Four Part Harmony

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!