After our May 15th Agricultural Guild dinner where Madden cooked and we had this dinner party for 16, so fun, we decided we needed to upgrade our entry bench. So we took a Madrone trunk over to Jay Ibold and he cut it in half lengthwise, we joined the two halves with Madrone branches and used limbs for the legs. Dave at Island Glass finally cut us a piece of glass for the center. We're so proud.
The other big project that took us about 6 weeks was the deer fence. It is really beautiful and lets us have a real garden for the first time.
Here's another view, you can see our cool sign that hides where we had to plant a stake to make that corner of the fence stand straight.
The cats, especially Sage, love to sit in the garden and wait for birds and bugs.
Pearl shows off her climbing ability, which is largely limited to going up.
We do still have a deer problem, though, with one doe. She got in once when the gate was left open (HAWK!!!), and then got her self in three different times by pushing so hard on the wires that the eyebolts bent or came out of the posts. Our solution right now, which has held for a week, is to put small scale deer fencing up to about 4 feet. If this doesn't work, our next step is to go to larger eyebolts and larger deer fence. It still looks great, I hope.
We decided to take the boat on a short cruise after lunch on Thursday, so we packed it up, rinsed off the dinghy and launched her at the park. Here is Hawk, taking a cold wind and a lot of salt spray on the way home, a day short of our plan. It's kind of funny now, not so good then. First, we tried to raise the sail as we left the county park, but we tangled the gaff lines so things stuck halfway up. We took it down but had to do a messy furl, which I hate, especially heading into Roche Harbor. By then it was 4:30, very little time to get anywhere off San Juan Island, but we made it to Reid Harbor on Stuart and anchored near a teeny island at the entrance. The wind came up in the night from a funny direction, when we looked at 4:30 we were fine. Not so much at 6:30, we were way away from the island. We lost the anchor, the shackle holding it to the line came undone. We tried to find it, it was low tide, but no luck. As we were taking off figuring out where we'd go, we noticed the engine compartment was full of water and we could hear the stuffing leak trickle. So we spend most of the morning and afternoon in Roche Harbor waiting to get it fixed. So then it was cold and we were bummed about losing our anchor and we just went home. A whole day early.
Here's a black and white from Elliot's birthday of Cora,
Here's a black and white of Suzy a year or so older. Cora is way cuter.