Four Part Harmony

Summer’s officially gone now, but truth be told it seems like we’ve been transitioning into fall mode for a while now. Nicki’s fall soccer league has started, and I’m playing fall softball. There’s been plenty of work to be done in the garden too. The weather’s been cooling off slightly (the furnace even came on the other morning), but that suits me just fine.

Here’s a photo from one of Nicki’s first soccer games. Anna and Milo and I went out to watch, and Anna ended up using Milo’s onesie as a helmet/hat of sorts.

We’re still getting a ton of tomatoes, which is what’s been keeping us busiest in the garden. The other day though, as it was looking like a few days of cool rainy weather was about to set in, we brought in our harvest of paprika peppers. My parents turned us on a few years ago to the delicacy that is fresh paprika (food of the gods, trust me), and so we’ve been growing them from seed for the past few years. This year we seem to have brought in quite a few, so hopefully they dry up nicely.

Nicki and Anna and Milo went for a hike in Tryon Creek State Park to celebrate the first day of fall. I was stuck at work, and missed out, but it sounded like fun. Anna ran the trails, and collected leaves. You can also kind of see her new haircut in this photo. We took her for a haircut last weekend, and she was set on a “short” haircut. I think she really likes how it turned out, and as a bonus, I don’t have to pull snarls out of her hair after bathtime for at least a few weeks or so.

Here’s the beatiful fall table setting that Nicki and Anna made for our fall celebration dinner. The used the fall treasures they found on their hike. The apple candle holders were really great, we used them for days but the fruit flies found them pretty quickly.

Nicki and Anna made these ink & leaf drawings/paintings (mixed media…hard to classify). Nicki says she used ink and then blew it out into lines with a straw. Anna helped with the crushing and gluing of the leaves.

A closer view. They’re pretty neat. A couple of them are hanging in our front window now.

Here’s a pretty fall-y thing too. We went and picked a bunch of apples and pears a few weeks back, and have been eating a lot of both. Nicki made this awesome pear-rosemary dessert called a clafouti. It’s a fruit dessert baked with a custard, and this one was really good. Not sure where she got the recipe, but I’m sure she could tell you if you’re interested.

And finally, here’s a couple happy Milo photos, hopefully to brighten up your day.

See you soon, so long for now.

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We’ve been enjoying these last few (official) weeks of summer. The weather’s been great, nice warm days and cool nights.

We went to our friends Brian and Alina’s wedding last weekend. Lots of friends there, and a good time was had by all.

Emily and Kayla were two of the flower girls. Our friend Jason performed the ceremony.

The reception was fun too. Among other fun activities, they had piñatas for the kids. The bigger kids were the most interested, Anna mostly stood on the sidelines at first. But I encouraged her to dive into the pile when the first one broke and she managed to grab up a couple handfuls of little trinkets and candy. The second time she decided to try her hand at hitting it. The stick was mostly too heavy for her, but she had fun trying. She spent much the rest of the day playing with the little toys she got and unwrapping (but not eating) the candy.

The garden is doing great, and we’re still getting tons of tomatoes (and basil and eggplants).

We’ve processed and frozen a few quarts, but mostly we’ve been roasting them up with basil and onions and garlic (or whatever we have on hand) and then blending the roasted veggies into a sauce/base. It’s amazingly versatile stuff, delicious as its own as a sauce or as  a base for any number of soups etc.

Our most exciting news this past week is that Anna started preschool!

Anna eating breakfast the morning of her first day of school.

Here’s a picture of where she’s going to school. It’s a nice little place run out of a house in Sellwood, right around the corner from where we live. They’ve got a few chickens and some rabbits in the backyard, and Anna was right at home. She didn’t evn hardly skip a beat when she realized on her first day that Mama wasn’t going to stay for the whole day. By the time my first day to drop her off came around, her third day, she hardly looked back once she was in the door. I had to track her down to get a kiss goodbye.

Here she is sitting down for morning snack, just before Nicki dropped her off. It’s nice to see her really excited about school. So far when we’ve picked her up in the afternoon she keeps up a stream of consciousness ramble of talking and singing for the rest of the day. She likes the kids in her class, and has made some friends there already, so we’re pretty sure this is going to be a great thing for her.

And of course, here’s the weekly picture of Anna and Milo, hanging out together.

So long for now.

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Quite the busy and fun time we had this past weekend…We left town pretty early on Friday and didn’t get home until Monday afternoon. In the interest of brevity, some pictures:

Friday afternoon: Rick and Margie’s wedding up outside of Welches, OR on Mt. Hood.A really nice little ceremony, officiated by Margie’s uncle, with many friends in attendance.

A family photo, taken just before the wedding. Doyle, Mark, and I played some music for the ceremony, and our band played again at the reception.

Anna’s friend and long lost next-door-neighbor Nora was in town with her family for the wedding. All the way from Bozeman, MT. They played kind of shy together for a while but in the end got some good play time in together.

Nora, Anna, and Kadin playing around on the grass during the wedding ceremony.

Saturday morning, a large contingent of the folks who were at the wedding headed up and over the mountain, down through Hood River, across into Washington and up to Trout Lake for the 3rd annual Last Chance Barn Dance. After all the fun we had last year, it’s become an event not to be missed.

Anna had a really fun time. She had a really strong independent streak going on all weekend and wanted to be left to do her own thing. Several times she wandered off and made it clear that I should just keep doing whatever I was doing and not follow her. It was nice to see her making so much fun for herself in all these creative ways.

Tricia and Bill were gracious enough to let us share their styling camp setup, stove, sun shade, drinking water and everything else with them the whole weekend. Here’s Tricia holding Milo. We didn’t camp out at the site because last year wasn’t so conducive to sleeping two year olds much less sleeping newborns. We stayed in town at a little bed and breakfast with the happy newlywed couple instead! It was great!

Nicki, Tricia, and Molly looking…coordinated. Molly and Owen were in town so we got to hang out for the first time in many, many years.

Grady, me and Milo, and Owen.

Owen playing my guitar. Owen’s the little known songwriter famous for the song “woodpecker lips”, which you may or may not have heard yet.

Carl was magically transformed into Carzol when Mo brought this hat back from the big garage sale going on back in town.

It was a fun time all in all. Of course, we missed a good majority of what the whole deal was mostly all about which was the lineup of musicians playing. But with the exception of a really fun campsite/back of the truck afternoon set form Jackstraw on Sunday, most of the music didn’t get rolling until 8:00 or so. The barn was really too much for Milo anyway, so we didn’t subject him to any of it. Saturday we split back to town early and just crashed. Sunday evening I brought everyone home, got Anna to sleep, and then headed back and managed to catch most of the acts on the bill. The music was stellar, but for us this year the fun was really mostly about seeing and hanging out with old friends.

Monday morning we rallied our energy and went and picked some huckleberries up in the national forest outside of Trout Lake. The sawtooth berry fields, about eleven miles west of Trout Lake up a dusty washboarded forest service road, are one of the biggest best expanses of huckleberry bushes I’ve ever seen. And this is prime time for them too. The weather was much nicer than Saturday and Sunday. Nice and sunny and no wind.

Anna helped pick quite a few. It takes a lot of little huckleberries to amount to anything, but they’re worth it. Anna had no interest in eating any of the berries. “I like blueberries” she said. I tried to convince her that these were exactly like blueberries, but better. That never works though. Somewhat surprisingly, she clued in to some wild strawberries that were growing on the ground among the bushes. I don’t know if you are familiar with wild strawberries out here, but each little strawberry is about the size of a pea at best (they’re very sweet and delicious though). She immediately took to picking and eating those, to the point where she completely abandoned huckleberry picking.

We picked and froze a few quarts in all.

A nice end to a nice long weekend.

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We had a big fun weekend up on Mt. Hood and then out in Trout Lake, WA this past weekend. However, thanks to my own obsessive/compulsive need for chronological order, I can’t bring myself to sit down and write up any reflections or recollections without first putting up a few photos from last last weekend (the weekend before last). After all, we did a lot of fun and important stuff…

Most importantly, we took Milo on his first camping trip! The band I play in was scheduled to play at a benefit concert in Astoria, OR called the Concert for Big Red. We were scheduled to play Saturday morning, so we decided to go out on Friday to camp at the beach.

We drove out along Hwy 30, which follows the Columbia the whole way out to Astoria. We used to drive that road quite a bit, but it had been a few years since Nicki and I had made the drive together. We took our time and made several stops along the way, since Milo would periodically need to eat or be changed. We stopped just outside of Rainier, OR at a little County Park and had a picnic under a big cottonwood tree.

Here’s Anna at that same park, looking out at a tugboat on the Columbia. We also saw one of the big ships go by, looking very loaded down with cargo of some sort.

We stayed at Fort Stevens, which is a pretty big State Park at the northwestern tip of Oregon, right where the Columbia comes out into the Pacific. We were right across the river from Cape Disappointment, where Anna and I had camped the weekend before.

We got in early enough on Friday to get our little camp all situated, and then we walked down to this little inland lake that was pretty close to where we were camped.

Anna and I waded in a little bit. The water was pretty shallow and warm. We stayed and sat and played in the sun at the edge of the lake for quite a while and then headed back.

Our evening was pretty nice. We had a small fire and sat around it telling stories again (a tradition now, it seems). Anna would say “Tell me a story from before I was born”. We’d think of one and tell her, and then she’d say “Tell me a story from before you were born”. which was a little harder, but left a lot of leeway. Then it was “Tell me a story from before Milo was born”.

We stayed up pretty late, well past dark. We counted stars. Then we crawled into the tent.

Saturday morning was fairly leisurely. We packed up camp after breakfast and headed out to the fairgrounds where they were having the show. Our band played at 11:00 or so, and the sun was just starting to come out. There weren’t too many folks out there, but we did see some friends. Our set was ok. To be honest, it seems they were still working the kinks out of the whole sound system (no drum monitor?), and as a result we had a hard time all getting together on the same page. I’m pretty sure I’m usually my own worst critic though.

There were a ton of Portland bands lined up to play all day Saturday, and we had planned on maybe sticking around and seeing some of the other folks playing.  But it got hotter and hotter, and there was nowhere to escape except back in the tiny musicians tent. We decided to split.

Before heading back to Portland, though, we decided to stop back at the beach to let Anna get out and run around a little bit. Here’s a shot from the top of a big sand dune looking south down the beach.

We stayed quite a while at the beach and then started the slow drive home. We had hoped to make better time coming home, but we still ended up having to make several stops. Somehow we got home just before dark and both Nicki and I felt like we’d just driven across country.

Next morning we all went outside and had our first big tomato harvest of the summer. Anna was a big help.

We also harvested a whole bunch of eggplants. Everything in that garden bed is just doing great this year (except, surprisingly, the zucchini). We’ve never had eggplants or basil like we hve this year, and haven’t had tomatoes this good in several years. We haven’t done any canning yet. Instead, we’ve been roasting up these big pans of tomatoes, onion, garlic and basil, then freezing it. It makes a great tomato sauce.

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