Cut Rounds, errr, Biscuits, Lola and Max

Another episode of Edwardian Farm has gotten me tickled over the differences in Brit-speak and American-speak. In episode 9, Ruth has gone to quite a lot of trouble learning how to put together a proper Devon cream tea. She's learned how to traditionally make clotted cream (easy), and it has me drooling.

She's also learned how to make the area's Cut Rounds, upon which the clotted cream was served with jam or marmalade. Well, Cut Rounds from Devon are simply American biscuits, buttermilk biscuits to be more precise. Since I've not tasted a cut round, I can't be sure, but from watching them being mixed the only difference I saw was how the rounds are cut.  In England what they call biscuits, we call cookies.

We seem to be having our usual autumn which has become the new normal - from hot summer to cool weather in one week. Used to be we had very hot Augusts, with Septembers becoming cooler, and one could enjoy September and the first part of October. I even remember going Trick or Treating rarely having to wear a coat. In the last 20  years, it's become more normal to go from having to have the A/C on to needing to have the heater on in one week.

Max was in this weekend. We didn't get a lot done. The kitchen got cleaned up, and some groceries were bought. He brought barbecue left from his company's "Employee Appreciation Lunch," and I appreciated it greatly. In the evenings we watched "Tales from the Green Valley."

The yard needs mowing, but the lawn mower is refusing to move. It runs; it just won't go anywhere. Sigh. There's always something, it seems, that needs fixing.

On Friday we had a sump pump attached to the heater and pipes run to pump the condensate over to a proper drain. Joe, bless him, decided to simply knock a hole in the basement floor and let it drip out there. The problem with that is that every time the ground was saturated with water, so was the basement. Now we've just got to plug that hole up, and we might have a dry basement.

Physically, Lola has been doing better lately. She's gotten off her jag of wanting to sleep all day. That makes her steadier on her feet and less shaky getting around. Mentally, she's a mess. I've had to take her trash can away again because she started dumping half-full glasses of juice and water in it. Also, there was a whole stack of prized photographs in it, which I managed to save from a dousing. Now I just have to pick up all the food and candy wrappers she throws on the floor.

She's begun to want to eat her food with her fingers a lot. She has to poke her forefinger in everything on her plate. Then sometimes she picks up her fork and sometimes she doesn't. She's also developed a strange demeanor when I'm in the room with her. She stares in my direction at stomach level and won't speak. She won't look up to see who's in the room with her, and she won't look directly at the person. Other than that, she's carrying on getting up and watching TV all day.