An Inverness Birthday (& hike & pie)

After a foggy start, more beautiful weather yesterday, and Jerry elected to spend his birthday hiking on the Muddy Hollow Trail, tracking butterflies. ( It's a sport I get lured into, although many of them are just generic brown/orange/black types to me, can't tell the difference.)

 Birthday begins at breakfast

The birthday boy

Crossing a small stream, rock to rock, always makes me a little nervous

Lupine in bloom

Native Morning Glory

Skeleton of a dead cypress

Vista from trail out to the beach

Wetlands

A great idea!

Bags inside

Bridge to the beach

Foggy at the coast

Resting up on a bench for the hike back to the car

A stop in town for a flashlight birthday gift

Getting underway with the puzzle

He started a couple of days early

I kept noticing series of things, around the house...

 

...and on the trail:

Ocean, Pine, Bay

Another day of glorious weather.  First thing this morning, I threw open the French windows in the bedroom and breathed in the distinctive Inverness smell of ocean, pine, bay.

Morning activities:

Jerry sorted the night's catch:  here's a giant Ceanothus Silk Moth, next to a dime for scale

I began sewing together rows of quilt squares

I found this teeny speck of a woman on a tablecloth in the dining room

...and concluded that it had to do with Elisabeth's collage-making

Discovered some scrumptious chocolate cookies in a drawer and ate several.  Have since replaced them but suspect I'll eat all of those, too.

The afternoon:

Lunch on the deck with a view of oyster beds

A hike on a nearly deserted trail

An impressive field of poppies at the start

One of those days to feel really lucky to be outside

A brief stop for groceries...

...including a pint of Three Twins ice cream. Yes, I ate it all.

I watered and tidied up Elisabeth's dahlia bed

A 6 pm walk down the hill to the beach

We could see the fog starting to roll in

Today my friend Val reported that I had a letter published in the New York Times, to my amazement.  I wrote an online comment a few weeks ago, and an editor e-mailed to see if I'd allow them to print it.  I said yes and forgot about.  Haven't seen the paper; Val's keeping a copy for me.  It's on the topic of a big push for granny units.

So far, I've discovered I forgot a pair of jeans, which means I'll have to wear my baggy pants, big hardship.  And Jerry forgot his electric razor, which I think is a passive-aggressive excuse not to shave.  Since rectified (disposable razor).

Getting Settled

We managed to get out of Berkeley by 11:15 today, a near-miracle.  We took everything but the kitchen sink:

Jerry's car, of course

A welcoming plant at the door

Inviting sun and chaises in the courtyard

Flowers left by our hostess

View from the desk where I'm working, Tomales Bay in the distance

A walk on the Estero Trail in the National Seashore

Colors of grasses and plants--no shadows but gray foliage

The trail to the Estero

The Estero at the lowest tide we've ever seen--all is mud

A favorite bench we pass and never sit on

Packing: The Final Stages

We're leaving tomorrow for a short vacation in West Marin.  It's been frenzied around here getting ready to go, even though we've been vacationing in Inverness for 20 years, and we've stayed in more than a dozen rental houses.  I know the drill, but I get frenzied, anyway.

Our landlady, our friend Elisabeth, is going to England,  so we get to stay in her beautiful, well-organized, and fully equipped house with a view of Tomales Bay:

I can tell you that working for the Department of Pre-Travel Overkill has been exhausting. Here's what I've done:

1. Finished the design of a quilt that's been stuck in a drawer for three years, constructed numerous squares, labeled them, stacked them, and packed them so I can construct a quilt top while we're there, possibly to auction off to benefit the Berkeley Food Pantry.

I also packed a rotary cutter, sewing machine, rulers, cutting mat, thread, seam ripper, and all the other quilting paraphernalia I might conceivably need (no fabric store there).

2.  Planned two weeks of dinner menus, made a list of all the ingredients, bought them, and loaded them into plastic bins.

Staging area.  Jerry packs.  Note several pages of typed list.

My packing consists of parking things in boxes

Don't ask me why, but we never eat out there, unless it's at somebody's house. Yes, there are grocery stores there, but we hate shopping.

3.  Bought reading material:  four novels and then I managed to track down  a copy of Roz Chast's latest, "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" as a treat to read while I'm away.  I couldn't help myself and read it last night (Excellent!  Funny! Sad!  Depressing!)  Will take it anyway.

 4.  Washed numerous pairs of jeans, plus t-shirts, and debated what to take.  Bright colors are not worn in West Marin unless you're a tourist, in my experience, and I feel uncomfortable wearing them there. (Once I wore a bright orange fleece jacket and was asked if I worked for Caltrans). Of course, I am a tourist, but that's beside the point.

5.   Chose a jigsaw puzzle from a stack in the basement.  I hate jigsaw puzzles, but Jerry and my sister like them and swear at me for bringing them on trips because it "wastes so much time."

Bought it at a garage sale.  Are all the pieces here?

5.  Drove over to Inverness last weekend with two bicycles and stored them at Elisabeth's.  We're actually taking two cars on our trip, but bikes would take up the back of one car, and the other car couldn't contain all our stuff.  For two weeks.

Jerry, who once drove home from Inverness the day we arrived to retrieve his briefcase, has only two categories of packing:

1. Bug-collecting equipment
2. A small, random collection of clothes "because there's a washing machine there."

An hour ago, I talked to Elisabeth, who faced the challenge of leaving her house ready for renters (us) AND packing for three weeks in England.  She was at San Francisco Airport buying a book to read on the flight.  She actually apologized for leaving dishes in the drainer and laundry in the dryer.  She is another member of the Department of Pre-Travel Overkill.

Now I'm going to fall asleep at the keyboard because I managed to wedge in a trip to the allergist for a shot.  Benadryl is very relaxing.

A Tale of Two House Dresses

Vintage version

 A house dress is a foreign concept now--what the hell WERE they?--but when I was a kid in the '50's and '60's my mother wore one every day.  

2014 version

A house dress was a washable, cotton number that mothers could run up on their Singers from a Simplicity pattern.  My mother wore hers when she did housework and went to the supermarket. They were sort of shifts (remember shifts?) with a belt.

My Aunt Kit, who lived in England, wore house dresses, and when she died about 20 years ago, my cousin Sue rescued a couple and stuffed them in a drawer.

When we were in England in 2011, Sue mentioned that I might want the house dresses to cut up and use in a quilt.  Sure, I thought. Why not?  Sentimentality and all that.   She said she'd dig them out and give them to me on our next visit.

But last year when we were in England, Sue forgot to give them to me.  No problem, because my friend and neighbor Leah was going to be in London in the summer, and she could collect them.

I sent a photo of Leah to Sue, so she'd recognize her when they met.  They connected at Victoria Station and spent an hour chatting in a cafe.  Then Leah flew to New York with the two house dresses.

I was in New York about a month later, and I retrieved the dresses from Leah.  (These are well-traveled house dresses).  Here we are during the hand-off at her apartment:

Greenwich Village, September 2013.  

Note the two dresses slung over my arm. 

I brought them back to Berkeley and examined them:  two nondescript dresses, a pocket here and there, no piping.  I cut them up and put them in this bin in my studio closet:

A few weeks ago, I was writing an e-mail to Sue and I thought, really, I need to do something with those fabrics.  And a bunch of other DFP's:

An aerial view of the DFP box

I cut the dress fabrics into strips and played around.  I tried this and that.  I found myself adding more interesting fabrics.  My friend Claudia A. sent a possible pattern that reduced the DFPs to very narrow strips embedded in larger-patterned prints.

Stacked Strip pattern that  just about hides the DFPs

But I'd  already cut most of the fabric into wider strips, and I was determined to work with them.

I tried and tried, and then I discovered I can deal with DFPs only if they're reversed:

Right side

Wrong side

Here's a draft (ignore patches of white design wall):

Draft, with the house dress fabrics just about lost in it

So my plan is to use the dress fabrics right-side-up only on the back of the quilt.  It's the best I can do.  And when the quilt's done, I'm going to give it to my cousin Sue and not tell her which side is the front.

My cousin Sue in 2011, the year she told me about the fabric.