A land -- and time -- of extremes

Vineyard Wedding!

The last 10 days or so have been a time of extremes, hence my sparse posting. There have been no horrible events, (in case that first sentence sounded dire) just a lot of difficulty working the land due to the incredible heat and at the same time, a bunch of wine country related events, which gave us a great excuse to shrug off some chores at the end of the day in favor of dancing in the vineyards and eating fine food.

This is about all we got.

My olallieberry crop was a total bust this season; I think the heat withered the berries on the vine quicker than they were able to ripen properly. At the other end of that extreme however, the canes for next year look extremely promising, so hopefully summer '16 can make up for the berries we didn't get this summer. I still have plenty of berries frozen from summer '14, so we will have pies. (this is our homestead's unofficial motto/anthem, by the way: We will have pies. So very important.) My cucumbers also seem to be a bust, never quite taking hold, while my zucchini squash crop is, as usual, leaving us buried in excess zucchini. So it looks like I'll be buying cukes to make relish this year and leaving squash on the passenger seats of coworkers' unlocked vehicles -- a typical thing.

An afternoon Industry party getting wild, and then wilder (see below).

The events and parties we've been to have been just wonderful. We had a coworker's wedding to attend last weekend, along with a birthday party plus an Industry Night that turned out more like a combination of Pride celebration and/or giant rave in the vineyards, and we danced until we dropped. The great thing about dancing is that you can pretty much eat all the food you want, drink what you like, and are guaranteed to burn it off on the dance floor. Sometimes it seems strange to be doing that at my age, but as long as there are people older than I am doing the same thing, I feel safe in participating.  Who knows, someday (probably sooner rather than later) I may not be able to, so I'd better enjoy it while I can.

So while we bake in the daytime triple-digits and hide from the sun after about 11 a.m., at night everything is warm and magical and people come out to have some wine, see their friends, and dance until the cows come home, or in our area, until the grapes ripen. Which, at the rate this heat is going, should start in a couple of weeks.