Back in November, we stopped at Nestucca Bay Yarns in Lincoln City, Oregon, for Caroline to buy some yarn and I also chose this blue handpainted yarn for Caroline to make me a scarf with. It’s supposed to be done before we leave for Yellowstone – she knits furiously in the car, waiting in line, before ordering dinner.

This photo is of a heddle in the process of being made. A heddle, you ask? We are taking a Navajo weaving class again; practice makes perfect, don’t you know. Last week, we created our warp, which are the strings in the background that the yarn will be woven onto in order to create a Navajo rug. The heddle is the white yarn loopy thing attached to a branch of tamarisk (also known as salt cedar) that is used to pull forward every other string so weaving can occur. When the heddle is pulled forward, this is called a pull shed. When the heddle is not in use, and another branch of salt cedar is lowered, allowing the batten to squeeze between the warp rows to create a wider gap so the yarn can be layered into place for the weave to progress, this is called stick shed. Of course, there’s more to it than that, but I’m just posting a photo of my progress, not writing a lesson plan.

Dehydrating tomatoes requires approximately 18 hours of drying time when sliced 3/8th’s of an inch thick. After making all that ketchup I was down to about 24 pounds of Roma tomatoes so I plugged in the dehydrator, broke out the mandolin (as in slicer, not the stringed instrument), and started filling trays with tomato slices. I can only dry about 28 tomatoes at a time so this should only take about 4 days.

This photo is ketchup red precisely because it is ketchup. Three days ago I told readers about what I’m doing with more than three hundred pounds of tomatoes, I forgot to include that I’ve made ketchup. A gallon and a half of ketchup is what I ended up with after cooking down close to forty pounds worth of Romas. Caroline has found a recipe for honeyed tomato butter, suppose I’ll try anything to get rid of all these tomatoes.

No, it’s not what you think it is. Our air conditioning stopped working and the temperature in our little abode quickly rose to 96 degrees Fahrenheit (35.5 Celsius). Two days later, Roger, the air conditioning repairman, scaled a ladder up into our near 140 degrees (60c) crawl space and brushed off a huge wad of moist clumping dust off the cooling coils which as it turns out was stopping our a/c from functioning. Living in the desert of Phoenix, Arizona, being without cooling is a near impossibility, late in the day frustration starts to set in as you wonder how in the world to sleep in these temperatures.