A Good Morning

Erik, Mae, and I were lucky to get a rain break this morning for our trip to the Portland Farmer's Market. What a treat! Our last several outings to a farmer's market have been to the Beaverton market, but today we headed into the Park Blocks on the campus of my alma mater, Portland State University.

It's the one market where we can get our favorite breakfast of huevos rancheros. There's usually a big line for this, but today there was none. We watched them cooking the vegetables and frying the eggs.

The tortillas are made on site. And man, oh, man. This is the best breakfast going. Yum.

From there, we shopped around. I was on the hunt for some tomato starts. Along the way we saw lots of pretty vegetables, including this purple broccoli.

Honestly, if I'd taken pictures of every blooming thing, we'd still be there, and so I limited myself to just a few daffodils...

and mixed arrangements...

and lovely lavender. Mmmmmmm...I love the smell of lavender.

I was intrigued by these vinegars, and I tasted every one. There were more to the left of this image. The ones pictured here are "drinking vinegars," intended to be mixed with alcoholic beverages or else sparkling water. They can be used on salads too.

We were tempted by these little tarts.

This is green garlic. I thought about purchasing some, but decided against it. I have a recipe for a green garlic aioli, but it didn't speak to me right at the moment.

Instead, I picked up two bottles of the culinary vinegar and one of the drinking vinegar. Lately, I've been drinking sparkling water because of our diet.

When we got back to Erik and Mae's house, Cricket posed for her picture. Clementine made herself scarce. I'm going to do their pawtraits one of these days.

Also, I picked up the mail Erik and Mae have been holding for me. This was my first opportunity to see my swap postcard in person. Isn't this the cutest thing? Karen did such a great job on it.

Thank you again, Karen. It's perfect, and I love it.

Also...at some point, I won some buttons in a giveaway or a challenge or something...I honestly can't remember because it's been so long. I had them sent to Erik and Mae because I feared they wouldn't arrive before we left home last fall.

I was able to select some buttons from her website. Of course, I picked the cats.

And these...I like my buttons like I like my bindings. Stripes or polka dots. Cute, huh?

So that was a fun package to open.

After I left Erik and Mae, I had a couple of errands to run. There were no tomato starts at the farmer's market, but I was determined to get some. I ended up going to a local nursery where I found these beauties. I got ten Roma's and one cherry tomato.

Now...we really need to clean out the greenhouse. For now, they've taken up residence in the laundry room.

Speaking of tomatoes, I finished my little tomato quilt top. I'm calling this quilt "The More the Marinarier." (Did you see what I did there?)

Yesterday we had wine shipments to pick up. It's so lovely driving out into the rural countryside on these excursions. It was an awful day of weather, and so I didn't take many pictures. Here are a couple from better weather days. We stopped off at Sokol-Blosser:

And Domaine Drouhin:

And our favorite, Witness Tree:

At Witness Tree, I did take this one picture of the sign on their restroom door. Take a look at the image above, and then note how someone went to the trouble of digitizing their logo for the restroom sign...and then they machine embroidered it and made a little tiny quilt from it!

Okay, and then the most exciting thing to date...We took the newly-opened Newberg-Dundee Bypass home.

Now this requires a bit of explanation because the road that goes through our little town of Newberg and heads through the even smaller town of Dundee is also one of the main routes to the Oregon coast. On weekends, the traffic through those two little towns is absolutely horrendous. It's made worse by one stinking stoplight in the middle of Dundee. Sometimes traffic backs up there for miles in both directions. So...our transportation department, in its wisdom, built a bypass around the two towns. It was years in the planning and building, and it opened while we were traveling. (Click on that link for the big news!) This was our first time driving it.

And don't you know we were waiting on tenterhooks for this light to change so we could see what all the hubbub was about. Always a killjoy red light. Am I right about that?

And whoa...we went over...

And we went under...

And my navigation unit didn't even know the road was there. It thought we were driving across open farmland.

We crossed the Tualatin River...no swimming or drinking...it's polluted.

And in about four miles (or thereabouts) the thrill came to an end.

Apparently the light is red at both ends.

I probably should have warned you about all that excitement. I hope no one had a heart attack.

So there are more errands to run this afternoon, and I really need to get some cooking done for our dinner with the kids tomorrow. Before I go, however, I wanted to tell you that I finally put the hummingbird feeders out. This morning I saw the first hummer.

Spring is coming...really, it is.