Four Part Harmony

We didn’t have the camera out too much this Thanksgiving, but I did manage to take a few photos.
Take a look in the photo albums to see some more pictures…I’ll try to put a few more pictures into the album in the next day or two.

We did have a nice long weekend, and the weather was clear and cold for most of it.

Here’s Nicki, chopping parsley Thursday morning as we finished up our cooking for the day. We had made our traditional pumpkin shortbread tart the night before.

A rather blurry picture of the greens pie that we made. Lots of different greens from the farm and the garden, mixed up with some feta and all wrapped up in a quick-rise bready kind of crust. We’ve made this a few times before and it always turns out good. Very tasty.

We went down to our friends Steve and Keri’s house, as has been the tradition for the past four or five years now. It was a nice, fairly small gathering and we spent the day half watching football games, playing with the kids, and eating/drinking. Here’s Steve, carving the turkey.

Anna had a lot of fun playing with Emily and Kayla and Niko. She was especially fond of Kayla, and they spent much of the day playing together.

And here’s Anna and Niko having a little tea party.

We hung out until maybe 7:00 or so, and then headed for home. Anna was out before we got to the end of the road, which is always a sign of a day well spent. We spent the rest of the long weekend mostly doing stuff around the house. Anna and I made a couple of short, chilly trips to the park. Nicki and Anna went to OMSI. I cleaned the chicken coop.

On Friday I built this workbench for the basement which was a pretty fun quick project. The top is our heavy old front door, which I had been hanging on to for just such a purpose. It seems to have turned out pretty good. I spent some time yesterday trying to rearrange the basement to find a place for it.The limited space down there, and the quantity of stuff that we have stored down there makes it a bit like one of those puzzles where you slide the little squares around…move one piece, slide something else into its spot, move another piece, put something in the new space… Eventually, I’ll get back to working on the guitar.

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Well, here we are. Our brand new shiny website. What do you think? Pretty fancy eh? There’ll be lots of changes around here I’m sure, and I’m guessing most of the site probably doesn’t even work yet…

But as always, we’ve been busy, and I’ve got a lot of pictures backlogged so the show must go on.

Earlier this month, my pal Gabe was kind enough to invite me to take a trip down to Eugene to see the Oregon Ducks football team play Arizona State. I wasn’t really aware at the time, but it was a big game…tickets were going for hundreds of dollars on craigslist and everyone apparently wanted to be there. Gabe’s wife Maya had to work, and I guess I was just lucky (sorry Maya!) . We left town after breakfast, and were cracking beers in the parking lot by 11:00.

It was fun.

At some point during the day, Gabe convinced me that I should let him set up and host this new blog for us, which I thought was a great idea. Gabe’s a certified internet master…he was hosting websites out of his closet when I met him in Eugene in 1996. I don’t think I even had an email address back then.

Here’s the one photo I have of Gabe that wasn’t taken 10 years ago. Grilling up some potatoes at halftime.

This past week Don and Mary were here. As always, we had a great visit. The weather was decent, if not entirely cooperative. This picture was taken at Bar Carlo, a new breakfast/lunch cafe right around the corner from our house.

With the weather being kind of wet and cool, we ended up pursuing mostly indoor projects. However, we did have a clear afternoon and had enough time to put together a pretty nice extension for the chicken fence using stuff we had lying around. No more escaping chickens! They are much happier, as we can just open the coop for them in the morning and they can come and go as they please.

Don also helped me get a handle on sharpening planes and scrapers, and helped me with some brainstorming for my guitar project. We bought a Stanley plane that needed a lot of work, and we spent quite a few hours sharpening it (it’s still not quite done yet, but it’s very close). This photo shows it after finishing with 150-grit. You can almost make out the camera’s reflection. According to Don you’re supposed to be able to count your whiskers in it. Yikes! That’s a lot of sanding.

One really great project that Don undertook was to re-upholster our dining room chairs. This turned out to be a massive undertaking. There were at least three layers of old fabric on each of the chairs, and the webbing was pretty well stretched out. There were hundreds of little tacks that had to be removed. I don’t believe that he had any prior experience with such a project, but that certainly didn’t stop him from doing a really great job.

And here’s the finished product. They look really nice.

Looks like this post will need to be continued…

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We’re working on a little remodel project over here at threepartharmony headquarters.
Watch your step around here as I try to figure out how to drive this thing.

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Halloween turned out to be a pretty fun week for us here on 59th Street.

For starters, Anna got to wear her ladybug costume much of the week leading up to Wednesday, which she was pretty excited about.

The weather has continued to be clear and cool, and
so we spent quite a bit of time working out back in the yard. We also ran our errands out and about town in costume, which suited Anna just fine.

Here’s a shot of Anna and I with our pumpkins. Michael came into town from Astoria and stayed with us for a few days. We carved pumpkins after dinner on Wednesday night. Michael did the little one and I did the bigger one. Then we set out on a trick-or-treating excursion, and left Michael to deal with the coming onslaught of ghosts and spider-men.

We set off up the street and coached Anna in the finer points of trick-or-treating. She was unsure about it at first, but seemed to warm to the idea of people giving her things that she could put in her bag. Thankfully, she doesn’t really see candy around to much, and therefore she wasn’t too worried about eating any of it. She mostly just liked going from door to door and putting stuff in her bag.

We made a short loop around the ‘hood, probably went to about 15 houses.
We actually ended meeting a few different sets of neighbors that we had never seen before.
Ever.
Even though they live within 200 yards of our house.
A sad commentary on the state of society?
Or maybe we just keep different hours, who knows…
Either way it was nice to make that connection and feel a bit more of a neighborhood bond.

By the end Anna had it pretty well figured out. She would knock on the door, and hold out her bag or reach into the bowl, but wouldn’t go so far as to say “trick-or-treat”. Her hands were pretty full too by the end, as she was collecting leaves along the way. When it came time to pick her treat, she had to shuffle all the leaves to one hand, set her bag down, then try to fit the candy into the bag one handed.

Her “treat” bag sat in the living room for the next several days (actually, it’s still there), and Anna would play with it by taking everything out and putting everything back in over and over. She did get to eat a few pieces of her candy. Unfortunately we didn’t have the camera out to catch her big smile and eyes lighting up when she got that first taste of chocolate.

We’ve got some more photos from the rest of the week, and this past weekend.
I’ll put them up if I get a chance in the next couple of days.

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