I will fight you for this last piece of pie.

The cherry pie filling: success. Wild, unadulterated success. We were invited to dinner at a friend's house on sunday and in addition to
1. eating her fabulous meatloaf
2. holding her cute baby we also got to
3. eat cherry pie.
It was the best. Yes, I wimped out and used a store-bought crust (sorry Elisa, I cannot seem to channel your crust-making mojo) but it was still without a doubt the Best Pie I Have Ever Made.

the garden today: enormous

There were rumblings during that dinner that some out of town visitors may be by this week to meet the chickens, and that was the catalyst for me removing The Lazy and doing a summer cleaning of the chicken coop today. The chickens don't get to free-range much (see: multitudinous predators and a zero rate of free-range chicken survival) but every once in a while I let them out to explore the great outdoors. So while I was cleaning out their palatial, enormous, entertaining, flight-sized (can you tell that I feel guilty that they are not free-range?) coop they got they run of the yard. And what did they do? They stayed around their flock leader to see what she was checking out.

She was scratching up bedding and scrubbing perches and sterilizing the waterer and the feeder. Yes, instead of exploring the great outdoors to their fullest, the chickens followed me around. I shooed them off regularly and they did have some fun dust bathing moments and ate a whole lot of greenery but they kept trying to see what fascinating things I was doing. I couldn't help but laugh. At the end of the day I shut them up in a lovely clean coop with fresh trimmings from the vegetable garden, and tucked them in for the night.

I will also fight you for this wine, which I tasted for the first time on Sunday and loved. AND Mark Ryan is giving me grapes in October to make jam, as long as I give him some of the final product. And he also gave me a scone from his favorite bakery. I am so awesome. Actually, I am shy but get really talkative when it's about jam, which served me well in this encounter.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Sunday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Saturday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Friday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Thursday: 4
Eggs laid this year: 448