We’ve been out of town!
And I didn’t tell you that we were going. A couple of years ago after we’d just moved back from Germany, we got a few phone calls from customers who’d found me in the phone book. After that, Nathan asked me not to publicly post when we’d all be gone from the house…because “you never know.” SO…every so often, I’ll be gone for a while and then tell you about some trip we’ve taken!
We took about a week to go visit Nathan’s brother Matt in Missoula, MT. it was SUCH a weather change for us! We’ve already been in the 100s here for temperature, and some days it didn’t go above 50 there! It was cloudy, a little drizzly, and we found it to be really refreshing!
One of the best things we did was go to the Farmers’ / People’s Market on Saturday. There are SO many vendors, lots of food and crafts…really cool. I bought both girls hats from this lady, Jackie Preiss:
I thought to bring Mazie a hoodie, but neither of the girls had hats along…so these were really cute and useful souvenirs. The hats are made of upcycled clothing. Really simple, but what a cute idea! Here’s her Etsy shop. Everywhere we went, people said, “Oh, you’ve got Jax Hats!” so they’re really a local “thing.” We did see lots of people wearing them!
Matt bought a house a couple of years ago, and it has an irrigation canal running through the yard. This turned out to be incredibly fun for Mazie (and stress-inducing for her parents.) There were lots of dogs around, too…Mazie loved it!!
We flew out of Phoenix, and stopped into see my friend Tracye. Tracye and I have been friends for THIRTY YEARS! 
She has 10-year old twins, and it was so fun to see our kids playing together. They were so good with Mazie!
Now we’re back home and back to the heat and back to work. It was 106.9 degrees here on Saturday! Nathan spent the weekend getting our swamp coolers running, so it’s nice and cool in the house…but Man. It’s HOT outside! Some of the plants outside are just flat out giving up the ghost! Most are ok, though, because I’ve tried to plant local, drought tolerant stuff. And the garden is looking awesome, thanks to our little farmer:
This was actually taken before we left, and things are even bigger now. I think we’ll have lots of melons, tomatoes, and peppers! The beans also look really strong. The carrots died, the bugs are in the lettuce, the radishes didn’t make it, but we might have a few broccoli and a couple cucumbers. It’s a good experiment to see what REALLY tolerates zone 8/9. (And what tolerates the level of attention we’re willing & able to give it!)
