A Magical Garden & A Bike Ride

Yesterday my friend and fellow quilt-grouper, Marion, who moved here from Berkeley several years ago, gave me a tour of her recently remodeled house and garden.  Magical!  She is a woman of many talents, and she designed the garden and the remodel herself:

Front door with its decorative downspout

Part of the front garden

Intriguing plant related to foxglove

Dining area added during recent remodel...

...overlooks the living room

One of Marion's quilts

View of Tomales Bay and Pt. Reyes Station from a deck

Marion's office, with view

Her hand-dyed fabric in an adjoining studio space

Steps leading down to the back garden and her  new studio

The studio, at right

Studio porch, with cat

Interior, where she makes jewelry and dyes fabric

Enviable space and organization!

Drawer of jewelry-making supplies

In the garden

A vegetable section, with drip system. Everything in the garden has its own gopher cage.

Above and below, inside the house:  Everywhere you look there's something intriguing

 

In the afternoon, Jerry and I took a bike ride on the Cross Marin Trail, starting in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and then crossing over into Samuel P. Taylor State Park.

 

 

A stand of redwoods

A fair number of campers on the holiday weekend

Signs on the bathrooms

Plenty of empty picnic tables

In the evening, more work on the quilt:

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).