Yellow Plum Wine

Last Winter during the snow, I was wandering around the fields near our house and I found this old basketball hoop in a small clearing in the trees. It was really surreal. Here is the link my post on it last December.
http://nylandblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/december-snow.html

So last weekend, I was out in the same field picking blackberries and I found myself at the same basketball hoop. It was surrounded by yellow plum trees and the plums were really sweet. Yesterday, I picked 10 pounds of plums and made a couple gallons of wine. I figure that the actual wine cost will be about 40 cents per bottle.

Jess is at Young Life camp and Joe is at Grammy Ann's this week until Thursday or so. Tonight I am going to ride my bike downtown to meet Meg for dinner or something.

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Jess at camp parsons

Date night

So Jess is at Camp Parsons and Joe is at Nana's. We had a night to ourselves with nothing planned. I left work at 3 and rode my bike from the Renton plant to the Mount Baker light rail station. I intended to ride all the way downtown but I couldn't resist trying out the light rail. They had a hook on the ceiling to hang bikes and it only cost $2 to get downtown. Very convenient but it really isn't much different from any other cities light rails that I have been on. It just needs to get extended to make it more useful.

I met Meg at her work and we drove over to pike place. We had happy hour drinks and some appetizers at Zig Zag which is on the hill climb. We had some half price fancy cocktails that were really good. We then stopped at the wine tasting place in Post alley next to Kells and tried a flight of Rose. For dinner, we walked up 1st to Black Bottle in Belltown. It is a "small plate" place where we had boar ribs, mashed potatoes wrapped in prosciutto and brie leek flatbread. It was excellent and we wanted to try more except we were full. This is going on our favorite restaurant list and I am sure we will be back.

Tonight (Wed.) we have a wine making class and then on Thursday night I am going out to Parsons for the last 2 nights of scout camp.

Help- need bottles

In the last couple of weeks, I have bottled pear, blueberry, rhubarb, and pineapple wine. It has seriously depleted my bottle stock and I just realized that I have about 20 gallons currently in secondary ferementation (apricot, peach, raspberry, bing cherry, and lapin cherry) . That means I will need about 100 bottles in a couple of months and right now I only have 10 bottles. and I haven't picked any blackberries yet. and I am still thinking about more Peach. the stuff I made tastes really good and the peaches look really good right now.

So....I am putting the call out to family and friends to save their wine bottles. Just rinse them out and we will take care of getting the labels off.

A little nervous on this request because our family and friends really know how to drink wine and I could end up with a garage full of bottles.

As for what we are up to.....We just spent the weekend at Stretch Island with the Nyland families. Jess brought his friend Hayden and we spent a lot of time in the water. The cove was so warm I didn't need my wet suit. Joe is coming back from the Grange Camp and we will have a barbecue with the Traxels tonight. Jess has left for Scout camp at Camp Parsons so we will be missing our baby sitter this week. Joe will spend most of the week in Tacoma with Nana or Gerrit so we will be kidless. Thursday I am going to camp for a couple of days and then we will have Max and Henry next weekend.