wind-row fences accumulate an amazing volume of leaves; the Phactors probably remove more leaves from just these places than most people in the burbs remove from their whole yards.  And you have to know which perennials need to be uncovered, de-mulched first, e.g., fern-leafed peony, clematis (bush and vine), species tulips.  Once you get the leaf situation under control, the lily pond can be cleaned out.  The fish show up and indicate they are hungry; it has been 5 months since they were fed, so no big surprise.  Friday marked the end of a taxing season for Mrs. Phactor, and thankfully for those who share the same state with her, this coincides with the beginning of the serious gardening season, and garden activity not only provides exercise, but a positive therapy to recover from the tax season.  TPP trusts his were filed, properly; now to find some compensation for his tax preparer.  Maybe a magnoia? 

Tax Day - My wife is back and decompressing

Well, the Phactors have survived another tax season, physically, financially, and psychologically.  Today has been a long day, for both of us, and we still have a couple of hours to go because the late shuttle bus from Ohare arrives at 9:40 pm and we must meet it.  By coincidence of scheduling our big black feline is adopting her newest German graduate student today.  She seems to have a particular penchant for them, or to put it another way, visiting graduate students staying in our guest room find out that it comes complete with cat, but from the cat perspective, all this is mine, including any bodies sleeping in my bed, and these young females seem to really like cats, a nice mutualism. It's quite a marvelous thing that tax season has a very definitive end, unlike field research that never ends.  But the long hours are taxing too.  In more normal years, the gardening begins in earnest just after tax season, but so much needed to be done earlier this year, more gardening than usual had to squeezed into tax season.  Well, so much for that.  Mrs. Phactor & F1 are chilling on the couch, decompressing, with the assistance of their yoga class, and the most fine Italian dinner prepared by none other than yours truly.  However, having paid his fair share for running this country and Lincolnland too, it would be nice to get some higher quality government, you know getting your monies worth so to speak. So having amply compensated my own personal tax preparer via a handsome gift, and a stint in the Missouri Botanical Garden gift shoppe, which has cost me dearly in the past, we officially close the book on the 2012 tax season, with an exhausted spouse back and recovering.