There is a little delay in my “around here” this week, since I just got back from a long weekend in Italy! It’s olive-picking time, and my family’s estate cabin has an olive grove that warrants a yearly small gathering of people willing to rake olives out of the trees. It happens with a net underneath, and little rakes on sticks that you use to comb the branches of olives so they fall into the net. Then you gather the net and dump the fruits into baskets, which you finally take to an olive pressing place, that presses the oils out of the pits and gives you jugs of peppery green olive oil. And then you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor! Good fun, and good work.
We were lucky to have some really lovely weather while we were there, as you can see from my bare-armed (wool!) olive picking-outfit. That’s my dad in the background, for a contemporary and alternative spin on American Gothic. Other activities included knitting of course, fires in fireplaces in the cool evenings, and loads of cheese and bread and wine. And now we’re back to the daily life, which for me includes hopefully soon finishing that dress I was cutting and prepping last week.
indigorchid 
I was thinking those pictures didn’t look very much like Norway :-) (I suppose the pic out of the plane should have been a giveaway but I was a bit slow to catch on) Anyway, how lucky you are to have a place out in Italy (even if it is just a cabin and not an estate!), it’s such a beautiful country. And I bet that olive oil tastes even more amazing knowing that you picked the olives yourself.
Haha, that’s funny! It certainly didn’t feel like Norway! I can’t wait to get that olive oil in my hands.. it will be something special! Like the food-version of hand knits or something!
Mmmm olives! Beautiful property.
How awesome to just “have a weekend in Italy”…. we just can’t do things like that here in Australia!
Hehe.. I do feel lucky to be able to do that. When we were living in Chicago, I was just dreaming of when we’d be able to do weekends in Italy, or England, or Germany, being so close to them all from here. It’s funny – I can come up with a bunch of reasons why Australia is exotic, and how lovely it would be to go weekending there, but in the end, things close to home (wherever home is) just isn’t exotic, is it? ;)