Four Part Harmony

Well, it’s the end of August and summer continues to be busy and fun.
Here’s a quick rundown of the past couple weeks.

Nicki walked the 127-mile Portland to Coast race last weekend.
She was on a team with some other friends of ours (Kathy and Ursula), a coworker of mine (Tabitha), and some other work-related friends and acquaintances.
Their team did great, finished very near the top of the pack (25th out of 142 teams), and it sounded like they had a lot of fun.

Prior to this race, I think it’s safe to say that Nicki would never have described herself as a competitive walker. The guy at the running shoe store asked to see her “walking style”, to which I think she replied “Should I have one?”
However, it was clear from the results of the race that she’s got walking skills, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s doing the Portland Marathon next year.
Here’s a photo of Nicki walking her first leg on Friday afternoon, having just passed three people and about to pass a fourth.

I guess this picture is from a couple weeks ago, but I thought it was worth sharing. Anna dancing out at the Grand Lodge on Maya’s birthday.

Don and Mary were here staying with us this past week. They just flew back to Cincinnati on Wednesday. We had some fun and managed some productivity as well. One really fun project that Don and I did was to make some rain barrels for the house. We ended up getting four of these old barrels for pretty cheap, and cobbled together a design of our own creation from various sources. The trickiest/most ingenious part were these wooden filter screens we built, which hopefully should work great. Here’s an action photo.

And here’s a shot of one set of the finished barrels. We set them up so that each one has a barrel for capturing (which also is the one with the hose attachment) and a second barrel for overflow storage. We did one group at the front of the house (for the north side of the roof) and one at the back of the house (for the southside runoff). It was a fun project, and one we’ve been talking about forever. Of course now I’m really dying for some rain so we can test the system.

Although on the other hand, the warm, dry, summery weather we’ve been having as of late has been enough to finally start kicking in the late summer abundance of tasty vegetables from the garden. Most noticeably, the tomatoes are finally ripening. After hearing from everyone else in the country that they’ve been eating tomatoes for a month or more, here on Holgate street ours are finally just starting to ripen. Here’s a shot of one of our first real harvests of ripe tomatoes. Flavorwise they’re outstanding and well worth the wait.

Here’s another photo of a day’s harvest. Squash and zucchini of course have been going for months, with no end in sight. It’s OK though. We eat what we can and the chickens love getting the really big zucchini that have gone a little too long on the vine. They like them so much in fact that we rarely pick one that hasn’t been pecked on at least a little bit. The sweet onions have also been great, and hopefully will last in the ground well into the fall.

We’re heading up to Trout Lake, Washington this weekend for another long weekend of camping/music/fun. Trout Lake is a place dear to our hearts from past work adventures, backpacking trips, and huckleberry picking excursions. We always make at least one trip up there in the summer.
This trip should be a lot of fun, and the huckleberries should just about be at their peak…yum.
Hope you all enjoy these last few days of summer-proper.

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Hey! Maya sent us some of the photos she has taken since becoming a Portlander.
Which is nice, because we haven’t had the camera out much lately.
Most of these are from Pickathon.

First and foremost…this picture needs no caption.

Here’s one of Anna…I think she’s shoving a handful of noodles into her mouth.

Papa and Anna.

Anna loves camp chairs. Here she looks a bit worried though.

Here’s the whole family relaxing between shows at the main stage.

Anna hopping through a hula hoop obstacle course.

Another shot of Anna.

I like this one. We were out in the hidden stage back in the woods.

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Yesterday was Anna’s 2nd birthday!
It was also the 1st birthday of Kadin, Dawn and Doyle’s son.
It was a Tuesday, which means I had the day off work, so Anna and I got to spend the morning together. The weather was kind of cloudy and threatening rain so after our morning garden/chicken work we went to OMSI for some fun.
Anna always has fun at OMSI. There’s some cool nature-type exhibits with shells, rocks, animal tracks, magnifying glasses, etc. There’s tons of stuff for her to climb on or crawl around on or in. There’s a sandbox and a little splashing/waterpark area. There’s puzzles and blocks and balls and books and puppets. And you never quite know what she’s going to go for. On Tuesdays they also usually have a couple musicians show up to play and sing songs. We stayed for quite a while.

Nicki came home early from work, and we let Anna open up her presents. I think she had the most fun opening and then tearing up the cards. Here’s a few pictures we managed to get of her opening and playing with her presents.

We had Kadin’s family and a few other folks over for a small dinner/birthday gathering.A few kids came over: Anna’s friends Wren and Violet and Zennon and Bodie, and Niko. We ate a little and let the kids chase the chickens and each other around the yard. Here’s a nice photo of the collection of salads we had for dinner.

Here’s Anna and Kadin getting ready to blow out the candles on their chocolate zucchini spelt flour cake (it was good!).

Here’s a shot of the whole group of kids together (except Niko, who was possibly sleeping in his chair). I’m still not sure how we managed to get them all to congregate, it just sort of happened.

And here’s Anna thoroughly enjoying her birthday cake. It was a really nice day for us, and I’m pretty sure Anna had a good time too. It was dark when we went up to bed, and I only read 2 books and she was out like a light.

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Well hello again friends and neighbors.
We’re back and recovering from our exhaustingly fun weekend out at Pendarvis Farm for the 2007 KBOO Pickathon.
We missed last year, which was the first year Scott and Sherry hosted it out at their farm.
It was really an astonishing transformation of the place from the quiet little farm, but it seemed to work out great and go off without a hitch.
They had at least 4 or 5 different stages with music from about 10:00 am to 3 or 4 am.

We had initially just planned on heading out Saturday morning, but sort of impulsively decided to just throw our stuff together Friday night after work and go.
We got packed up and rolled into the camping area just before dusk.
Finding a suitable camping situation almost bested us, but in the end we ran into some friendly folks who totally rearranged their campsite to accommodate our two tents and car.
We knew they had to be friendly when we spied the FMR stickers on the back of their car.
They turned out to be super friendly folks, and its always nice to start off a festival by meeting some new friends, so thanks Jeff and Jennifer!

I saw some great music Friday night after Nicki and Anna went to bed.
Main stage square dance with the Tallboys was fun, but my dancing partners were both in bed…
Erin McKeown and her band put on a rocking set in the barn. Her drummer impressed me to no end.
Alela Diane, a Portland musician I wasn’t very familiar with before the festival. I saw her play a late set with her dad around 1 or 2 am. I ended up seeing parts of her other two performances throughout the weekend, and really enjoyed her songs and her singing.
Also, the Two Man Gentleman Band, from NYC I believe. They played pretty late, but put on a really entertaining short set of tunes, despite the fact that some guy kept tossing handfuls of straw at them whilst they played.
I stayed up too late, and suffered a bit for it in the morning, but that’s ok.

Saturday, Maya and Tricia met us and we checked out some of the music happening on the main stage.

Here’s a picture of Nicki, Maya, and Tricia (hereafter “the girls”).

Anna and I went down for a much needed nap kind of early, and the girls caught the Wood brothers playing a set in the barn. I later managed to see part of their set on the main stage, which was sounding really good. The really cool thing, though, is that Oliver Wood (the guitar player) plays a mid-60′s Guild T-100D which is the same guitar that I play (mine’s a ’65), and which I don’t really see around that often. So there ya go.

Lot’s of fun all day Saturday…so much fun in fact that we didn’t really get around to taking many pictures. As usual, Maya took some great ones. She got a really sweet picture of Nicki riding a unicycle (will definitely post this later), and some great ones of Anna being her usual goofy self.

A couple more photos though, from Saturday evening:

Dale Watson and band on the Main Stage. Great set, rocked the place.

Langhorne Slim and his band the War Eagles. Later night set in the barn. Nicki and Tricia attended this show. I saw them earlier in the day on the main stage, and was very impressed. Really high energy band, and surprisingly captivating songs.

Caleb Klauder and Martha Scanlan, putting on a workshop/show Sunday morning. This was really good. I also saw Caleb later in the afternoon with David Pugh (Jackstraw) and David Long, putting on a bluegrass mandolin workshop…Quite possibly my new favorite all around musician in Portland.

This isn’t even half of the music we saw, much less half the music that occurred throughout the weekend…other highlights…Flat Mtn Girls Sunday morning gospel set in the woods, Jackstraw afternoon set in the woods, morning “music together” classes with Anna (lots o’ fun), the breakmen, horse feathers (great, very unique Portland band), chatham county line…etc, etc, etc…

And here’s Anna with a big leaf on her head.
It’s her birthday tomorrow! I better get some sleep.

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