an end to summer

Summer officially ended two days ago, and even though i lament the passing of long days and cricket-filled nights, i do like fall as well. I have a whole list of "to-dos" that i never accomplished this summer, but i don't feel too bad because some of the things on my list have been there for 2-3 years now. I'll just add them to next summer's list when spring rolls around. And even though there are lots of things i didn't get done, we have been busy with a number of other projects like the hen house, canning, and lots of eating. I've been meaning to build a hen house for the last month. I was hoping to get it done before the chickens started laying, but i didn't quite manage.

I found the first egg on the first day of fall and i got another one today. But i have made progress on the henhouse. We got it all framed last weekend, and i'm hoping i can finish it up this weekend.


In addition to the hen house, we've been trying to put up and cook with the garden abundance we've been enjoying.

Twenty or so different varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

Over Memorial Day we turned some of this:


into this:

Raspberry Salsa, cucumber salsa, peach salsa, and mint jalapeño jam.

And this last weekend, we turned more of it into this:

Zucchini salami pizza

Red Chile coppa pizza

Tomato basil pizza (actually i think cait put just about everything on this pizza, so maybe it should be called "everything but the kitchen sink")

Calzone (i have to admit, this was a botched pizza, but we just folded the dough over and it still made a pretty good calzone).

Cait and T-dub's peach, brown sugar dessert pizza.

lotoja '09

This year at Lotoja i mostly got beat by a lot of people. Here are some of the people that beat me:



and yes, even my BFF beat me, even though she started a good 30 minutes later than me.


She did take 2nd in her category and the official results show her as QOM with a time of 16:52, though at the awards ceremony they gave the QOM (and the free hotel room and ski passes for two) to someone else who was almost a whole minute slower at 17:50. Guess it pays to check the results and protest, even at a clustermuck race like Lotoja.


The race was topped off by an exciting night of firetrucks and smoldering logs, which the artist elucidates far better than i can. Suffice it to say we didn't get back to bed until after 2:00 am.