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.