Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Welcome to Summer

I don’t care what the official calendar dictates, everyone knows that summer officially starts Memorial Day weekend and ends on Labor Day. Using that logic we actually managed to sneak in a few extra days of summer this year! I hope you plan to use them wisely. I managed to honor our veterans over the weekend by taking not one, but two afternoon naps. It could be the allergy medicine or backlash from Quilt Market or my deep desire to be a couch potato, but a large chunk of both Saturday and Sunday afternoon were spent on the sofa in a prone position.

We had travel plans for this weekend but when they had to be postponed I decided it was the perfect opportunity to get a few things accomplished, including:

Painting the kitchen
Cleaning my closet
Planting the garden
Getting some work done.

Nope
Nope
My husband did it
A little – very little.

I have selected the paint color for my kitchen at least 6 times. Every time I think I have made a decision a family member takes a look at the swatches and says “You aren’t thinking of doing THAT are you” and I revert back to square one, a sure sign that I didn’t really love the idea in the first place. I think the only way I am going to be forced into making a decision is to invite company over. Not just any company, important company, the kind of company that you would be mortified to have in your unfinished kitchen. The problem is there aren’t that many of those people left in my life. Is that a sign of wonderful friendships or deteriorating standards? There is little chance of my daughters future in-laws dropping by from Iowa, so I wonder if someone like Prince Charles will be in town anytime soon… do you think he likes red?

My walk-in closet could use some attention. On Monday I was pondering the job when a TV program about the messiest house in America came on. Whoa! Compared to that family, I am a certified neat-nick! What possesses people that live like that to allow TV cameras into their homes? One look at their mess and I decided it was intended as a high-tech permission slip to stretch out and take a nap. I did take my daughters advice about something that she learned on Oprah. I turned all of the hangers in my closet “backwards”. Now when I wear something I will return it to my closet with the hanger facing the “right” way. The clothes on any hanger that are still backward at the end of the season are to be donated, no questions asked. From the looks of things, I will have plenty of room in my closet this fall.

My husband took care of the gardening. He wasn’t impressed with my artful arrangement of the plants last year. He seems to think that things grow better in straight rows. At our house it always comes as a shock that anything grows at all. We use the “plunk’em in the ground and hope for the best” method. There is no early or late season, no plant rotation, no pinching back or fertilizing and almost no weeding (notice I didn’t say no weeds, I said no weeding!). As the poster children for Gardening with the Clueless, any harvest at all is considered gifts from the gods. Cary decides what and how many plants he needs according to the available space. The man owns not one but two roto-tillers, we have LOTS of space. Enough for 12 assorted tomato plants, 9 zucchini and more peppers than I had time to count plus other things that I won’t be able to identify until fruit appears. A good deal of that harvest ends up on the counter at The Quilt Company for “free tomato/zucchini/pepper days”. After all how much produce can a family of three consume?

Now it’s back to work! I have to send the email for our Garden Trellis Block of the Month. We are offering $5 off the sign-up fee through the end of the month and we want all of our dedicated customers to have the opportunity to fill the program first. The fabrics are all hand-dyed batiks and the patterns are exclusively ours (in other words we don’t sell the program to other stores at this time) so we are limiting the number of participants. If you are interested, click on the website at www.thequiltcompany.com and click on to the Garden Trellis page in the upper left corner of our website (not the photo of the quilt on the right) for details.

HAPPY SUMMER!
Karen

1 comment:

Barb Johnson said...

Good Lord, woman, what are you thinking? NINE zucchini plants? You'll be able to feed the whole city of Pittsburgh with that many zucchini! I usually plant one hill (2 plants)and feed the whole neighborhood, plus make quarts and quarts of ratatouille, at least a dozen loaves of zucchini bread, plus saute it up for dinner almost nightly! I have a cookbook called "Too Many Zucchini" that I can loan you!