We had eaten a bit of the pumpkin the day before, so we didn't have quite enough for what the recipe called for. Oh well. We also discovered that we didn't have maple syrup - so we used honey. Furthermore, the pie crust recipe I was going to use was invisible (or rather, in a book in a box 300 miles to the south), so we used a different one. And then it took a while to bake the pie. We hoped it worked.
As we had not managed to find everything we'd wanted on our grocery store run the day before, and we wanted to visit the local yarn store (I wanted to learn to make hats!), we drove into Arcata, the nearest largeish town, which is about a 30 minute drive to the west over/through some hills/mountains.
The weather was kind of wet, which we didn't allow to bother us much, but when we stopped at the gas station, we were told that it might snow at the higher elevations. Interesting, I thought.
So we set off for Arcata.
It rained a lot.
And then it started looking grayer than it had previously, and then we started noticing some white on some of the trees... and then full-fledged wet-looking snow was rushing at the windshield. Shortly after we started back downhill, the white stuff started turning transparent again.
Fabric Temptations is a fun little shop in Arcata that sells a little bit of everything you could want for fiber-related crafts. Something over half the store is dedicated to fabric - they seem to cater a lot to the quilting crowd - and the rest has notions, equipment, patterns and yarn. I picked out some lovely soft alpaca yarn, among other things, and we made our way out to lunch at Los Bagels. After that, we headed out to the co-op, did some more grocery shopping, and then headed north to Trinidad.
My friend comes from a family of musicians. She is a cellist; her father plays viola and cello, her mother plays violin and viola, and her sister is a violinist. Once a week, her parents get together with a couple of friends to read string quartets. Since this happened to be the night of the meeting, it was arranged for the quartet to meet at my friend's parents' house.
I love their house. While small (two bedrooms, a bathroom, and an open living room/kitchen, with a loft above the bedrooms), it is cozy and gives the impression of being much larger than it is. The walls are a lovely golden wood, the ceiling is high, there are windows all over. The porch wraps around the entire house. It is situated at the end of a windy little shared driveway in the middle of the woods. You *can* see the neighbours' houses from their yard, but they are obscured by trees. It is easy to go hiking from this house. Several years ago, they even built a little stable and yard for a horse (currently unoccupied) out on the property. It's a beautiful spot, and a wonderful home.
I was allowed to borrow a viola, and the quartet graciously allowed me to play along with them. Unfortunately, small children don't entertain themselves very well, so we weren't able to read a sextet like we'd wanted to, but I got to participate in a Mozart viola quintet (mostly not too difficult to sight read... except for the movement where I think I was supposed to be doing something terribly clever and pretty and neat, and wasn't able to read more than one note in six at the speed we were going at...) and, after my friend switched out with her dad, a Schubert cello quintet. The small child participated by sitting on Grandpa's lap for a bit.
It was a terrible lot of fun, and then we ate pie.
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| It rained. |
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| It sleeted. |
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| It snowed. |
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| See? Snow. |
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| Helping Grandpa play viola. |
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