Not Quite There Yet

I have not yet sewn the jacket together to determine if I have been able to avoid disaster. I spent yesterday morning weeding potatoes and laying out soaker hose, after which I made a pass through the strawberry bed and brought in another two gallons. A pair of opinionated robins—how dare I take their berries!—kept me company. (These were not the nesting robins, who do not have time to heckle the gardener because they are busy feeding babies.) The rest of the morning was spent making phone calls. I am working on something for the husband which requires calling people, but most of that time is spent navigating stupid phone menus trying to get connected to a human being with the answer to my question. It is absolutely maddening.

The weather has been showery all week. I am grateful for the rain and happy I don’t have to start the supplemental watering just yet. The hoses are all laid out, though, and ready to go. And I thought we had a lot of strawberries until I looked at the raspberry canes. We are going to have a tsunami of raspberries this year. (Deana, bring all your best recipes for using them.) I suspected that might happen after I ruthlessly pruned them the year before last.

Anyway . . . after lunch, while it rained, I finished all the edges of the jacket pieces on the serger in anticipation of assembling the jacket. I used a teal thread in the upper looper to match the teal background:

And a black thread in the lower looper to match the charcoal background.

Anything worth doing is worth doing in excess. No one is going to see the inside of the jacket, but this makes me happy.

I also spent some time cleaning up my sewing room. I had been dumping all of my stock-up-before-Joanns-goes-under purchases from last month on every empty horizontal surface and they needed to be put away. I can only work in clutter for so long.

The husband and I are going to work over in the rental house today, although I’d like to spend another couple of hours in the garden, first. The weeds don’t wait for anyone. If I have time this afternoon—or if it rains—I’ll see about sewing the jacket together.

Summer is so vastly different from winter, and not just because of the weather. The daily routine is different, the flow of the weeks is different—even what I cook for dinner is different. (No soups and stews again until the fall.) It’s almost like being set down on a different planet for a few months.