Sweet Sweet Tile

I call this photo, "Composition with tile and cranky child"

Nothing beats coming home from and especially stressful and shitty day to find NEW TILE in the mail! Oh so exciting. I'm really happy with the gradient of blue I ordered; sometimes it's really hard to tell on the screen what you're actually ordering. So far I've had the best luck with a place called www.tesseraglass.com. KP tiles is OK too, however, KP tiles seems to always be out of whatever glass tile I'm looking for, I just got lucky this time. For the goldfish, they had nothing in any shade of yellow or orange available for some reason.

Hopefully tomorrow I can get the fish jigsawed out and primed. I am so bringing it on vacation with me to the beach.

Ooh! and it actually RAINED today, which hasn't happened in weeks, so the garden is happy tonight.

Updates from the garden...

So, I made some awesome tomato sauce from the first tomatoes of the year... I had about 6 of them. That variety was called "Rutgers." The teeny ones in the photo are my "micro tomatoes," an heirloom variety called "Currant." How adorable are they?! Olive calles them "Tiny Matoes." I saw these in the catalog and thought, "How silly!" but they were just too cute to pass up. The funny thing is, I grow tomatoes every year. I hate raw tomatoes. Hate them. So does Marc, and so does Olive. It seems kind of ironic, but I just cook them instead. The micro ones are actually tolerable; I've eaten a few and don't mind them. They're just kind of sour, and they lack that explosive gushy slimy quality that most tomatoes have.

I made sauce with the tomatoes and sweet Italian sausage and basil. Fantastic. I also made cucumber salad with the first cucumber of the year mixed with homemade yogurt I made this weekend. It really is remarkable how much better stuff tastes when it's fresh and you make it yourself. The fresh cucumber was so sweet, it actually had a flavor and wasn't tasteless and waxy like most cucumbers you get at the store. I was having a little homesteading moment there when you say to yourself, "This is why I do this!" It was great.

Tonight I also discovered another surprise in the garden, I have a cantaloupe coming along that I swear was not there the other day. Too cute. My neighbor's chain link fence is turning out to be a great trellis, I am just trying to keep all the fruit growing on my side :)

And, last but certainly not least, the Stargazers are blooming and the entire yard smells heavenly. They are my favorite flowers; at least next to morning glories!

Hot Hot Hot

Ha! Tile for the next mosaic has been ordered! I'm very excited. I just bought the board today at Home Depot. I has wood at home, but it just wasn't big enough. I just like to work large, especially with mosaics. That's the best way to get nice gradations in color and form. It's also expensive, heavy and somewhat unweildy, but I'm not worrying about any of that yet. The next mosaic is going to be a hippo tang, and yes, I like it because it's blue and it gave me an excuse to order blue tiles.

It's also looking like I might have to make some tomato sauce this weekend... the tomatoes are starting to ripen up. I've definitely learned that there are some things that work and somethings that just don't work when it comes to this container gardening thing. It's all a big experiment; it gives me ideas for next year.

The State Fair application has been officially mailed in, so I'm really excited. I have now committed myself to at least one batch of Bread and Butter pickles and some Peach jam. I figured as many categories as I can enter, the better my odds.

It is quite literally 96 degrees in the office today. The Heat Index is reading 104. Yippee!
Off to ceramics class tonight too. Yay!

The latest project

So here it is, the new blog. I've started this blog to document some of the fun, non-baby related stuff I do. I have another blog about my daily adventures with my two year old daughter Olive (http://www.olivethebean.blogspot.com/) and I am hoping that I am able to keep up with both.

So a little bit about me... let's see. For my dayjob, I manage a Historic restoration/decorative painting company in Baltimore. We work in a lot of historic Churches & government buildings in DC and Baltimore. My job keeps me pretty busy. Although I am in no way organized in my own personal life, I have a knack for managing projects and staying one step ahead of whatever needs to be done to make sure the job runs smoothly. I manage crews on jobsites, work with contractors, and make sure everyone has what they need and knows what they're supposed to be doing. It's never that simple, but it's always different. I like working on messy jobsites with scaffolding... it's like a huge jungle gym. Currently, my husband is also working with me, running one of our DC jobsites. Surprisingly, we work very well together. (Everyone always asks me that.)

In my spare time, ha ha, I have many other interests. Usually on weekends I can be found taking on some sort of ambitious project. Lately I have been working on mosaics, and I am taking a Botanical Sculpture class. Also, since it's the peak of summer, I've been canning and making jam & working in my garden. I grow vegetables and flowers. The vegetable garden is relatively new... I have taken over part of the driveway with a patchwork of planters & pots. It is incredibly satisfying and I absolutely love it. I also draw and paint, and I like to work on the house, although fortunately most of that is more or less done.

Let's see, so this weekend I finished up my fish mosaic I had started (I'll post some pictures) and went blueberry picking with Marc and Olive. We picked over 11 pounds! I don't know what I'm going to do with all of them. My neighbor Mary and I made jam and pies last night. I have 14 jars of jam. I have ambitions for the State Fair this year... I am entering jam and pickles. We'll see. I have a feeling these people are freakishly competitive, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

So, here it is. Hopefully I can keep up with this. I am hoping it will foster my creative spirit to do more stuff. Lately, I've been feeling really good and have had lots of ideas for stuff to make, and I am hoping to keep that going. In the mean time, I guess I should get back to work.