BlackDogHair

Our garlic is ready to harvest, I think its a bit late this year but finally there are good sized heads to dig from the studio garden. It  still has to dry out a bit so we’ll braid up the now brown stocks and hang them in the back of the pantry. I’m looking forward to roasting whole heads of garlic. Clip off enough to expose the cloves, drizzle some olive oil over them and bake in a medium oven for about 30 minutes. The roasted cloves are soft will pop easily out of their skins and spread on toast or add a mellow garlic flavor to a sauce.

The other great thing about growing your own garlic is the scape. What would become the flower is a curl of green stem topped with a spear point.  Then, just a few weeks before the plant is ready to harvest, you snip these off  to direct the plants energy away from flowering and into the fattening up the root.  This leaves you with a hand full of fresh green that can be chopped and added to a saute like you would garlic or green onion and it brings a similar flavor.  While you wait for the garlic to mature and dry there are plenty of meals seasoned with fresh scapes … js

I’d tried to post this photo when we were downtown last Monday but for some reason the draft didn’t make it to the web …

At Portland Saturday market JQ discovered a vendor with real pie cherries and though we picked up enough for a single pie on reflection she decided it would be nice to have some extra in the freezer.

Turns out the local orchard was going to be at the Farmer’s Market in Pioneer Square so we went down town for lunch. The thing about seasonal fruit is that, well it’s seasonal and when it is gone the wait is 12 months for a second chance.  As of Monday our freezer has enough fruit to bake a couple of cherry pies … js

Ahh, the hardware store, filled with solutions for things that are broken.  Home Depot is not a hardware store, it’s a big box discount mart where you might be able to save some money but never find the right ‘parts’.  The worthiness of fixing has returned. People value well made objects and understanding how things work is growing the ‘do-it-yourself’ movement.  Parts are the points that wear down and to fix it you’ll need a trip to the hardware store.

Ace Hardware in Sandy is a classic hardware store.  I’ve spent hours walking it’s aisles and discovering all manner of ‘parts.  These are usually small pieces, not sealed individually in envelopes of semi rigid plastic but rather stored in bins which have been arranged by type and size. To collect your parts you pull the number of pieces you need from a bin, place in a bag and write on this bag the unit price.

Just the other day I was picking up a handful of eye bolts to terminate a run of twine from plant base to post which will serve as climbing support, when I witnessed the classic Hardware Newb blunder.  This guy and his wife in the parts aisle caught my attention. Don’t get me wrong a second pair of hands is occasionally helpful, it’s just very infrequent that a couple picks parts together. Efficiency typically dictates that if  your hardware store stop requires two people they are on different assignments meeting up at the counter later. Pulling parts is not a team sport and it is not very helpful to have someone asking you questions about how a particular bolt is going to fit when you are trying to decide if a carrage bolt might work better than a machine bolt. In this instance the guy had found the proper size and was counting them into his hand. The wife asked if she could write down the unit price for him, actually she did this a couple of times, in a very helpful tone. The guy brushed the questions aside. A few minutes later as I stood behind the guy and his spouse at the counter there was a question about a unit cost of one type of bolt from the pile he had dumped onto the counter.  He didn’t know, he offered a guess “thirteen no maybe fifteen cents … ” to which the clerk shot him a look and rung up the higher amount. To her credit the wife did not, in the store at least, remind him of her offer to help.  Trust me even a couple of different part unit prices are hard to hold in your head, that bag makes it much easier at check out and the weathered old coot, the one who’s name is know by all the staff , writes down the unit prices on a parts bag. Ace is the place when parts are needed … js

Just ahead of the really hot weather we managed to get some shades hung in the studio. Using a rail and panel design from IKEA it was pretty easy to set up a layer of three panels across the east end of the studio, which is pretty much solid window. If you look closely at the photo there is a red lazer line … that little tool has been worth every cent.

As with any IKEA project there are lots of parts to sift through and just about as many left over as you used to assemble the thing in the first place … plus the directions are all in picture, oh don’t get me started ……

The difference in studio temp has been noticable … and the panels look great in the space.

The next ‘project’ is to get some stairs under the front door so it is safer getting to the porch and front veranda. Arond here there is never a shortage of projects … js

This the first time I,ve had a chance to work on an iPad and still getting all my settings loaded. The college gave me a 16gig WiFi version to work on with the idea that we could find cleaver ways to incorporate it into our class and teaching. Day two and I’ve managed a blog post