Our Week Back Home

It's Friday already?

It was last Saturday evening when we returned from the Oregon coast. Since then we have been busy.

We have done our 3.25 mile walk each morning until today. Since it's Friday, it is breakfast-out morning, and we stayed and visited until almost 11:00. Then we stopped at the local nursery, Furney's, to take advantage of their sale on pots to shop for a pot for Tom's rapidly growing brugmansia. 

This thing started out in the spring in a six inch pot. We've been keeping it's now big nursery pot in a tub of water to keep it going while we are away. When it's cooler, Tom will get it planted in that new ceramic pot sitting next to it. 

When the brugmansia blooms, it looks like this. Right now it is between blooms, but setting lots of buds. 

On Sunday afternoon we went to the stadium for a Sounders game. We won!

Beginning Monday morning we began another crusade of getting the yard back in shape. We went for our walks early, then spent until noon each morning clipping and pulling and mowing and edging and deadheading.

And picking. Bouquets of sweet peas for the table and vases full of dahlias around the house. Cucumbers and beans and carrots and beets, and, of course, zucchini. 

I made two double batches of zucchini bread, eight loaves, this week. Tom helped. 

Those tomatoes in the basket are part of the crop we've picked, which is coming on fast. It's time for tomato, cottage cheese and fresh basil salads. Basil from the garden, of course. 

We have a canna in bloom, and another getting ready to bloom, in pots on the patio. That's a first for us as we dabble a bit in tropical plants. 

We will be hosting a little workshop for our garden group on making glass flowers, so yesterday when it got too hot to garden we made the rounds of thrift shops and went a little crazy. I designed these glass flowers, which await cleaning and gluing. I'll use a couple of them as demonstrations, and then offer our glass supplies to members of the group to make their own. With the price tags still on most items, we'll just charge the original cost of the items. 

We have been having lunch on the patio every day. Josy the Cat likes to join us out there. We started out on Sunday with a light jacket. Yesterday we were driven indoors by 2:30, when the sun reached the table.

Today it was 90F by noon. After getting home we spent some time cleaning house, since we couldn't remember the last time we did that, and we usually maintain a once-a-week cleaning schedule. 

Then I had my lunch inside at 1:30, but Tom, who likes heat more than I do, dined outside.  

He came back in at 2:45 and is now napping on the couch.

Josy hadn't decided yet. She may have found a cool place in the shade on the concrete.

It's now 93.3 and rising. The air conditioner may finally kick in today. It's set at 75, but it's hotter than that upstairs, where I am, so I'm signing off!