this little life of mine

Seals and Sea Lions snoozing on the rocks in Morro Bay.

Two Sundays ago I went out and took my weekly garden pics, but never got them resized or posted due to having put a bunch of my rubber stamps for sale on eBay, and subsequently selling them all within a couple hours. So then there was packing and printing and shipping, and gah! Why can't all my crap super good quality stuff sell this fast??

Then this past weekend I ended up with a cold that I'm despiratly trying to get over quickly since the Central Coast Writer's Conference is this coming up this weekend and my vacation with my mom to Cambria is next Monday thru Thursday. So I never even made it outside to harvest the few little tomatoes I can see from the kitchen window, let alone take a new set of pictures.

Anyway, the other night I was playing with one of my favourite photo sites, dumpr.net, and decided to do my garden pictures in lomo, just to be different. (BTW, dumpr looks.net has the best lomo filter for pictures,  IMHO.) So, here's what the garden looked like a couple weeks ago. It probably hasn't changed much.

Everything is crazy huge. My pepper plants are both pretty loaded down with peppers in various shapes, sizes and even colours. A lot of them have been turning red, and some have a little orange in them, too.  They have all been delicious sauteed in a little EVOO!

The Big Beefsteak tomato plant itself is ginormous, but the tomatoes never got too terribly big. They have been delicious, though, sweet and meaty, and hopefully we'll get some more over the next couple weeks.

We did get some pretty good-sized, uber juicy and delicious tomatoes off the Bush Goliath plant, but they're starting to fizzle out, too.  This plant was so successful we're planning to just get two fo them next year and skip the beefsteak.

I think the garden may be just about done for this year. The tomatoes are not getting as large, and there are fewer and fewer blossoms on the plants. The weather is finally (hopefully?!?) changeing from the hideously hot summer to a somewhat cooler fall, and I think in a few weeks we'll be saying farewell to the garden of 2012.

I finally got around to printing up some new pictures for my Art Wall. There are shots here from the Coppola Winery from last year's Rehab 2011 Napa Valley Wine Tour, Atascadero Lake and my own backyard. The shots were enhanced in Instagram, dumpr.net and picnik.com. Enjoy!

Once again I have signed up for some Reading Challenges for the coming year. I'm hoping to keep it down to just a few so I don't get totally overwhelmed, so I've chosen the Off the Shelf challenge, 2012 Debut Author Challenge, and 2012 Young Adult Reading Challenge. 

For the Off the Shelf Challenge, I've randomly chosen six books from my bookshelves:

1. Montana 1948  by Larry Watson
2. Mariel of Redwall  by Brian Jacques
3. 5th Avenue, 5 A.M.  by Sam Wasson
4. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby - Scary Fairy Tales  by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
5. Waterfall  by Lisa T. Bergren
6. Hunter Brown and the Consuming Fire  by The Miller Brothers

I've chosen to read 20 books for the 2012 Young Adult Reading Challenge, and most of them will just be added as the year goes on. For the 12 Debut Author Challenge books I've chosen:

1. Cinder by Marissa Meyer
2. Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi
3. Above by Leah Bobet 
4. Something Strange and Deadly by Susan Dennard 
5. Storybound by Marissa Burt 
6. The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet 
7. The Vanishing Game by Kate Kae Myers 
8. Unbound by Emily Goodwin 
9. Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown 
10. May B. by Caroline Starr Rose 
11. The Treachery of Beautiful Things by Ruth Frances Long
12. Seraphina by Rachel Hartman 

There is sure to be a lot of crossover and I'll probably change my mind on some ofthe books I choose to read, but those are the lists for right now. 

 
bright orange, yellow, gold

bursts like sunshine in my mouth

perfect little fruit