Flowers from Dana

Flower arrangements from Dana are always special because they come from her own garden. She brought them over yesterday so she could set them down where she wanted them and tweak them just a little. One would never guess from this beautiful loose arrangement that she is quite a perfectionist with a good eye for detail.

Soon after she dropped off the flowers, we went over to their house where Jim cooked a wonderful Korean inspired rice bowl...delicious. And a lovely, relaxing end to a nice day...capricious weatherwise, but in the end that enforced the relaxation part.

Today was another day altogether. Physical therapy at 8 involving a half hour of manual torture  therapy to loosen up hips and back followed by ten minutes of t.e.n.s. treatment, then home to pick up John and Spike and back down the road to Trail House. The coffee tasted great after an early start without it. Spike is learning his Trail House manners and waits more patiently for his chance to lick the last of the foamed milk out of my cup. 

Back home to drop off John and Spike and then off to Pilates. I have managed to get most of the p.t. appointments scheduled so that they are not on the same day, but it didn't work out this week. Maggie, the teacher, kindly reset the springs for me so I didn't have to keep sitting up to do it myself.  I'll have a repeat on Wednesday.

I sewed the last border on the quilt and was just snipping off some final threads when I accidentally snipped a wee hole in the quilt, so I can't call it finito  until I patch it.  I was just doing that when David arrived for beer and a chat about replacing the wooden porch off the kitchen.

One of the reasons I love working with David is our wide ranging chats about everything from Elon Musk to LED lights, planting tomatoes to fixing a fifty year old paring knife. We even got out the sales brochure for our Berkeley house to show him a picture of the porch which set off a whole string of memories of all the craftspeople who worked on that house.

There was the guy with a PhD in Physics who put in a new hardwood floor, paying careful attention to the darker wood strips that ran around the edge of the rooms like the border on a rug, and the husband of a student in one of my prenatal yoga classes who remodeled our kitchen. Another student painted beautiful calligraphy around the kitchen ceiling with quotes from old sundials in the Italian village of Bellino. Under the calligraphy we hung pictures of those sundials, which were taken by the Italian photographer Davide Dutto, who was the photographer at niece Annie's wedding. 

And the random and not so random connections go on. We brought the photographs and a beautiful sideboard built by the same guy who remodeled the kitchen with us. I will save the story of the bedroom furniture and the library shelves for another day.

Now David has gone off to contemplate a cement porch and John has gone off to the store to buy a few things for lunch for friends coming up on the train from Marin County tomorrow. We were going to take them to our favorite winery for pizza and antipasto in the piazza, but it has been cold with sunshine alternating  with  dark clouds and rain, even a little hail, blown in on a frigid wind...not quite piazza weather yet.