West Coast visit

We got back from our west coast trip a few days. Here are a couple of pictures of Crater Lake in Southern Oregon.

The first part of our trip was a couple of days in California's Napa valley buying some great wines (8 cases), and having a couple of wonderful meals at Bouchon, and Botega, etc. We were thrilled to find that you can now send wines to North Carolina. One case of Cake Bread chardonnay arrived the other day with the rest soon to follow. Before we bankrupted the family coffers with all the high end wine buying, we headed to Southern Oregon to our son and daughter-in-law's gorgeous vacation/future retirement home on the Rogue river for a fabulous family re-union.

We watched the salmon jumping, fished with the grand kids, enjoyed the company of old and new relatives, enjoyed great meals, and found time for a couple of visits to old haunts and restaurants in Ashland and Jacksonville, with  a half day trip to Crater lake Monday, after the re-union festivities.

Since we've been home I've been digging up potatoes, doing a bit of weeding (they took over while we were gone!); and  just getting settled in with our animals. I took a rest from the garden yesterday and got some studio time cleaning up, doing some glaze chemistry, and getting some of the Helios porcelain that was re-hydrating while we were away, on to the plaster wedging table to dry out.  I should be able to get the rest of it dried enough to wedge and store for throwing later this week. While it's drying I'll weighing out some test batches of the glazes I created yesterday.



                                                                                                        

Potatoes drying

I've been doing some heavy duty gardening this week. Here are some of my early planted potatoes - Kennebecs and Red Pontiacs, that I dug the other day. There are more of these as well as Yukon Golds to dig up in the next month or so, since I staggered my planting according to the moon signs recommended in the Farmers Almanac. A bunch of volunteers also came up late. It will be interesting to see if there's a difference in the amount of potatoes I'm getting from those and the ones I planted in March and April.
Yesterday was an all day food and other shopping trip to Asheville. I got some new kitchen tools at the restaurant supply store (love those places!), and found some Canadian bacon at Earth Fare. So, this morning I'm making Jim one of his favorite dishes - Eggs Benedict. I also got a lot of goodies at the Asian grocery store and a few items at Sams Club. A nice lunch at the Thai restaurant and then the drive home pretty much took all day.
We were both sore from all the gardening the day before, so this shopping day gave us a bit of time to rest all our sore muscles. I didn't have to cook last night. Earth Fare provided the sushi and I provided the cold sake for me and Chardonnay for Jim.
It looks like we may be getting rain, so I don't know if I'll get any planting in this afternoon. If not, then I'll get in the studio; but I'm really hoping that I can get most of these small annual veggies and flowers planted today; but first there's breakfast to make. After breakfast I've got cornbread to bake for tonight's leftover bean dinner.