Garden Update

It seems like a good time for another virtual trip to the garden. Here is the usual shot from the corner where the peas were growing, what seems like a very, very long time ago! You can see the butternut and acorn squashes have grown out over the lawn. The compost bin is to the left of the picture, covered with vines and flowers. I just have a small corner left where I can add things until the vines are finished and pulled out. There is actually a pumpkin growing in the bin! You can see the green colors are not so lush as early in the season and there is a yellowy or tan hue. Since I can't walk into the vines without crushing them, some weeds have grown up too.

I am happy to have some 2nd crop zukes starting to grow fruit to the left in the picture and 2nd crop cukes flowering to the right.

The first crop zukes are pretty beat from relentless picking, mildew and just running their course. I plan to drag the old plants to the burn pile soon, but I'm still picking a few zukes from them for us and the dogs in the meantime.

The tomatillos have set a lot of fruit. It's hard to resist giving the pods a gentle squeeze to feel how much the fruits have grown inside!

The bean row to the right is starting to get past prime, but the second crop row to the left will be ready soon.

Later on, we will have three more varieties in this 3rd crop row.

There are ripe cherry tomatoes and a few larger varieties are turning, but mostly they are still green.

Pie pumpkin.

Decorative gourds.

Decorative gourds taking over the lawn!

An extra warty gourd.

Ripening Jack o'Lantern for carving this fall.

The sunflowers are just beginning to bloom and I hope to get a shot of them soon with Jeff for scale. They are HUGE! The zinnias and 4 o'clocks continue to attract a lot of insects and birds.

Looking across the tomato annex at the flowers.

The current burn pile is about as tall as me already. I am sure it is the first of several we will make as we go through the fall and leaf season too. I won't have room to burn though until the nearby tomatoes and other garden plants are done.

This is a real variety of work to be done including harvesting and clean up and even starting some seeds for fall lettuce and Swiss chard. I'm working on the yard some too, cutting back invasive vines that have grown over the summer.

Coffee

There have recently been a couple of changes to my coffee routine. First, after about 13 years, my faithful little Braun espresso maker died. I was sad! It was a nice shape on the counter and made good coffee. I could operate it with my eyes closed, as they often are first thing in the morning. I bought a new, very cheap espresso maker as similar to the old one as possible. I only need steam, not pumps, etc! So far, the new Delonghi is working well. Here it is steaming away and forming a nice crema on top of the espresso.

The second (disagreeable) change was that Starbuck's stopped selling their syrups in stores and made them only available online at a higher price, plus shipping! I've regularly purchased the vanilla syrup. Well, no more! Now, I'm making my own syrup instead. It's only simple syrup flavored with vanilla. I feel silly that I ever bought it, really. What was I thinking?! Peeking into my fridge: on the left is simple syrup I'll use to make fresh fruit sorbet, on the right is the vanilla flavored syrup for my lattes.

So, despite some hiccups, I am still enjoying my iced lattes. Believe me, they are the best thing after some exercise in the hot weather!

Well, I'm not growing my own coffee, so I've still got the Starbuck's monkey on my back! And, I'm quite partial to the double walled cup I bought this summer. It's great not having condensation dripping all over and the drink stays very cold.

Btw, I did give up coffee entirely for over 4 months starting in January this year, just to see how addicted I was. Turns out, I had no problem without it (no headaches, etc.). When summer came though, I missed iced coffee! When the weather cools again, I think I'll continue having one hot latte a day or so. I like the routine.

Winter Squash...

...for a summer meal!!!

I have never had winter squash ripen so early before. I could hardly believe it, so I just had to test them out for dinner. Yes, they really are ready!

These are acorn squash. (I have not tried the ripe looking butternut squash from the garden yet.) My favorite way to have acorn squash is roasted, with the cups filled with butter and brown sugar.

Every year, I forget how hard it is to cut into them! I should get a power saw, just for squashes ;)

You initially roast them in a 400 degree oven, cut side down in a baking dish with a small amount of water added to it. After 30 minutes, you pour off any remaining water, turn the cups right side up and put a little brown sugar and butter in each. They go back into the oven until they are tender, but be sure to check them every 10 minutes or so and baste them.

The size determines the remaining cooking time once the sugar and butter are added. These took about 45 minutes. Here's one ready to eat.

Even though there are quite a few ripe squashes, many of the vines are still going strong. There are numerous squashes at various growing stages and the vines even continue to set more fruits.

Old Pictures

Before digital cameras, I loved taking pictures as much as I do now. I even took photography classes and developed b&w photos and some color slides. For my own pictures, and family pictures, I have had to work out storage and digitizing solutions. I have digitized a lot, but it is an ongoing process.

In particular, I have a lot of slides. Most of them are from my trips to Spain, Labrador and Denmark, but there are also some from little trips and around home. For a long time, I didn't know what I would do about a reasonable quality and cheap way to transfer them to digital. Also, I wanted it to be fast. An old scanner I had would do slides, 4 at a time, painfully slowly and not get a very satisfactory image either! I also needed to do something fast in the sense that my slides were not storing very well, even in their special slide boxes and were no longer pristine, to say the least.

But, last summer, I came up with an idea when I got a new camera, the Canon PowerShot SX10IS. I set it up on my tripod in the dining room behind the slide projector and projected the slides onto one of my bright white window shades. And, for several exhausting late nights, I took pictures of each of the projected slide images, one after another, while it was good and dark outside.

I have uploaded a lot of the images to Facebook. You can see the albums even if you are not a Facebook user. (But 'friend me' if you are! There is a link in the sidebar over there--->)

First, I uploaded all my Labrador (Canada, not dogs!) slides to Facebook as I knew the most people would be interested in them, from the villages where I took the pictures. This picture shows the fog starting to roll in between the outer islands in Nain.

Labrador
Album 1
Album 2
Album 3

Then, I posted just a sampling of my cross country trip pictures in one album, like this one of Crater Lake.

Finally, in the last view days, I cropped out the 'screen' from around all the Spain images and uploaded them. This is one of my most favorite pictures that I ever took. It was in La Alberca. I like so much about it, like the boy in the background, skipping to the fountain.

Spain (and some of Portugal too)
Album 1
Album 2
Album 3
Album 4

Also, over a year after digitizing them, I've uploaded my Denmark images. They were taken in Copenhagen, Roskilde and Lejre. Here is the goose patrol at the Lejre Center.

Lejre Seminar/Copenhagen
Album 1
Album 2

All the pictures are terribly out of order and I haven't taken the time to label them, but at least they are digitized and shared with people who were there and may even be in the pictures. Perhaps they will even be found by the people I lost touch with!

I won't bother to upload all the around home ones, but perhaps I will occasionally post a 'vintage' one here. Here's an old one of me on my horse, Charlie.

And trail riding on the farm.

Digitizing all the old photos is quite a trip down memory lane! (The actual lane/old road in the above picture is called Lover's Lane.)

I have often wondered over the past few years if I would have preferred prints to slides in the long run, not that I could do anything about it. While prints tend to be easier to digitize, once I determined a way to digitize my slides, I was happy I'd used slide film. You know how the light in slides combined with sitting in a darkened room you can't see the details of, can kind of transport you into the image? I think some of the luminosity of a slide comes across even in the pictures of the slides.

And speaking of 'memory lane'. It is so strange to remember how second nature it was to try to anticipate a shot, line up a shot, focus manually, adjust settings and take a picture with a plain old SLR camera. It was so hard to point and shoot really fast to catch something fleeting. I remember the rush of trying to get a shot of someone moving and wanting them just so. I remember missing so many shots. But then, the *thrill* of realizing (often weeks later when the film was developed!) that I'd gotten a shot I really wanted or one that came out better than I'd thought it had. Because of the concentration photography with limited film took, I really remember a lot about the moments in time I took the pictures, unlike a lot of my current digital snaps. There are a lot of examples of this in my Spain images. For example, the girl moving through this image. I remember willing her not to move out of the frame of the stairwell before I could get the shot. I remember actually woefully thinking I'd pretty much missed it at the time!

Or, this shot of a bull getting a little payback time. It happened in a blink!

My photos also remind me of who I was at various stages of my life and the sorts of things that fascinated me. A lot of these things are still in my nature, but it's still entertaining to look back sometimes.

Pickings for Dinner

Edited to add:
Dinner was: a zucchini, ham and swiss frittata with boiled green beans alongside. Also, a simple salad. I combined the tomatoes and cucumbers with thin slices of Vidalia onion and gave them an improvised version of the Greek Dressing treatment a la Nigella in her book Forever Summer. Some of the dressing got on the beans and made them extra delicious too.

Summer Reading

Something about spending a lot of time out in the sun and gardening makes me so tired. When I finally sit down in the evenings in the comfort of the air conditioning and think I'll do a bit of reading, I find myself nodding off or feeling it's easier to catch up on some TV shows than hold up a book. (How lazy sounding is that!!!) However, I have recently read London in Chains: An English Civil War Novel and Alchemy of Fire and a young adult book called Beyond the North Wind, all by Gillian Bradshaw. Her books are always so good I can't put them down. Her characters seem so real I miss them when I finish the books and I have to remind myself they are fictional!

I have recently ordered some more historical fiction by Bradshaw, Dark North, The Sun's Bride, Imperial Purple and a couple more of her books for young people called The Dragon and the Thief and The Land of Gold. I have copies of and have read (sometimes more than once) most of her other books. Her science fiction is excellent as well. In that genre, I particularly liked The Wrong Reflection. I am going to try to track down the remaining sci-fi ones I haven't read yet.

Also in the reading queue, I have a copy of Faceless Killers: The First Kurt Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell. I love the Wallander dvd so much, I now want to try the books!

I am greatly anticipating the next Inspector Banks Novel by Peter Robinson, Bad Boy, due to be released on August 24th. I plan to go to the bookstore for that one the day it comes out!

I have yet to do any reading outside, even on my chaise in the shade. It has just been SO hot for much of the summer that I have preferred to be in the cool air conditioning. It does seem a shame not to read out in the garden though!

This is a faintly surreal image of some blooms back in June. I did a little editing to saturate the colors a bit, but it was an evening shot, so the colors were already deep and intense seeming anyway.

Front door - back on the hinges!

Over the weekend, Jeff worked on the front door facelift. Yesterday, which happened to be my birthday, we got to hang the newly painted door in place. The door is something that needed doing anyway, but it was also a nice present!

I am excited to get a picture on here right away, though the door still needs a little touch up where paint came away with the masking tape and some of the tape goo still needs removing from the glass.

The camera has trouble with the shade and my eyes see it differently in changing light too, but all the variations are nice.

From inside the house. It's actually good the color is a little muted inside to go better with our inside colors and decorations when the door is open.

From outside. It appears quite a bit brighter in the sunlight and looks sharp with the blue shutters and white siding. Please excuse the dirty siding, we plan to pressure wash soon. It has been very dusty at times this summer during the dry spells and the dust finds a way to stick to everything.

You can see there is still a fairly long to do list. We have to paint the door frame with a fresh coat of white paint. The threshold needs gray paint and the porch floor will be stained gray again after the wonky board is replaced...it would have to be front and center!

However, I think Jeff is in the mood to work on doors all at once, so probably the next job will be scraping and peeling off old paint and freshly painting the back outside door (the same color as the front). The back door is just wood, no glass, so there will be more surface area to deal with, but the mouldings are less detailed.

Seeing the door in place really makes me want new, full glass panel storm doors for both the outside doors. I am not sure if they will be easy to install in our older home doorways, or not. I need to look into sizes, styles and cost of those. I'm sure it will make yet another set of holes in the frame! Perhaps we'd better wait to paint that until after we've decided on the storm door, so we can putty in all the old holes at once.

Homes TV shows or magazines make home improvements look so easy and fast, but for us anyway, they seem to take soooo long! Therefore, I get very excited about finishing just something relatively small, like a door =)