What I Did On My Summer Vacation

In July, we spent an afternoon with friends up in Dickerson, MD. Ostensibly there to see our friends Sara and Oskar who were visiting from Sweden, we mostly spent the afternoon drinking beer, playing kubb, and trying not to get too sweaty.

Our garden has overloaded us with delicious bounty in the form of Swiss chard, tomatoes, squash, herbs, and six different kinds of peppers.

My niece Janie spent a couple of weekends with us and has shown a knack for home improvement jobs, like helping Bill put up the monogram letters above our wood stove. I finally decided to abandon the idea for another bookshelf in the family room, and put up three rows of small pots (complete with succulents) on the wall instead. The room is done!

For Bill's birthday, we went down to his parents' farm outside of Charlottesville and taught Gracie to swim in the pond. She was not at all enthusiastic (perhaps because Maya kept jumping on her head with excitement) until she spotted the geese. Poor thing never quite got the picture that she was never ever ever going to be able to swim fast enough to catch them.

While at the farm we canned some of our tomatoes from the garden, has lots and lots of wine on the porch, picked blueberries, fed the chickens, and felt sympathetic for the cows that were separated from their babies just that weekend.