"whoever touches us, teaches us....."

Saturday, August 28, 2010

A Butterfly Interlude

My son keeps a small herb garden outside our front door. He harvests his 3 kinds of basil, oregano and 2 parsleys every night for his food of choice; pasta. Usually our herbs are so prolific that we have ridiculous amounts that 50 people could not consume. This year they have been scanty and he has had to ration just to have enough. He came out one day and ALL of his parsley plants were stripped to the stems and the ground. I mean nothing was left. After some searching he found some caterpillars lingering and devouring the final stems and we captured them and but them in a critter cage. Now he wanted to protect his parsley and take them to another location to release. I wanted to see butterflies. And since parsley and I think fennel is mainly all this particular butterfly eats...and we were leaving for the beach in a few hours...I went to the grocery store and bought the largest bunch of parsley I could find,and  stuffed it in the cage. I was hoping to see the whole chryssalis (sp?) thing happen but we were out of town and missed it . But we had a critter cage with a few stems left and 5 beautiful swallow tail butterflies. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo if them, but we released them all at once and they were very beautiful! We have started a new crop of parsley; for my son so he make pasta. For me, so I can feed butterflies.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Getting there


Finally the wood is in place on the countertop. It looks so much better than I ever imagined and I am really excited about it. It gives my kitchen that warm comforting feeling instead of cold and modern. I am not a modern kind of girl, more of a farmhouse style stuck with a 80's tacky house. It is getting there, though, just takes a little time, money amd a LOT of elbow grease!. Now I have lots of sanding to do and some finish work and the  counter will be done. It has finally reached a point where I can take over and do some of the work, that L has been stuck with the whole time!

Unfortunately (well, its a good thing, just wish I had finished my counter). I go on family vacation this week, so I won't get to work on it for awhile.We are going to the beach  regardless of this awful heat wave the south is having. I think it might be cooler there, as we have had 100's daily for awhile. I will post the before and after shots when I get back in town and have a little time to complete the project.

This last shot is a closeup of my favorite knot and grain pattern in the wood.