I’d requested this Tuesday off from work because Pat and I had the knitting class last night in Ventura, and I knew I’d want to sleep in and give myself time to drive back to Morro Bay today. Also, Sean doesn’t teach a class on Tuesday mornings, so we were able to grab some breakfast at Cafe Nouveau and spend a little bit of time together before I hit the road. It was a nice little way to celebrate the 300th day of 365 days handmade.
Looking forward to cooler days ahead!
Remember my little pumpkin seedlings that Sean and I planted back in June?
They bore two little orange pumpkins, each one currently about the size of a honeydew melon. They’re too small to carve for Halloween jack o’lanterns, but they are certainly cute. Here’s one of them.
Isn’t it cute?
I got home late from work today, and then I did my cross training and made dinner and by the time I remembered to do the daily blog post, I realized that it was too dark to take an outdoor photo of my sock progress.
So here is a photo of the pretty sunset, instead.
The Green Print sock’s colorway mirrors the leaves of the grapefruit tree in our front yard.
Back in June, when my mom was visiting from Hawaii, I purchased a locally grown cherimoya fruit for us to eat as a snack. “Save the seeds,” my mom said. “You can grow your own tree from them.”
I followed her directions and wrapped the seeds in a few layers of damp paper towels that I then sealed in a plastic sandwich bag and set on the windowsill. After several weeks, a few of the seeds had sprouted. This is what they looked like.
Isn’t that neat? I’m hoping to nurture these little seedlings and coax them into becoming a stronger plant that will eventually be big enough to plant in the yard. In the meantime, I’m very tickled with these little sprouts that I planted in a blue Fiestaware teacup.
Today I worked ten hours, went home to the Morro Bay house, packed up my computer and weekend bag, and got back in the car to drive the 150 miles (two and a half hours) back down to the Ventura homestead, where I am now typing this blog entry. Tomorrow Sean and I have to get up early to run 11 miles for our half marathon training, and then we are going to get in the car and drive another 150 miles to Redlands to visit some old friends. I didn’t make any further progress on the sock, so tonight I present to you the image of a beautiful sunset view from our newly painted deck and newly painted deck chairs in Morro Bay.
A couple weeks ago, Sean installed our new front door. It needed to be painted, and the hardware needed to be changed. Sean painted six different color swatches for me to look at. I agonized over which was the right color for our front door, but I finally settled on one.
This was the old door.
The painter finished painting our house including the back deck and the front door two days ago. We’d put off buying a door handle and lock for the new door until today, when the particular finish and style that I wanted was back in stock. This afternoon Sean installed the hardware, and now the front entrance to our home is complete.
This is the first time in our lives that we’ve lived in our own house, not a rental, and one that we’ve customized to our personal taste. We’re pretty pleased with how it turned out.
I had two appointments scheduled two hours apart this morning– one with the allergist and one with the dentist. Afterwards, Sean and I ate lunch, ran a couple of errands, and then made the two-and-a-half-hour drive back up to Morro Bay. I didn’t get a chance to work on any of my assorted projects today, but that’s okay. There will be a lot of knitting coming up in the next few days, because on Thursday morning we’re headed to Los Angeles, where we’ll be flying out of LAX to Florida. I should have a lot more interesting photos to share with you then.
I got home from work–10 hours of what is my Monday after a 3-day weekend–and I was fully prepared to camp out on the couch for the rest of the evening. But, nooooo. Sean said, “We have to run today.”
“Can’t today be a rest day?” I asked.
“No,” Sean said, “because tomorrow is supposed to be the rest day.”
Drat. He was going to be disciplined and stick to the half marathon training plan that I’d printed out and stuck to the refrigerator door.
So I changed into my running clothes and put on my running shoes, and we went out for a forty-minute run, according to schedule. I spent the first half hour alternating between being mad at my husband and trying to distract myself from the various aches and pains that were developing along my hamstrings and shins and the arches of my feet. I spent the last ten minutes focused on just getting home and putting this run behind me.
Just as it is with every long run that I complete, by the time I got home, I felt pretty good about what I’d accomplished, and I was back to liking my husband again. Especially since he’d made puttanesca while I was at work, and we would be able to sit down to eat in a matter of minutes.
I didn’t take any photos of our dinner, but here is one from our 4th of July breakfast that Sean made. My contribution was the handmade quilted placemats and handmade napkins.
Even though he won’t let me slack off the training schedule, he does make the best breakfast.
Today Sean and I joined a few hundred people for the Morro Bay 4th of July bike parade.
The bike parade path is a 1.5 mile stretch that starts north of the Morro Creek Bridge across from the Morro Bay Rock, winds along the Embarcadero, past restaurants and tourist shops, and ends at Tidelands Park. Despite how crowded it looks in the photo, it’s actually a lot of fun. People ring their bells and honk their bike horns and cheer and wave to the pedestrians. For this year’s parade, I thought it would be a great idea to attach tin can noise-makers to our bikes, and the results turned out better than I expected. The cans made an incredible racket that added to the merriment of the parade, and other riders made sure to give us a lot of room to let those cans clank and drag along behind us.
A lot of people waved and cheered and laughed when they saw us riding by with tin cans trailing from our bikes. For some strange reason, though, we kept getting asked the same question:
“Just married?”
I don’t have any photos from the actual parade because it was a lot nicer to just ride without a phone or a camera in my hands. Also, I needed my hands free so that I could wave to all the people who came out to watch and enjoy the event.
Happy 4th of July!
365 Days Handmade 
