All The Time in the World

Now that we are selling the house ourselves, we are completely distracted by it. I've been designing ads for the newspaper, both the print edition and the online tile ad that starts today. My wonderful sister, the world's best and most honorable real estate agent, designed some flyers for us and emailed them to me so I could write the copy. Roger assembled the "House for Sale" sign sent by MLS4Owners.com. It is now firmly planted in the ground on the roadside of our house. He's also tackling the huge task of cleaning up the workshop. Luckily, he found someone who took all of the siding that he so carefully removed from the house last year for the shingling project. It's great to see that stuff be recycled and put to good use. Despite all the pull on our attention, we still try to make the rounds and read all of our favorite blogs. Vicki of A Mark on My Wall has a fantastic post up about honeybees at her new digs. I don't have a pic of a honeybee, but I did photograph this bumblebee a few weeks ago. So, in honor of all bees, here's a pic of a bee's tongue. It knocked me out when I downloaded the pics and saw that (definitely click on the pic).

We found the time to harvest the last of the broccoli, cauliflower, and spinach. The tomatoes in the greenhouse are finally reliably producing, as are the zucchini and yellow crookneck squash. We've been having almost all of our dinner veggies straight out of the garden. The other night, while sitting down to one of these garden suppers, it occurred to us that except for rice and spices, we had grown the entire plate of food. We were absolutely grateful for those spices too. Fennel, fenugreek, cumin, coriander, dried whole red chili peppers, basil and/or oregano in varying amounts make the difference between Indian, Thai, Mexican, and Italian. The right combination elevates a zucchini and some cauliflower into the sensual realm of flavors. After a single bite, we completely understand how the Spice Trade influenced the early days of exploration on the planet. People probably died for pepper and cinnamon, and I'm sure that seemed as tragic as people dying for oil now.
We try to take a break from real estate a couple of times a day, to walk and take a good look around. We had to thin apples from the tree as the limbs were so heavy with fruit that they were literally bending to the ground. We also discovered that we have five spectacular peaches on one of our peach trees. These five will be treated like royalty until they are ripe enough for consumption. We don't see peaches like this very often in the northwest. Of course, the weather has gotten very cloudy and gray again, so the peaches may take their time attaining their delicious sweet maturity.

We can wait. We often pretend that we have all the time in the world.