Dinner With Friends

I didn’t time my chicken feed runs properly last week. We almost ran out, which necessitated a trip to town yesterday morning. I try to avoid Kalispell on weekends during the summer. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to see that town was nearly empty, and I was able to get all my errands done in record time. One of the items on the shopping list was this:

The bugs have been awful this year—so bad that it has been almost impossible to sit outside. I refuse to allow the bugs to drive us away from our favorite rocking chair spot. This was the biggest bug zapper Home Depot had in stock. Hopefully, it will help.

Before I left for town, the husband helped me move some black plastic around the garden. Many years ago, I planted horseradish. Don’t ever do that. The stuff spreads and is nearly impossible to dig out. I am tired of it being where it is and will leave the black plastic there for a couple of seasons to make sure it’s gone.

The potatoes look fantastic. The husband put a whole bunch of compost in that area last fall.

The herb garden next to the chicken coop is still slated for demolition when it becomes part of the expanded chicken run, but that project is a ways down the list. In the meantime, it has run amok. There are salvias in the middle of the lavender bed and lemon balm coming up in every nook and cranny. I am enjoying the columbines, though. I love this fringed one:

And this one is such a pretty color:

The salvias will bloom next, followed by the bee balm. I’ve gone in there a couple of times to pull the ox-eye daisies and the hawkweed as they are garish white and orange and spoil the landscape. They are also classified as noxious weeds in Montana.

Our friends, Tom and Marcie—the ones that got stuck up in Jewel Basin during that storm Tuesday night—invited us over for dinner last night. (Their youngest son and his wife live in our rental house and Tom was on the fire department with the husband for many years.) Marcie is an amazing cook. We started off with chips and homemade salsa followed by a salad, and then the entree of sage chicken with bacon and tiny potatoes cooked in a creamy wine sauce:

Doesn’t that look like it belongs in a magazine? It was so good. Tom and Marcie have a pottery business. I have a whole set of dinnerware exactly like that plate in the upper left of the picture.

It was good to visit and catch up with them.

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I am working on a quilt project. This one is challenging for me because the design relies on the sashing to pull it all together, so each block looks a bit unfinished. (That’s also why I don’t have any pictures of the blocks, because they don’t make much sense individually.) The blocks themselves are not difficult to construct. This one is going to be mildly scrappy, but in a controlled colorway. I’ve already done one prototype of it in a different colorway.

I am still trying to figure out how to switch back and forth between the creative half of my brain and the “keep the wheels on this bus” half of my brain. The latter half tends to take over during the summer when there is so much to do and everything has to be done on a tight schedule. I don’t have time to manage a flood of ideas, so I keep the creative half on a tight leash. It’s frustrating, although working on a project where the design has already been fleshed out does help.

Men are so much better at compartmentalizing than women. The husband goes into “work mode” every morning and it’s like the rest of the world ceases to exist. I have trouble doing that.

In any case, it’s raining hard again this morning (yay!) and I can sew this afternoon without guilt.