Vacation Over!

I took vacation last week. Sandwiched between two three day weekends, I got 11 days for the price of 5! I didn't go anywhere (except two day trips to the Bay Area--once for the Mission Peak walk and once for a niece's baby shower), but I had a really nice time. It was really strange to take a vacation during the middle of the school year, but that is one of the advantages of my new position. I'm not bound by the academic calendar. One of the really fun things that I did was to have a small cocktail tasting party at the house. One of my work friends is what I call a cocktail artist. He experiments with infused vodkas, specialty bitters, and flavor mixing. I sent him an article by one of the Garden Rant bloggers about her new book adventures writing The Drunken Botanist. It's a book about the intersection between plants and drinks. He had the idea of having a cocktail garden party club that would meet every month. He will experiment on us with small tastings of his recipes. This first episode was really fun! We had an over-the-top orange drink, a fruity one with lavender, and the one I liked best with violet liqueur and cardamom bitters! We tasted and filled out rating sheets and tried to guess the flavors. Fun! I also took time to finish a couple of projects for the Central Coast niece's baby shower. One, a baby quilt, had been an unfinished object for 24 years! I got stalled on it when she was a baby and never finished it. I can't believe I didn't take a picture of the finished product, but I'm sure someone in the family must have taken one at the shower. I did take a picture of the Elefante that I made but blogger is being difficult this morning, so you will have to wait. I didn't do much gardening. A few weeds got pulled, but mostly I just walked through it, enjoying the daffodils that are starting to bloom! Between the ones I moved last spring, the ones Mom planted on Thanksgiving as my birthday present, the ones I ordered from the Old House Bulbs catalog, and the ones I rescued from Home Depot in January, there is quite a show starting up out there!