Summer is slowly coming to an end here in the Willamette Hills .. very slowly ..
Flowers are 'over their top' but the vineyards are still very green, probably due to the very late start of the summer.

It's hard to remember how cold and rainy and late the Spring was this year when we're (still) in the 90's (30's C) right now!

                                                                           

But the mornings are definitely having a hint of crispiness in them and it looks like we finally might have a cooler week coming up in the forecast.
Except for the coming weekend .. 98!!! on Saturday! Yikes!

          

Labor Day was very warm as well, but we went for a potluck-BBQ get-together to Sheridan, about 45 minutes away from us toward the coast, where it is usually about 10 degrees cooler, and were the weather turned out to be just perfect!
So, Labor Day .. like Snoopy says, get your grill on .. which we did:

                                          

Serena, our land-lady, cooked us some perfect burgers on the Traeger, while the rest of us were 'shooting the breeze' ..

As usual I didn't make any more pictures, but we had a great day with, also as usual at a potluck, loads of food .. I'd made an overnight salad and a blueberry-peach cobbler, someone brought a terrific potato salad and besides all the hamburger fixings there was corn-on-the-cob, watermelon and some very good cookies!

Talking about food, these were the dishes of this week's meal-plan 'Work those thighs' (as in: chicken-thighs) of the Washington post I wrote about last week.
Momo Yakitori With Spicy Smashed Cukes and Chicken Schnitzel With German Potato Salad:

There was a third dish, but due to the long weekend it didn't quite fit in our schedule so I'll save it (Hot Chicken Lettuce Wraps) for another time. Lord knows I (somehow?) have enough chicken ..

It looks like my vegetable garden is really not going to grow anything more than it has done so far, which is pathetically little ..



I grew a few handfuls of strawberries, a little more wax-beans and pole beans, one ear of corn, one green bell-pepper and one hot pepper, a couple of teeny, tiny carrots, two zucchinis and three cherry tomatoes .. so far.

As I mentioned before in Doug's yard we didn't have many Blueberries this year but we had some more success with the red and yellow Raspberries and the blackberries on the edge of the orchard were actually better and bigger than last year!

 

Well, I cannot come up with much else for this week, I'm still a little bit in that summer-funk, but it's September now, so things are starting to look up.
The days are getting shorter and there are some fall festivities in the near future.
Fall is just around the corner!

Here's a sliver of a moon from a week or so ago, which made me think of a dutch Sinterklaas-song ('zie de maan schijnt door de bomen') which event takes place in December

... only 3 months away!