All About Olives

It's olive season in Maberga.

Neither of those bottles is our oil*.  David did this with our olives this year...

How gorgeous are those jars?!  

Wait, a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Some of you may recall that picking olives is not really my favorite job.  I'm pleased to say that I made huge strides in my I-hate-olive-picking attitude this year by employing a simple strategy:

David and I invited some people we're rather fond of to come help us with the job.

Yep.  That's my parents, all the way from Wisconsin just to pick some olives.

Ok, not really just for the olives.  We also ate a lot of food together,

had lots of nice chats, and some cut-throat games of cribbage (the result of the throat cutting was some ass kicking, women won).

And we planted grandma Serpe's oregano seeds which they carefully transported to us from Uncle Mike.

thank you thank you thank you, mom and dad for making it all the way to visit us again this year.  This was the BEST trip EVER.

* the bottle on the left was purchased and is from last year's crop.  the bottle on the right was pressed last week by our neighbor Franco.  See the difference in color?!