The cats are enjoying the summer

Mo loves visiting the greenhouse

Mr Mo often comes out to help me tend the vegetables in the greenhouse.  There are some carrots, corn, lettuce, tomatoes, basil, beans and peas.  Lemon verbena, dill, strawberries and cosmos complete the crew.

Mo follows me out there, flops on the cool concrete and enjoys the heat of the hothouse.  Seattle has had a cool summer, so much more comfortable than the rest of the country, so the warmer greenhouse has pleased the plants.  The radishes however, were too hot and had to go outside.

Chilling with the lettuce and cosmos

 

Meanwhile, Miss Nimbus is locked indoors, wishing she could come out and play.  There she is looking out the kitchen window.

 

Not until dark!  As soon as she hears me shut the blinds she starts begging to be let out.  Maybe when she is older she will lose interest in hunting birds.

I see birdies, please let me out!

Annealing glass beads

a kiln full of beads

Here we have a kiln full of handmade beads ready for annealing.  Annealing is a method for heat treating the beads to make them less likely to break.  Annealing is also used in metallurgy to make metals less brittle.

After several hours in the hot kiln, the beads reach 960F and are then allowed to cool slowly.  Now they are ready to release into the wild.

Glass is still glass, so a bead might break if dropped.  It is also wise to avoid thermal shock to glass beads, so if you were wearing a glass bead while sunbathing and then jumped into a cold swimming pool it could have unhappy results.