I Think You're Wonderful

Last night my six-year-old nephew, Keaton, had his first-grade school program – Hearts and Hands. These school programs are entertaining in a way entirely unique to themselves. In fact, at one point, Brett – who is diabetic - leaned over to me and said he was going to have to take more insulin as there was so much sweetness going on. Where else does one hear songs with titles such as “Making Valentines”, “Love is the Magic Word” and “I Think You’re Wonderful”? The best song, though, was one called “A Different Beat” that basically taught there are many people on the street and each moves to a different beat and really that’s okay. While most of the songs had hand motions, this particular one had such gems as disco moves, hip rolls, shoulder shimmies and fist-pumping. The little girl on the riser behind Keaton left me with tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks. She was so exuberant and so very into her dance moves and was obviously having SUCH a great time that I wish I had video of it to play when I could use a laugh.

So if you ever need to be reminded of how simple and fun life can be, find a grade-school program to attend. But preferably one in which you actually know one of the participants. Otherwise it might be a bit creepy.

Urban Farmers

I read the most interesting book this weekend. It is titled Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter. I am a total back-to-the-earth hippie at heart (though I shower regularly and shun patchouli) and daydream about the day I can have a gigantic garden and honey bees and farm birds and would love to be completely self-sufficient. I know the complete self-sufficiency is a long-shot, though, because I draw the line at raising and butchering my own meat and I will never be anything other than an omnivore. The author of this book, however, draws no such line. She lives in urban Oakland and turns the abandoned lot next to her apartment into a big garden and raises everything from chickens and geese to pigs, rabbits and goats in her backyard with the intent of eating the meat birds and animals. I totally geeked out reading this book - imagine how excited I was when i found her blog online! (novellacarpenter.com) I love the idea of growing all my own produce. Right now my garlic crop is coming in and I check it every day as though I expect it to grow inches overnight. I am planning this year's garden already, deciding what food I want to grow and what the ratio of ornamentals to edibles should be. I will grow flowers to attract the hummingbirds and bees so am researching which varieties will draw the biggest crowds. I am totally itching to get my fingers dirty and it's still January!

Happy New Year

Yes, six days late, but Happy New Year nonetheless. I haven't set any official NY resolutions. There are definite things I wish to do/accomplish this year, but generally I'm just planning on making it the best year possible. I would like to blog more. But if I make it an actual resolution it won't happen. Other goals I won't make official are to exercise regularly (such a cliche), increase my creative projects, see things with a glass-half-full mentality, and spend more time fortifying my personal relationships with family and friends. Easy peasy, right?

Where's My Stuff??

One of the best parts of internet shopping is being able to track the package as it makes its way to me.I can't explain why, but I really do get excited as it gets closer and closer, even when I'm not self-gifting. Equal to my excitement over getting a package is my disappointment when I learn it's being sent via the US Postal Service. Now, don't get me wrong - I like supporting the post office because somehow I think if they get enough business they'll stop raising stamp prices Every Single Year.But their tracking system is terrible. Amazon.com tells me my package shipped via USPS on Saturday of last week. But the last package sighting was in Lexington, Kentucky and when I track it on usps.com - using the tracking number provided to me - I'm told there is no record of that package in their system. I'm not worried, because that has happened before. It's quite annoying, though! UPS is my favorite for both sending and receiving because their tracking system is second-to-none.

Pickles and Pesto

Autumn is definitely in the air. My Betty Crocker bone is flaring up so I'm trying to bottle some of summertime and use up garden offerings before cold weather really sets in and there is no more harvest to be had. The tomatoes are being made into tomato jam, but I didn't take pictures. I found a new recipe this year and it is deee-licious. It makes a great pasta sauce or can be used on meats as a sort of relish. The cucumbers were pickled with onions and green bell peppers (yummy) and the basil was made into pesto (not so yummy - oh, well).
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Two Canoein' Fools - Part 1

Brett and I have long talked about going on some sort of canoeing trip. I've had more experience with it than he but even that experience consisted of minor, short-term ventures - nothing major. I put Brett on the assignment of figuring out where we were going and after some internet sleuthing he found a website for Strathcona Lodge on Vancouver Island, B.C. This place offered all sorts of outdoor, recreational activities such as mountaineering, high ropes, zipline, rockclimbing and most importantly - canoeing. We arrived on a Sunday and arranged to stay there that night, leave the next day with one of their canoes, canoe and camp the next three days and stay another night at Strathcona upon our return. The pros - high adventure, meeting new people, bear-sighting, beautiful scenery, great stories - far outweighed the cons - thinking I was going to die.

We put in at the Strathcona Dam and paddled up an arm and into Lake Campbell. The portage (where you exit the lake and hike to the next one) was kilometers away and required going the length of the lake. This particular lake was open to motorized boats so we had to contend with wakes and as it was large, there was a fair amount of breeze that didn't often agree with us in regards to which direction we needed to travel. We wouldn't have been so eager to cross if we'd known the task that lay ahead. We had NO idea how heavy the canoe was and the Australian employee at the lodge made shouldering it look so incredibly easy! So imagine, we've just paddled for 2+ hours and now have to transport the canoe and all our gear to the next body of water. There was a campsite at the portage and I was talking to a woman acquainted with this canoe trail to make sure we'd gotten out at the right spot on the lake (directional signs don't really work on water!). She was affirmative and went on to tell us how to get to the next lake - Gosling Lake. Did we think to check our map and make sure her verbal directions coincided? Um, no. And after a long, grumpy, mosquito-ridden detour to Boot Lake (NOT on our route) we finally got back on track. This time-waster was only slightly redeemed by the fact I had my first bear-sighting! It was a black bear and based on the way he tore through the forest away from us, he was in no way eager to have a human sighting.

We arrived at Gosling Lake and decided to make camp there for the night. Originally we'd intended to get much further but the detour ate up too much of our daylight and it made sense to stop and camp as we were both pretty exhausted. These lakes are part of a ring of lakes and the entire route takes you full-circle. If we'd had more time, we would have done the whole thing.

At Gosling Lake we met the nicest, kindest, friendliest family from Switzerland. Tomas, Cristine and their two children gifted us bottles of water and, upon learning or our tired state, Christine ran to their campsite and returned with an Ovamaltine chocolate bar that she said she gave to her children when they had low energy. It was such a kind gesture. I told them about my great-grandparents being from Switzerland and they thought that was wonderful. We didn't eat the chocolate right then and there but if we'd known how delicious it was going to be we just may have. Our sites were adjacent to one another and after they Swiss retired to their RV we could hear the children (ages 7 (boy) and 9 (girl) maybe?) laughing and talking and they seemed like the happiest children I've ever met. Hearing how they interacted has really stuck with me. The next morning before shoving off, Brett searched our rations for something - anything - we could gift them in return. Of course we didn't pack in anticipation of international relations so had nothing grand so-to-speak from home to give them. (Well, unless you count Winco trail mix!! We had lots of that.) We also had packages of organic fruit-leather with little cartoon frogs on them that were obviously an American product. So Brett selected the ones with the cutest pictures and took them over the Swiss children. Not two minutes later, they appeared in front of us with fresh bottles of water to take with us! We asked their names, Niana and a very heavily accented Mikhail maybe? Brett responded with "Micky??" and the two kids giggled and fled back to the safety of their familiar parents. They must've found our whole expedition curious as the two of them sat on the dock waving as we paddled away.

Hot Child in the City

It has been so unbelievably hot here. Yesterday it was 110 degrees in my town and it's completely out of the ordinary. I haven't experienced heat this high since I lived in Arizona. Down there it's expected. Here? It's cause for leading storylines on the evening news. In fact, this morning I was watching Good Morning America while I got ready for work and they highlighted Portland and area suburbs at the top of the weather segment, saying they haven't seen highs like this in Portland in the 200-something years they've been keeping records. I may have gotten that wrong, as I was listening while at the same time lamenting that I 'd already broken a sweat. The high for today is supposed to be 107/108 degrees and tomorrow we're expecting a nice, balmy 100. First snowstorms that shut down the city in December and now record-breaking heat in July. What's happening to my temperate city? If you don't hear from me for awhile it's because I'm sweating so much my fingers are just slip-sliding across the keyboard and I'm unable to form complete sentences.

Fun at the Birdbath

I recently constructed a birdbath on my deck. I like to watch the birds at the feeder I have hung up and want to provide them water in addition to food. It has been so much fun to watch them in the bath. Some just perch and drink, others get full-on in the water and splash to their little bird-heart's content. The Stellar Jays are the most sprinkler-like, probably because they're such large birds that when they splash and play the water cascades everywhere. It's great! I've tried to take pictures but my camera isn't the best for nature shots and the birds tend to be skittish. So I can't take credit for any of the slideshow pictures, but wanted to show you my avian visitors!

According to the BBC, the average person will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed here. Which of course made me want to figure out how many I have read. I've entered those in purple- my total is 54. How many have YOU read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (really? all of them?!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog inthe Night-time -Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Garden Update

My garden is really taking off. We had a very warm, sunny weekend which seems to have caused a growth spurt. All in all, I'd say not bad for a container garden!

Dahlias


Mighty Lemon Cucumber


Two of my seven tomato plants (can't really tell, but they're nearly as tall as me, one Sweet 100, the other Sun Gold - both cherry and both sweetly, magically delicious)


Gerbera Daisies


Cowhorn Peppers (will change color as they ripen)


Tomato Close-Up (these are Bush Early Girl)