Seattle was great fun — we went to the Cheese Festival at Pike’s Place Market, where we tasted many fine fine cheeses despite the crowds of corpulent tourists who could just as well have been at the free sample booths at Costco for all they cared about beautiful cheese — but who’s to complain? I tasted some lovely goats cheese camenbert, and any number of lovely bleus. I think my stepmother was a tiny bit shocked at what a cheese head I have actually become (that Wisconsin college education must be paying off). I kept saying things like “Point Reyes Bleu — have you tried this? Mt. Tam? Here — eat this!” Then we took the ferry to Bellingham and went to a great yarn store (I know, we’re big nerds) — a really beautiful yarn store where there were so many yummy yarns that I wanted to start a whole bunch of new projects.

I took the rest of the week off because it looks like I’ve got a new movie option deal for my novel and I’m going to be writing a screenplay on spec. Not much money unless we can manage to sell the thing, but it’s a new thing to learn, and that’s always fun. So I’m here doing a crash course in screenplay writing — it’s a sad state of affairs when writing a screenplay of my very sad novel is the fun project in my life! But it’s a fun project, especially since I get to mess with the chronology of things in a different way than I handled it in the book, and I get to play with telling the story through images, rather than through words. I’m having a gas ….

As to the garden — I built the tomato trellis this afternoon and hoed the many weeds out of my perennial bed. My potatoes are starting to come up, although the raspberries still look like popsicle sticks — we had a tiny bit of hail this afternoon, and it’s been raining steadily the last few weeks. I came home from Seattle and you could have baled hay in my yard — I actually killed the lawnmower a couple of times. Tomorrow’s project is to set up the wall-o-waters so they can start warming up, and I need to figure out where to plant the carrots, chard and beets. I’m thinking of building a couple more trellises as well, for the cucumbers and beans on the sunny side of the garden.