Which is fine - it actually gets me started early, which is nice sometimes.
After dropping Daniel off at the shipyard, I drove onto the 6:20 AM ferry home from Bremerton. I went straight for the Jiffy Lube, and got my oil changed (it was about 100 miles over the recommended change mileage and a month past the due date; I usually am more on top of things than this...). Then I came home, showered (we attended a Navy "family day" barbecue on Friday, and we both smelled like charcoal smoke...but the chicken was good!), started off two loads of laundry (consecutively) and headed down to Pike Place Market.
I wanted to use my gift certificate that Jeanelle had gotten me for my birthday. I also exchanged a few things that Kris had bought me; it was very kind of them both to think of getting me anything for my birthday, and it was much appreciated. (For the record, Kris gave me the receipt for the items she bought, and she said that it was OK with her if I exchanged them.)
Here is my haul. A set of aluminum potato spikes (they help to cook the inside of the tuber as the outside is baking away), a Microplane grater with a larger hole size than my zester, a set of tongs, a whisk, a ladle, and two different wine corks - one is silicon, and one is meant for champagnes... I am looking forward to using it for the 22 oz beer bottles, as well (to keep the fizz in!)
I then went up and down the Pike Place Market briefly, in order to use up more of the parking time I'd paid for. I bought some produce - white peaches, Bing (?) cherries, and a large bunch of peppermint. I also got cheese at the Beecher's cheese store. I'm very excited - they now sell a raw milk version of their Flagship cheddar. Sweet Jesus, it's fabulous. It's a little more tangy than their traditional Flagship (which is similar to any great cheddar). I also bought a piece of this wonderful Anise and Lavender goat cheese. Kris was generous enough to have bought a pound's worth of it a month or so ago for one of our "Cheap-Ass Wednesday" potlucks (what we have christened the dinner that traditionally follows our Wednesday night pilates class). Anyway, the cheese is also wonderful - it is mildly herbal while having a very fresh and almost grassy flavor from the goat's milk, with that goaty tang you expect from a fresh goat cheese....and it's almost spreadable. The picture is later because I loaded the pictures incorrectly today, and I am too lazy to go back and fix it. :) Blogspot is pretty inflexible about allowing me to cut and paste pictures within the blog.
Anyway.
After I got home from that, I put away my newfound cheeses, put the mint in a water glass, and then potted up some plants. Pictures to follow. I put my tomato seedlings, which are still quite small (?), in big pots, and I also put my six strawberry starts (the one plant I bought this year, I am proud to say), in a long rectangular pot. I had a lovely white butterfly hanging around me while I was doing all this - it must have been flitting around for 20 minutes in my mini-garden.
Here is a picture of the sun streaming through the trees in Ballard:
Here is a shot of my potted garden. The diamond trellis holds star jasmine, the square pot in front of it holds a passionflower vine. The pot to the right of the diamond trellis holds a honeysuckle vine, around which I have planted annual flowers (which are growing up nicely). The strawberries are in the terra-cotta colored plastic rectangular pot. There is a lavender plant in the black pot in front of the passionflower vine. The other smaller pots are assorted herbs (borage and basil, maybe some mint? I can't recall.)
Here is my haul from Pike Place Market:
Here is a shot taken in the middle of the street as I walked into Ballard. I was on a quest to buy shoes. I bought a pair of Earth shoes that look vaguely Bibletastic.... If you look really hard into the background of this picture (towards the vanishing point), you can see the Olympic mountain range, still covered in snow. Gooorgeous!
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