Bonus Days...

It's Monday in a three-day weekend. Labor Day usually signals the end of the "summer season", but it looks like summer is here for a couple more weeks at least. Still, the sun is much lower and the nights are quite cool even with the warm days. It's the best of both worlds; autumn nights and summer days. No rain is in sight. It's really pretty perfect.

We've taken advantage of the weather to eat outside (al fresco) each evening. Soon enough we'll be putting away the summer toys and hunkering down for winter. For now, evenings are pleasant as we while away an hour or two with a glass of wine and plain ole conversation.

We've accomplished quite a lot this weekend. It was the monthly Farm Breakfast on Saturday and we enjoyed chatting with our regular breakfast partners. We like the breakfast experience but it's lots more fun with friends. We admired their beautiful gardens at the Farmhouse and aspire to one day have a fraction of that at the house. Of course, they have "peeps" who work on it daily and we have no "peeps" save ourselves who are working elsewhere most days. But John has been clearing and reclaiming some of the lawn/meadow/jungle clearing since getting his handy strimmer-on-steroids tool. It's an attachment with three blades that replaces the string cutter head and it takes no prisoners. It makes short work of the brambles which have taken over about two feet around the edges of the property. I guess that counts as some kind of landscaping. And we visited the Farmers Market on Saturday and scored some real honest-to-goodness homegrown tomatoes. Heaven in my mouth. Next year, no matter what else we grow, we have to create a "hot house" so we can achieve tomatoes.

Yesterday, we Skyped with our friends in England in the morning. It's fun to catch up and see them while we do it. Closes the distance a little. Then we were off to do our respective "stuff". John had more gardening to do and he got some rhododendrons placed. He has been picking the ripened blackberries throughout the week and I canned some jam from them. We'll freeze some of them for use later and use another bit to make ice cream. We discovered that blackberry ice cream is a truly divine experience. How can we not have thought of it sooner? We also teamed up and replaced the whole-house water filter that lives in the pump house. That may not sound like much, but this contraption is placed in a wholly inconvenient space and is not the easiest thing to remove. But, we did it and we're set for another 6 months or so. A trip to the hardware yielded us some obscure batteries I wanted if not the filter wrench we were looking for. As an aside - I love a hardware where you can see a man working in a kilt. Finally, we managed to give the dog a bath. Since she injured her leg, we have been reluctant to bathe her because she usually runs around like a nut afterwards and we didn't want her to stress that leg. She had reached critical dirty-dog stage though and so we managed to get her into the bathtub and contain her long enough to get a good layer of muck off. There's a do-it-yourself dog wash in Kingston that we want to try, so as she gets back on her feet more and more, we'll take her up for a more thorough cleaning (those sprayers really help do the job).

Last night the coyotes were out in full chorus. I woke a couple times to their eery howls and replies. And early this morning the owl that lives in the woods gave a few hoots as he finished his shift. Today is rightfully a holiday. The "work" of the weekend has been completed and so we can enjoy some down time. Maybe I'll pull out a quilt project that's calling me. John will likely putter about in the garden. And this evening, we'll sort it all out when we meet on the deck for dinner. As I said, really pretty perfect...