Saturday, 22 November 2014
I woke up early to the sound of stormy weather and the happy thought: Today I can spend all day reading And the Dark Sacred Night…at last!..and then fell back into a sound sleep. Both Allan and I slept shockingly late. I clocked an exhausted ten hours and did not even wake for a dramatic thunderstorm around 7 AM (unless that is what woke me for a brief and happy book thought).
When we finally arose, the sky was blue in all directions. Ironically, at 1 AM the night before Allan had asked if we were going to go do Marilyn’a garden if the weather looked good today. I had said no, because she lives a half an hour away and I did not want to fall for a weather “sucker hole”, get all the way there on a day that predicted to be rainy and then have the rain dump on us and make it a wasted trip.
However….the weather app promised a perfect window of opportunity to get the job done….

So off we went after quick bowls of cold cereal for breakfast. We skipped making coffee and went through the Great Escape espresso drivethrough instead.

view from Great Escape coffee window. I have issues with pampas grass. However, these look pretty fine right now.
Marilyn’s Garden
At Marilyn’s, we had two projects to accomplish. Allan’s was to clear a better path around the east side of the house. He did an impressive job.

before

after

after

Allan’s audience on the roof next door.
My project was to pull some patches of montbretia, cut back some flopped ornamental grasses so they would not smother other plants, weed some little plants out of the gravel path, and pull some weedy creeping charlie.

before, front driveway

after

before, near back porch

after
Creeping Charlie is a fun weed to hate, as it comes up with ease in satisfying large sheets. There’s always a bit that lurks in the center of a perennial and then emerges and covers the ground again. Some folks might even like it (even though the leaves are stinky) and plant it on purpose. I have found that I do not much like anything that is called a groundcover as most plants described as such turn out to be invasive pests.

all nicey nice again
Charlie still lurks in the background; more will be pulled in spring when we cut down all the stems of perennials. In this garden, we leave the backdrop of tall perennials standing over the winter as shelter for birds (and deer!).
My good friend Goldie came outside for awhile.


looking for (and getting) some pets

This patch of montbretia (which I really wish was not there at all) got pulled.

looking south: path weeded. Fig tree on left had lots of figs, most unripened.

Maddeningly, I had forgotten to bring the little bits of golden boxleaf honeysuckle that I meant to plant at the south end of the path. I was able to get some layered rooted starts from the Lonicera ‘Baggeson’s Gold’ that is already there to extend its run. The starts I have in a bucket at home will just have to go somewhere along my fence instead.

looking northwest from back porch
Allan had finished his side project in time to also tackle the drainage swale in back where we have commingled Siberian iris, ornamental grass, and daylilies.

before

after

same area, after, from the corner of the house
That is a very hard area to do as all the irises are difficult to shear.

Goodbye to Marllyn’s for 2014!
To our own amazement, we got out of Marilyn’s with a full load of debris in time to dump it at Peninsula Landscape Supply’s mulch pile.
Peninsula Landscape Supply

at Peninsula Landscape Supply
I walked around taking some photos for their Facebook page while Allan dumped.


When I went to join him I decided to just leave him to finish and take some more photos instead.

Allan at the back of a long slog of mud.
He was probably glad I had not been in the van as I would have been freaking out about maybe getting stuck in the mud.

more pics of the very cool large river rock on offer

and angular rocks
I was ever so relieved to look back and see the van coming around from behind the mulch piles.

not stuck after all

Woody debris gets ground and composted down into mulch.
We took the buckets of creeping charlie home as we did not want to inflict it upon the pile of mulch making ingredients.
Depot Restaurant
On the way home, I suggested a check on the windowboxes at the Depot Restaurant. Of course, the annuals are still refusing to die.

endless osteospermum
I did see that we needed to cut down the Coreopsis ‘Flower Tower’ and a completely blackened pineapple sage.

before

after
42nd Street Café
I’d been cogitating about the prospect of yet another celebratory dinner. I knew the 42nd Street opened early, but how early? We went four blocks up the road to find out and learned that we had only ten minutes to wait till opening time.
Something had been bothering me every time we drove by there: the dang blang lady’s mantle near the entrance. Restaurateur Blaine Walker recently had knee surgery and I decided we could trim up the area as a get well present.

before

after

Even though we have bowed out of the occasional job of weeding the river rock, Allan could not resist pulling some big clumps of weedy grass along the front edge.

Sunset over the 42nd Street Café
And now, to celebrate the official start of staycation…

We were almost the first to arrive.

marionberry lemonade and a Vesper (A modern Version of James Bond’s Martini) Broker’s Gin, Tito’s Vodka, Cocchi Americano and a lemon twist…shaken, not stirred.

The restaurant soon began to fill.

bread with their famous corn relish

flatbread pizza appetizer; today’s flavour was New Orleans style

I opted for comfort food: Rich & Real Beef Strogonoff

It is beyond compare, especially compared to the hamburger helper stroganoff that was a staple of my childhood. Not my grandmother’s cooking; hers would have been real.
Allan opted for the crab and cheese ravioli. It did not appeal to me as much from the description; I think because last year, in another restaurant, I had crab in a chile relleno and did not like the combination.

our two dishes

The crab and cheese ravioli
However! that lemon and caper sauce was one of the most delicious sauces that I have ever tasted. We are going to have to return so that I can have a dish of it all to myself. Allan might like to have a dish of it all to HIMself.

My spoon kept sneaking past the breadbasket to get another taste of that lemon sauce.
Our wonderfully warm and kind server, Betty, said “That sauce is so good you could put it on a flip flop and it would be delicious.”

The café filling with diners

In the corner, a diner got one of the thrilling birthday sparklers that are a feature of the café.

We shared a chocolate rum truffle cheesecake that lived up to its description.


Allan had a chocolate linzer coffee and I had the house made spiced butternut squash liqueur.
Now that was a meal worthy of staycation celebration.

leaving the 42nd Street
home
At home, the work board is now empty except for two teeny tiny clipping jobs and some projects for 2015:

The windowbox annuals and chrysanthemums that refuse to die are all that is left.
Each of those last check ups will take only five minutes each!
I broke out last March’s birthday present from Lisa. I’ve been saving it for staycation evenings.

This all seems to imply that with kahlua in my morning coffee and Laphroaig at night, staycation is a boozy affair. Actually, I don’t know how people get much done with a couple of drinks in them as it took me over an hour to stop feeling like it was naptime after tonight’s dinner.
It’s time now to watch this week’s episode of Grimm. Certain friends of mine think it is high time I stopped blogging and joined them in the comfy chair. (Speaking of stopping blogging, there may be a staycation blog slowdown coming up soonish.)

Smokey, Mary, Frosty
My staycation plan is to read, read, read (and I must work in my own garden on some good weather days. And take trash picking walks around town). First, I’ll read And the Dark Sacred Night, the third in a loosely connected trilogy by Julia Glass. I have started it and was worried that I saw no familiar characters. I peeked ahead and was relieved to see my beloved Fenno and Walter will make an appearance. [Later: I was halfway through the book when I realized with a thrill that one of the original characters appears in the very first scene, using his full name rather than a nickname.]
I have a huge stack of library books on order, including the rest of the Seaside Knitters mystery series, and would like to reread some books from my own library, especially Margaret Drabble.
I also intend to catch up on my favourite blogs. I have some midsummer posts to read on the Tootlepedal and The Miserable Gardener blogs, and I have about three years worth to read at Moosey’s Country Garden. I intend to read the archives of Oysterville Daybook, Bonney Lassie, Rhone Street Gardens, and The Outlaw Gardener…among others. One of the drawbacks of writing a “daybook” myself is that it is so time consuming in the evenings that I fall behind on the much better blogs of other gardeners.
A two month staycation is clearly not going to be long enough.
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