Summer Niii---hiiiights!

(What, you say? Tell you more, tell you more?)

Erm, actually, not much to tell. The Mags family gets themselves into quite the piggish summer vacation lazies every year. We stay up way too late watching old movies and various HBO programming*, and then all sleep in until 9:00 (me) and 10:00 (the children, and lately, the husband). And, thus, as OG is hard to get started on the best of days, we don't physically MOVE from the house until about noon, when, of course, it is already time for lunch.

Today, we JUST made it to the free Alamo Drafthouse kids' movie showing at 11:00 - and that was with a significant amount of cajoling and threatening. (It's "The Iron Giant" this week, which I had forgotten was really good. It was Brad Bird's first big animated feature, and it deserved way more press than it got. I also forgot that it made me cry when I first saw it, and thus will always make me cry, even in public movie theaters, much to the embarrassment of my oldest child.)

After that, there was...well, home time, more movies and computer games, and then a brief jaunt off to the neighborhood pool before dinner, which was thrown together hastily, as I had my eyes on the bigger prize - a HUGE vat of homemade salsa, from my garden tomato-and-jalapeno haul.

I hadn't ever made salsa before, really - no, wait, I have made tomatillo salsa several times, and lots of Hatch chile enchilada sauce, but every time I've tried making just straight-up red salsa, it hasn't come out very good. Usually, it's really watery, and not a lot of flavor compared to the bottled ones.

But, this time, I took the time to roast, peel, and seed the jalapenos beforehand, and I also blanched the tomatoes to get the skins off correctly. Since that seemed to work out well, I briefly parboiled the red onions and a serious mess o' garlic, too. Then I just threw it all into the food processor with some lime juice, salt, pepper, and oregano, and after it was nearly pureed, I threw in a bunch of cilantro.

And, children - it was GOOD this time. There are three largish ziplock bags in my freezer that I shall look forward to thawing for quite some time.

So, the sum total of activity for my day was: waking up, driving to and summarily watching a movie, idly picking random objects up around the house while my children played video games and/or watched another movie, walking to the pool and briefly standing around therein, and then making salsa. And now, I blog.

Goddamn, I love summer.
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*So, is anyone else besides me really into "Big Love?" And, if you are, do you feel as conflicted as I do about liking it? Because you KNOW in your heart that it's a really unrealistic, sanitized view of polygamy, which is REALLY a horrible practice that victimizes and infantilizes women, and yet THIS SHOW makes you kinda, sorta, want a sister-wife or two to babysit the kids and cook dinner for you when you get home, and have kinky sex with your husband when you're just not in the mood?

Seriously. I'm half-shopping for one.