An at home day

It's been an "at home" day - morning chores in the garden, email, snail mail and cooking.
There's some fresh baked nutty fruity bread for tomorrows breakfast, and a ratatouille type sauce with veggies and herbs from the garden, which is going over linguini for tonight's dinner. A friend is coming who is on a no fat, vegan diet, so I managed to make a rather tasty salad dressing using orange juice, apple cider vinegar, garlic, ginger, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper.

There's been no time for the studio the past several days due to family time at our sons place, grand child baby sitting and other chores around here. Half of one day was spent in search of the right Japanese maple tree!

For some reason the previous owners planted a crab apple right next to the driveway and after cleaning those apples off the driveway for the past week, Jim emphatically stated "that tree has to go"! So we found a decent sized, Japanese maple replacement which will hopefully be happy in that sunny spot after it settles in a year or two. There were a couple of the same species at one of the nurseries that looked great even though four of the five nurseries didn't recommend it for a sunny area. We were cautioned though, to keep it well watered if it's going to be in a southern exposure, which seems to be the secret, so we will definitely make sure it's never thirsty!

The tile people have now promised to be here Tuesday or Wednesday (they were supposed to be here last week), so we're going to make tomorrow a half a play day and drive up to the lake district with our friend Sybil, for lunch. Sybil is home alone this week due a  family health issue which has taken her husband out of town, and due to a recent health issue herself, she can no longer drive. So we're all going to play hooky for half a day.

I should have plenty of studio time the rest of the week now that the family has gone back to LA for a few days. They'll be back for labor day weekend, so I'll have to make it a point to get a lot of studio time before then.