Four Part Harmony

Hi everyone. I wanted to post some pictures from our fun memorial day adventures, but realized that we had a bunch of other photos I haven’t put up yet so I’ll post a bunch of them real quick-like here.

For one thing, we had a really nice Mother’s Day brunch here at our place with a bunch of friends and food. I never did get any pictures of that though, as our camera was (and is) on the fritz. We’ve since borrowed a camera and have been using that as a backup until we get around to sorting out our camera woes, but no pictures of the fun Mother’s Day brunch (if anyone has any good ones feel free to email some over!).

A couple weeks ago, Nicki’s friend Michelle came out and stayed with us, and for part of her trip Nicki took her and the kids out to the coast.

They went to Beverly beach, outside of Newport, OR, and stayed in a yurt. To hear Anna tell it, it sounded like a fun time.

They also went to the aquarium.

It rained torrents the first night they were gone, but then they had some sunshine, and I think they spent some time beachcombing…

…which is starting to be one of Anna’s favorite pastimes.

I had some free time in town, and a day off from work so I started building a fence for our front yard. I did the bulk of the hard work in one long day. Dug all the holes and got all the material. I dd the bulk of the actual cutting of the rails and setting the posts over the course of the next two days. It was a pretty fun project all in all.

It came out looking pretty good too. Everyone really likes the fence. I mean everyone. People stop their cars and yell out “nice fence!”. The UPS man says nice fence. The mail man. The neighbor kids. Random pedestrians. All like the fence. It’s a pretty nice fence. It really ties the yard together.

Anna was pretty happy to have Michelle to hang out with. They spent several sunny afternoons painting in the backyard. Anna would get covered in paint and then run through the sprinkler to wash off.

Milo has been enjoying the nice weather.

We made some popsicles and he and Anna have been enjoying them on these warm late spring afternoons.

This past weekend we went on quite an adventure. I had some more free Mariner’s tickets from work, so we drove up to Seattle for the game. It being Memorial Day weekend we decided to make a full weekend out of it and stop and visit some friends nearby as well. The game was fun. We got out of town late and traffic being what it is on Friday before Memorial Day, we pulled into Seattle with less than an hour before game time. Still the kids did great, made it through to the seventh inning stretch, and then we headed out. The game ended up going to 12 innings, and the M’s pulled it off in the end.

Next morning we headed out early. We had reservations on a 12:00 ferry leaving from the south tip of Whidbey Island across the sound to Port Townsend. We left early with the hopes of finding a nice bakery or something on the island, and having a leisurely morning with plenty of time to catch the ferry. The kids slept while we drove, but woke up as we came into Oak Harbor. We inquired about a local bakery, but were told that there wasn’t really anything in town. The kids were getting restless and the situation was getting tense, so we pulled off the street at random and came across this beautiful little city park. We played and climbed on these big old oak trees for a while and then proceeded on.

Our last hope for sustenance before we hit the ferry terminal was the idyllic town of Coupeville, WA, where we were told there was a nice little place to get fresh bread. When we got there we noticed the locals were all setting up for a parade.

Here’s it is, the “knead and feed” in coupeville. Stop there if you are ever in the neighborhood. We got coffee and scones and a loaf of fresh wheat bread that was really great. We ate quickly. We only had a little bitof time to catch our ferry, and we wanted to catch a little bit of the parade.

The parade! It was really cool. We watched the first few cars go by and then we headed for the car because we were really cutting it close to be in time to catch the ferry. We got the kids into the car and started to head back out of town…except…that…the only road out of town had a huge parade going down the middle of it.

So we were trapped, and on some level we resigned ourselves to missing the ferry. We watched the whole parade which got done just in time for us to almost, but not quite, make the ferry. Oh well.

Thankfully, this particular ferry terminal was in a state park with a pretty nice beach right at the loading area. We killed an hour and a half pretty quickly just laying on the beach goofing off.

Waiting for the ferry.

Milo waiting for the ferry.

Milo climbing on some driftwood while waiting for the ferry. The boy is getting strong and adventurous.

The ferry came and we zipped across the channel in about 20 minutes or so. It was a nice ride, and a beautiful day.

Here’s a view of Port Townsend from the ferry as it pulled in. Our friends Owen and Molly and their new baby Fern live near Port Townsend and we stopped in to see them.

Here’s Anna and Milo meeting Fern.

We spent the rest of our weekend camped out in nearby Fort Flagler state park, hanging out, and checking out the local beaches. Anna really liked these beaches with their coarse sand and tons of shells. As we were walking to the beach, she would generally walk up until the very first hint of any sand or shells, then immediately sit down, take off her hat and shoes and start filling them up with sand. That was as far as she ever made it most of the time.

She did like to venture down to the water occasionally though.

We took one last walk on the beach Monday morning and said our goodbyes to our friends. A great end to a great trip (thanks Owen and Molly!)

It was one of those rare trips that was just so nice on so many levels, and that was made all the more interesting and fun because of the weird unplanned setbacks. I think we could have stayed an extra week or two up there on the peninsula. (And maybe we should have, because then we got stuck in a 10 or 15 mile long back up on 101 heading south which slowed us to a crawl for over an hour with the car running on fumes and nearly overheating…but I’m trying to forget that part of the trip.)

Well, I think that catches you up on our adventures of late. Next weekend we are off to…you guessed it, the beach! This time with Anna’s school. Should be fun. Then we will rest…or work in the garden or something.

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Well it seems I haven’t updated the blog in forever again. I’ve got somewhat of an excuse this time…our camera just went on the fritz and we’ve had all of our pictures locked up on the memory card with no good way to get them off. I finally broke down and bought a cheap little card reader so we could get the pictures off, but it looks like we’re without a camera for a while again…

Recently we’ve been working at some pretty big garden/yard projects. We dug up the scraggly shrubs that have been planted in front of our house, tilled up a bunch of the grass and started in on a sketched out vision of what we hope our front yard will one day look like. We’ve been throwing around ideas since we bought the place, but we had been waiting until the exterior  painting was done before moving forward with anything. We brought in a bunch of soil and laid out a big front bed and a perimeter of plantable space around the entire front yard. Our plan is to put up a half size fence like a split rail around the whole yard and one day to have all or most of the yard in plants.

We got a really nice bunch of native plants for the front bed. Red flowering currants, snowberry, clustered rose, kinnickinnick, and wild strawberries.

This picture doesn’t do it much justice at all, but it’s about how things look right now. We got two apple trees and a dwarf fig tree which you can see at the right of the photo. You can see the soil we laid out along the future fenceline. The idea is to have the herb garden moved to the southwest corner, and to hopefully fit one more larger tree at the northwest corner of the yard. The fence will really make the yard a lot more defined and will be really nice…when I finally get around to designing/building it.

We also constructed a ramshackle planting bed from a bunch of old bricks and rounds of wood  that have been taking up space in our driveway for years. It turned out pretty good. We just tonight went over to our friend Sally’s house and picked up some wayward raspberry canes that had escaped their planting box. We brought about 10 little plants home and stuck them in the ground. With any luck, by about this time next year we’ll be rolling in raspberries!

In the midst of our big landscaping/gardening adventures I had a birthday. Turned 32. It was fun. The most exciting part was that we took a trip out to an awesome native plant nursery (Bosky Dell), and we spent a nice morning browsing plants and scheming up what could work with our plan. I also ran into an old friend/classmate from my botany days at Portland State, which was pretty cool, and we ended up getting a great tour of the property from the woman who owns the nursery. Had some friends over for a nice dinner and Nicki and I even went out later that night. This picture is of Anna posing next to my birthday presents. She has made it known that she must participate in the opening of any present no matter what.

Anna’s school had a mayday party/potluck that was a lot of fun. Anna had been singing the songs for weeks, and was pretty excited for it.

We also went to Westwind, our annual pilgrimage to the coast for a weekend of cooking and camping and music and all kinds of other stuff. You can read back in the archives about past years if you got the notion. Nicki and I have been going for 6 years I think…this was Anna’s 4th year, and Milo’s 1st. We always rendevous at the Otis Cafe before heading in to Westwind, and you should too if you ever get out that way.

Anna was very excited for Westwind, and was in her element pretty much the whole time.

She made good friends with Pete another friend of ours who was out there with the kitchen crew.

One popular game was making “cupcakes” by filling her shoes with sand over and over.

Milo liked playing in the sand too, but we had a tough time keeping it out of his mouth.

Walking to the beach with our homemade kite.

Digging on the beach.

On Anna’s first or second year we took a really cute picture of her sitting at the window in the main lodge looking out at the ocean with her reflection in the window. We were trying to recreate it with Anna and Milo, but it proved difficult. This one just seemed funny.

Nicki and Anna took a long walk on the beach on Saturday. The weather was supposed to be all wind and rain, but it was really pretty nice the whole weekend.

Lots of beach time for Anna.

Anna was also wanting to do her share in the kitchen. She likes to cut butter at home when we make biscuits, so she was pretty happy to be given the butter cutting job.

And here’s one rare shot we actually managed to get of (nearly) the whole kitchen crew. Working hard making salad rolls for dinner Saturday night.

Unfortunately, this was where our camera suddenly stopped working, so we didn’t get any more pictures the rest of the weekend. The lens is stuck out and won’t move. It’s the exact same thing that happened to our last camera, and apparently is a common problem with that make/model of camera. It’s out of warranty, so I’m going to try and see what I can do to fix it, but more than likely we’ll be looking for another camera sometime soon. Until then, here’s a video we took of Anna running circles around the Westwind lodge while a little impromptu band plays in the background. Enjoy!

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