Valerean

Kat sent us a bunch of pictures she's taken, including this one she apparently snapped from the road. Her love for rodents will never die, I guess. :)

A hot, rainy start to the summer has made our raised bed gardens kind of explode. In the kitchen garden the strawberries are still producing and spreading (I think they want to take over the backyard), and all the herbs are going crazy, too. I've got fresh parsley now (center) so I'll probably make paella or meatball stroganoff this week. My guy said you have to do something special to make the artichoke produce a choke, but since neither of us are especially fond of them we're just going to try to keep it alive for Kat. The veggie garden is going wild as well. We cut back the basil once already, and I've dried enough to last me all year from that. We'll have to do it again now and share the wealth with the neighbors. I'm going to harvest the scallions this week and make dak-kochi with them. The regular yellow onions are still pretty small, but we're hopeful they'll get bigger once we cut back the pole bean vines so they can get mo...

I finally found the perfect backing fabric (green print at the top) for my double wedding ring quilt top at JoAnn, and also got it 50% off. I'll probably make the binding out of the backing fabric, too. All I need to do is decide on the quilting thread -- probably dark green for the print patchwork, and white for the rest -- and I'll be ready to put this project together and start stitching.

I finished quilting the first two panels of my summer art quilt. Pretty happy with how the first one turned out. I didn't do much stitching on the second panel. I started to quilt around the feather-stitched mandala, but it felt wrong so I pulled out the stitches. In the end I just stitched all around the border with metallic thread. I was also tempted to add a bunch of crystal montees to the mandala, but I don't want that much sparkle for this piece. In the end I sewed just one to the very center, which felt right.

This is one of the spots where my kid is testing the water up north. She spends at least one day every week driving to different places to collect samples to take back to the lab. This is a shot she sent us of the lab where she works. Here she is at work. I asked her to send me this shot as a gift for my birthday. :)

The only seafood my guy will eat is shrimp, which we either grill or I make into scampi. He's a bit bored with both, and asked if I could do a shrimp stir-fry, so I went looking for a recipe. I found this one , and decided to give it a go. The only tweaks I made were using just a pound of medium shrimp; the two of us can't eat a pound and a half, and large shrimp are expensive. For the mixed veggies I used fresh snow peas, celery, green onions and bean sprouts. It came out surprisingly good, especially the teriyaki sauce. I liked how fast I was able to put it together, too. My guy ate three helpings, so that's a big thumbs-up from him.

I invested in Wilder Days by Linda Winstead Jones simply because I needed a good story to read, and the author always delivers that. I'm also very fond of Linda, who since my rookie days has always been friendly and kind to me. This second chance romance starts off with the protagonists tied to a chair together and sitting on top of a bomb (hence the cover art.) What are you reading right now?