Fragilé

"Fragilé" is Italian for "you must really like Pizza."
Construction starts today.

Make mine with peppers!!

stop and smell the roses

These are actually geraniums, but the point was to take a few moments to enjoy a pretty summer day.

This was taken at the Delong garden this summer with the middle school

students. It was a great day to stop and smell the roses. Unfortunately we

then had to load the photo's onto the school computers, which was an exercise

in frustration. I suppose it's that whole Ying and Yang thing again.

salsa

I have a huge bag of beautiful, roma tomatoes (thank you Martha) in my fridge waiting for me to do something! ANYTHING! with them before they turn into mush. I think its going to be salsa--I'm just waiting for Martha's recipe (see, somehow I made the procrastination someone else's fault--I'm good.)

Okay... so the reason I'm procrastinating is... cause... well, that's what I do best! Stick with your strengths I always say! I have tomatoes on my kitchen - on towels, in boxes, bags and ice cream pails. Mikki walked in this morning and her eye's went as wide as, uh, tomatoes, and she just started laughing... instead of going for a walk, we cut and seeded four gallon ziploc bags of tomatoes for the freezer. Thanks Mikki. (today is salsa day here as well. Recipe Zaar's "Wonderful Salsa" is a fabulous recipe for homemade salsa.)

What I did on my summer vacation, 5

I'm part of a round-robin journal project this summer. We each complete a page in a journal and send it on to the next person. This was a page I did in a journal with the theme "Morocco".

A friend of mine brought a box of broken bowl parts to my door one day. She said her good friend Susie had taken the bowl to a picnic where it was dropped and broken. It had been a wedding gift and one of her favorites. Tearfully she dropped the mess into the garbage can. Later my friend, Zaida, pulled out the pieces and brought them to me and asked me to turn them into an art piece, for her birthday. What a good friend! The bands of the blue glazed pottery are the left overs of the bowl.

what I did on my summer vacation, 4

I watched a lot of soccer.

I didn't!

what I did on my summer vacation, 3

This was a photo I took in a cool flower/gift shop in Portland, OR. The black and white vs. color effect was done with an Ipad app that is a lot like coloring in a coloring book--perfect for a photoshop illiterate like me!

I went to visit Grams and Gramps in Kalamazoo and my dad was focused

on "digging up these flowers, so they can be moved" that week. He would

go out in the morning and dig and dig and dig... I'm still not sure where the

plants were being moved "to" but the accomplishment of having them "dug"

was the important thing for him!

what I did on my summer vacation, 2

We went to Michigan for a few days and we saw the Roaring Bear Clouds.(sort of like the Sleeping Bear Dunes... only different.)

This guy isn't roaring or sleeping, just sniffing around for something to eat.  The picture is taken from the car window on a road trip out west this summer.  And, full disclosure, we didn't just come across him in the wild.  We actually paid to drive through a "bear park".  I'm OK with that-- no bear spray needed!

what I did on my summer vacation, 1

I'm wearing a sweatshirt this morning--first in a long while, so starting in on end-of-summer activities doesn't seem so far fetched.

These cherries were done on my ipad. I had a lot of fun this summer learning

my way around the various art apps. Somehow working on a touch screen rather

than with a mouse has made it more accessible to me.

I helped teach a class about organic gardening, eating and cooking. Doesn't that

sound impressive? Well, it was for 12 year olds, and mostly I drove the school

van. My friend Mikki taught and organized the class and had some amazing things

planned for the kids to do. This purple pepper is from the organic garden on

the campus of the University of Wisconsin EC.