Last Blush

The roses are at their last blush. Today I picked my last rose bouquet of summer....fall begins tomorrow. While some things look spent and faded, you can still see plenty of color in my garden. I got out in the yard for a couple hours and it actually was warm enough to take off my sweatshirt as I pruned and weeded. But tonight I hear the rain again. So what else occupied me this weekend:
-Tutoring 2 older Vietnamese people from my church in preparation for their citizenship test. (I must be insane because I am certain they will vote Republican if they pass!)
-Reading the newspaper and reading blogs
-Two loads of laundry
-Went to a garden sale at Herr Garden Shop in Burien; only bought 3 perennials
-Made an Apple Crisp and Paella with plenty for leftovers tomorrow
-Went to a wine tasting (Ripasso wine) and enjoyed visiting with friends.
-Watched a dismal Packer-Cowboy game
-Avoided work for my classroom as much as I could and now I have a few loose ends that are going to become nightmares if I don't go upstairs and look in my 'book bag'

The time was.....

3:25PM in Tunis and 6:25AM in Seattle as I woke up this fine morning to the sound of pitter pattering raindrops on our grey deck that matches the grey sky which has covered our Emerald City all of today.
Yes, we have one clock in the house (pictured above) which is set to Tunisian time so that at a glance, we know just what hour of the day our daughter is experiencing in Tunis. She had called us in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (3:35am) to let us know that she had arrived in Tunis all in one piece. But today we wanted to know if we could contact her. We tried once, twice, a text (That worked right away!), and third time a charm; we were talking! 50 minutes of interstate phone card time became a truncated nine minutes and then our card ran out. But we had heard her voice and now we know that it IS possible to reach her across the miles of continents and oceans. The other arriving students were mostly from Oregon and mostly friendly. The French classes would be easy. Truth be told, TOO EASY. She and some other OSU students had made their way to a Mediterranean beach yesterday and enjoyed a swim in balmy turquoise waters. The food is delicious. The women don't all wear scarves but you notice more than in Seattle. They don't wear shorts; not even long shorts. There are a number of women who wear tight, TIGHT pants. I got the impression that although females don't show a lot of skin, it doesn't necessarily mean they dress like nuns. She plans on meeting her Tunisian host family tomorrow. She will most likely be one of two students assigned to a family. She prefers to be the only one so as she would be forced to become acculturated more quickly, but she is ok with being one of two. She is suffering internet withdrawal; she is not certain that she will be able to post on her blog as often as she would like. She has been to the Medina and she made mental notes of gifts that she might buy for friends and family (Goodie, goodie!) Then they walked beyond the Medina to a lovely tiled plaza where she took pictures of a spectacular view of the city. That is all I can remember of the nine minutes; that and the sound of her voice, happy and confident.

Did you watch SNL?

So, if I had not been out enjoying Damien Jurado playing music at the Triple Door I would have been enjoying a good chuckle watching Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on SNL. Go to the Chicago Tribune for a review of the skit or watch it here:

Remember those curtains....

the ones I labored over during Labor Day weekend? My daughter sent me photos of the completed project, hanging in her apartment windows. I'm totally thrilled with how they turned out. NOW I can say it was worth the effort.

Humongous Bouquet

I am well aware that late August is the correct time to prune Hydrangea Macrophylla 'Nigra', but it was flopping every which way so I went ahead and lopped away, well aware that I may be sacrificing next summer's blooms. I ended up with this enormous bouquet and being that our house is NOT a McMansion I could not find a suitable spot for it's display so it ended up on the deck table. As for what else I did today:
-An early am 4 mile run in the fog; I love, love, LOVE my runs!
-House cleaning; my weekly vacuum and scouring of the main floor.
-Lesson plans and tea at my house with my teaching partner.
-A yummy birria (goat) torta from Paisanos in nearby White Center for lunch
-An unexpected and happy IM session online with 'Honey Girl'. She is back in Chicago and we were so delighted to hear that she had received our most recent 'care package'. On Tuesday she leaves for Tunisia! Exciting times ahead for our 'one and only'!
-Pruning and weeding for 2 hours
-Blogging and reading online.
-And for tonight... We are going to a Damien Jurado concert. It starts at 10:00.
Time to 'sign off'. There is no way this middle aged woman will be awake at 10:00 without coffee!

And just so I am ahead of the game...here is my photo for Green Thumb Sunday:

Breezy Blooms

It is a lovely September day: blue skies, sunshine and breezy. it was difficult to get any blooms to sit still long enough to capture with my camera. Here are Yellow Wax Bells (Kirengeshoma) waving in the shade. I like the shadows on the leaves as much as the blooms.
And white Japanese anemone waving on tall and slender wand-stems.
The bees are abundant as they work the asters in my sunny bed.

The pink Japanese anemones multiply every year. They are one of the best fillers in every West Seattle garden!

The Color Purple

O.K. I know I am a day late on posting for Green Thumb Sunday but the photos were TAKEN on Sunday. I shot them in a hurry and I was rather surprised that they turned out so lovely.

My Porch Plants

I did not have time today to work in my yard as I would have liked but I couldn't resist taking a few photos in my front yard. I especially like the triangular flowers and fuzzy leaves on the Wandering Jew.

The August Pie

The August Pie is a blackberry pie, luscious and juicy. Usually I pick blackberries on Labor Day weekend; not a hard thing to do in Seattle where the bushes spring up in every untended yard, park, or roadside strip. The curtain sewing job was mine so that left the berry picking to the husband/daughter team. They whined about the thorny canes and the sticky, icky spiders and webs, but they sure were quick to eat blackberry pie ala mode!

Curtain Call

For the past two weeks I have been going on home visits to the families of the students who will be in my classroom AND I have been working in my classroom; labeling and laminating, putting up posters, moving furniture, setting up files, attending meetings and collaborating with colleagues.

But for this holiday weekend I set school aside and I sewed almost non stop to finish curtains for my daughter's Chicago apartment. I used to sew, in fact I sewed a lot. The machine I bought when I was in college, sometime around 1975, is the same machine I struggled with this past weekend. Every few inches the thread would break off or tangle on the underside of the fabric. So every hour I seemed to be consulting with the manual and changing something; I changed the needle, the pressure on the foot, the tension in the thread, the tension in the bobbin (yes, the sacred and finicky bobbin), I even changed thread. I finally stopped and dusted it's innards and oiled every moving shaft and gear. The machine did not get the best of me and finally the four lined 47" by 77" panels were finished. I even hand hemmed them. I wouldn't say I won the 'battle' with the sewing machine but I can say "Mission accomplished!" Thanks to me, my daughter will be able to get her beauty sleep, unperturbed by the street light outside her windows. Seems to me I should've made her an eye mask instead.

Poo Poo Point Trail

On Saturday we hiked Poo Poo Point Trail which begins behind the stadium of Isaquah High School. The trailhead is not easy to find; you have to walk about a quarter of a mile behind the stadium, taking one of the trails leading east,away from the stadium. First you will pass the trailhead for the Adventure Trail; that is not the one you want if you are headed to Poo Poo Point. We made that mistake and walked about 10 minutes before meeting someone with a map and discovered our error. We DID eventually get to signs to direct us UP, UP, UP Tiger Mountain to Poo Poo Point where we hoped to see para gliders launching off the side of the mountain. No such luck, but the view of Lake Sammamish was breathtaking and we really felt a sense of accomplishment to see how high up we were once we walked out of the woods. From the para gliding area if you take the trail about 5 minutes south you come to a small meadow (kind of made us want to break into Sound of Music) and this lovely view of Mt.Rainier. For us it was a moderately difficult hike. Even with poles the downhill can be taxing on a person's knees. It is 4. miles each way. Although we met people along the way I would not call it a crowded hike. It certainly was a quiet trail; not even a lot of birdsong, just an occasional airplane overhead. Nary a toot from a train was heard; they say the Poo Poo name comes from the sound of trains in the valley below. So we get back to our car, look up towards where we had hiked and of course, we see para gliders!

The Waning Days of August

Our vacation and family reunion in July seem so distant. I feel like August has just steamrolled over me. The garden in August is rich with the smell of lilies or dead possums; yes, we have experienced both. Last Saturday found us frantically hauling a dead possum from under our shed, digging a shallow grave in the vacant lot next door and burying said possum in a shallow grave sans ceremony. PHEW! You do not know stench unless you have smelled bloated, rotting possum flesh in 80 degree heat. That was a nasty, nasty job and I am so glad we discovered and dealt with the source of the stench before our Sunday BBQ which was held to celebrate the arrival of Honey Girl, home for three weeks from Chicago.

August found us tying up the loose ends of summer projects. My industrious husband tiled the tub-surround walls and installed a new shower door.

The icy water painting on the opposite wall is also his work. As well as this painting:

And while he has been tiling and painting, I have been refinishing those end tables,
attending two days of workshops to prepare for teaching; one that sapped my enthusiasm (shall remain nameless), another (Love and Logic re: classroom management) made me smile, kept me alert and seemed practical/useful. I also have made about 15 home visits to incoming kindergartners and I am both excited and a bit daunted by all the new, young enthusiasm that is headed my way on the first day of school. I have had children read to me, do cart wheels for me, hula hoop for me, count their lemonade stand money for me, introduce me to their pets, their grandparents, their siblings.

But today I gave to family pursuits: I went shopping with my daughter, our family of three went downtown to see the movie Bottle Shock (very good; especially if you are interested in wine. Even if not,this is an easy, happy movie to see.) Then we went to the open house of our dentist's office. He just remodeled his 17th/18th floor space. It is a spectacular penthouse office with lots of great views and a roof top garden. Oh, and he's a GREAT dentist! Lastly we enjoyed ice cream from a new shop closer to our own neighborhood.

Tremendous Tomato Plants

When he is not in his treehouse, my nephew, Tanner, just might be helping his mom in her garden. Lisa's tomato plants are eight feet tall! Pacific Northwest gardeners like myself are all agog at tomato plants that are that robust. Lisa lives on a woodsy piece of property that once belonged to our maternal grandfather in Northeastern WI. The fence around the garden is to keep the deer out, they come right up to the windows of their house and eat her flowers at night. You've got to be a tenacious gardener to put up with bold critters munching on delectable plant life when your back is turned. More likely, Tanner is taking a dip in his pool to beat the heat.

Tanner's Tree House

My nephew Tanner has this awesome treehouse. To be honest; it is more my brother-in-law's treehouse; he has put an incredible amount of energy and ingenuity in creating this haven above the forest floor. My guess is that at some point Tanner is just going to push his dad out and say, "Hey pops, this is my roosting place, doesn't the sign say Tanner's Treehouse?"

The Fair Experience

What visit to Wisconsin would be complete with out a visit to a county fair? I'm not foolhardy enough to do a state fair like Diana, but a county fair, we were up for that!
At the request of our kind host and hostess, Honey Girl and I donned aprons and put in a couple hours of scooping ice cream for the Dairy Board's booth. When in the country do as the farmers do, right? It really WAS a fun, and certainly unique vacation experience. But seriously, scooping cement would've been easier. We cringed every time someone said "Vanilla" because it was the most 'brick like'. I got a slight case of the giggles at one point because I felt like Lucy in the I Love Lucy t.v. series where she is trying to keep up with an assembly line and bad goes to worse in a hurry. Fortunately the crowds thinned and we got to create our own sundae with strawberries, chocolate and caramel. Don't ever expect a vacation in WI to be low fat!

View slideshow



"PULL KELBY, PULL!" we cheered. See the fierce determination in his freckled face? I couldn't believe he had that much muscle and energy left in his 5 year old body. We had walked around the Farmers Market in the morning, arrived at the Fair at noon and here he is, a couple hours later in the heat of the day, in a Pedal Pull which is a kid version of a Tractor Pull. The kids are grouped by their body weight. He was in the 40 to 60 pound group. The trailer that he is pulling has a weighted load. The box on the trailer measures the distance that it is pulled until the child stops pedaling. Kelby came in 2nd!! So what did he and ALL the other pedalers get; ice cream from the Dairy Board booth of course!


Soft bunnies and colorful roosters and so many other animals to see. The barns are always my favorite part of a fair.

A Coffee Shop Meeting

At Alvora's
Originally uploaded by mtnester.

Look, it's Diana who gave up a Saturday morning and cruised over Wisconsin county roads and negotiated one way streets and wound up and around the innards of a parking garage and then with a hop and a skip (OK, I'm embellishing) found her way to the front of the Inn on The Park, our agreed upon meeting place. Yes, Diana of Piffle! What fun to meet a fellow blogger in real time! Her hair is an enviable glossy auburn and her eyes smiled hello before she even said a word. Talk came easy and she even put up with meeting family members that I dragged along. Now I fully expect that she tote her 'family unit' out to the great Northwest for a visit.

Madison Farmer's Market

I have SO many photos of the Capitol and the square around it that I really didn't need another one. But what else can you do but say "Cheese!" and "Smile for the camera!" when you see a sign like the one in the top photo. Then there is the stately beauty of the capitol building at the end of State Street, and the disciplined lines of bountiful veggies in the market stands, and the farmer himself wiping the sweat off his brow, and what about those crazy gourds?

The Rural Life

View slideshow of Lodi WI

I'm back from Wisconsin with over 200 photos and I am having a heck of a time paring it down to a reasonable number to capture the memories. Impossible, I know. Anyway, this slide show is Lodi WI. I really intended on including a few shots of Madison but that did not happen. I keep forgetting that in BigHugeLabs you cannot edit your slideshow once you hit publish. My sister Lynn and her family live in Lodi. She lives on a street with beautiful old Victorian and craftsman style homes, each one with it's own distinctive porch, windows, and fancy trim. You sit in the swing on the front porch and everyone who passes by waves or says "hi" and the municipal pool is free and so refreshing although as you can see in the slideshow we were about the only ones in the pool as it was only about 75 degrees out. The entire time we were in WI the weather really was not as humid as I recalled and twice we had those summer storms where the rain comes down in sheets and thunder in the night that startles you at the edge of your dreams.