Coffee and Tomatoes

Sarah invited me for coffee yesterday morning. I got to tour her garden, which is beautiful and productive. Of course, I was so busy enjoying it that I completely forgot to take pictures. She texted me a photo last week, so I’ll put it here:

This is a dwarf tomato variety called Germanium Kiss. I love those pointy little blossom ends.

Sarah lives at a lower elevation than we do and she’s already getting ripe tomatoes. After the garden tour, we went in and had a taste test of some of the varieties she planted. Both of us really liked one called Rosella. I need to see if I have it in my own garden. (I have 38 plants out there and a couple of them are ones Sarah started for the plant sale.) If not, I will put it on the list for next year. I also want to put in some ground cherries.

I went to town after coffee and dropped off class samples at the quilt store south of town. I was clear on the other side of town when I remembered that I hadn’t picked up serger thread in a color I need to hem that turquoise LDT. I decided I would stop and get some at Joann Fabrics, but when I got there—at 11:10 am—I found a sign on the door saying, “Due to staffing issues, our hours today will be noon to 5 pm.” There has to be something going on for them not to be able to retain enough staff to keep the store open even six hours a day. They seem to churn through employees every couple of weeks. And it’s not like Joann Fabrics would be a stressful place to work even if one didn’t sew. Other Joann stores don’t seem to have trouble staffing for regular hours.

Joanns is always my last stop on my way out of town and I didn’t want to fritter away another hour waiting for the store to open. I came home without the serger thread. I need to go back to town this morning to pick up some items from the printer, so I’ll get my serger thread then.

If I had nothing else to do, I would be tempted to get a job there to see if I could solve whatever problem they seem to be having.

After lunch, I spent a couple of hours cleaning and organizing the sewing areas. They really were a mess. Now they are a bit less of a mess. That Miramar top pattern comes with a longer tunic option, so I traced that off for future sewing. I did chicken chores, checked on the pigs, made another six loaves of zucchini bread and started a new batch of pickles. The kitchen smells like dill.

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A cold front moved through here overnight. We got about half an hour of rain around 2 am, but we also got lightning. At least we did not get the gusty winds that eastern Washington got. Temps are down in the low 50s, so I have the windows open to let some of the cool air into the house. There is a new fire start on Columbia Mountain, which is about 10-ish miles north of us (between us and Glacier Park).

A friend of mine told me about an app called Watch Duty, so I downloaded it to my phone:

This is run by a nonprofit organization. Volunteers monitor dispatch and fire channels and send out alerts about new fire starts. I have mixed feelings about these kinds of things. My experience with websites and apps that track wildfires is that they can cause panic where there is no need for panic, because sometimes the information is woefully inaccurate. I monitor our fire channels on a scanner here in the house and get the best intel that way. I’ll keep this on my phone through fire season, though, and evaluate its usefulness.