June News
The highlight of our month was our trip to San Antonio and New Braunfels. It was 60 degrees when we left home and 106 degrees when we picked up our rental car. Wow, was it hot. Dan and I laughed at our weather differences: their lows in the evenings are higher than our highs during the day. Wish we could share our weathers. They are having a serious drought and could use a lot of rain, while we have lots of rain we would like to give away!
Greg had a good conference and I pretty much hung out in air conditioning while he was in class. I did a few short walks on the River Walk and lounged at the pool for 15 minutes or so but the outside was just not the place to be.
On Thursday we checked out of our conference hotel and headed toward New Braunfels. Dan and Karen were working during the day so we went exploring on our own. We went to Gruene (where Dan had taken us 10 years ago on our visit) where we enjoyed the old town, had lunch in the Tea Room, and bought fudge at the General Store. We found peaches at a roadside stand and couldn’t resist getting a small box. I love peaches and they won’t be ready until August out our way. In the evening we found Dan and Karen’s place and got the grand tour before heading out to dinner at Mamma Fu’s. Dan has a beautiful large garden going. It goes from one end of his property right over to the other end. We also admired Dan’s wood working projects, from vases, picture frames, puzzles, bookends, to a washer toss game and kitchen hutch. I want one of those kitchen hutches! Dan does a wonderful job with his woodworking. We met Karen’s Mom, Dorothy and her son, Garret.
Friday we started our day with the free breakfast at the hotel. I had the waffles that you make up yourself in the waffle iron. When I got my waffle out I noted its irregular shape and thought that I hadn’t used enough batter to make the normal round waffle. When I got to our table Greg said: Hey, the waffle is shaped like Texas – and so it was! We got a kick out of our Texas waffles.
Next we headed to Dan’s work in La Vernia. We met Dan’s boss, Warren, and his wife, Cindy, and their daughter, Danielle. Oh yes, we also met Maple, the ferocious attack dog who guards their house. Well, she barks a lot anyhow. I don’t know about her bite. She’s a chihuahua. We started our visit with lunch brought in from a local café. Amazingly the little café in the midst of cattle country had a terrific veggie sandwich! It was delicious. After lunch we toured Warren and Cindy’s place. They have a huge greenhouse that Warren built and have tubs of tilapia providing fertilizer. They are going to expand the greenhouse further. Dan, don’t forget that Warren promised to send pictures as the greenhouse progresses. We are looking forward to seeing them. As impressive as the greenhouse was, my favorite was the Chickilton, as in Chicken Hilton. Warren built a very fancy chicken house – as fancy as the Hilton Hotel. Then Dan showed us some of the work projects he had underway. He showed us how the various pieces of equipment work and the different type of signs that they make - all this in a big shop with only a fan to keep it cool.
We headed back to our hotel to rest up for dinner and in the evening drove out to the “Catfish Place” (officially known as Clear Springs Restaurant), where Dan and Karen claim the best catfish in Texas is to be had. Not being catfish fans, I opted for the salmon and Greg the shrimp, both of which were excellent. Karen and Dan said the catfish was great as usual. The special appetizer of the house is fried pickles. It sounded intriguing, but we went for the onion rings instead.
Saturday both Dan and Karen were off work and we went for the grand tour of New Braunfels, beginning with a stop at Naegelin’s Bakery, the oldest bakery in Texas. Once we were fueled up we started by driving around to look at old houses. Ever since my architecture project I have enjoyed looking at old houses. When we got in to town we started seeing deer everywhere – on the golf course, in the parks, on front and back lawns. Apparently they have come into town for food and water since the drought is making both scarce in their normal habitat. We cruised around looking at the big “muriels” – you know those huge paintings on the sides of buildings. They call them muriels in Texas – as least Karen does! One of them showed scenes from the popular Wurstfest each November celebrating German sausages, another was a tribute to an immigrant who started the first newspaper among other things, and another highlights the German immigrants who founded New Braunfels. We picked up some history along with the art appreciation. Road kill in Texas is different from what we find here in the Northwest. We spotted a buzzard pecking at an armadillo. Yuck! Not surprising water play is a big activity in town. There is a huge water park called Schlitterbahn which draws huge crowds as we discovered as we slowly made our way through the traffic. And all the rivers were packed full of “tubers” cooling off. We walked over a foot bridge spanning the Guadalupe River and had a good view of the tubers.
All that driving made us hungry and we headed to the Fork and Spoon for lunch and then back home for resting and visiting. Dorothy shared figs that came from her fig tree from her house (now rented out to relatives). The figs were huge and delicious.
And then, all too soon it was time to head home. We had a wonderful visit with you Dan and Karen. Thanks for the warm hospitality.
Another highlight of our June was a Janis Joplin concert. Well, it was actually a play "One Night with Janis Joplin" but it was mostly an actress singing Janis’ songs with small bits of dialogue in between. Being Janis fans we enjoyed it immensely.
Summer is at long last arriving. We have actually had two sunny days in a row. The garden is planted but not looking too good. If we can hold onto this sunshine for a while it might perk up.
Love,
Carol and Greg
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
February News
Holy Tree, Batman! I enjoyed the acorn stash tree photo with all those snacks just waiting for the woodpeckers to come collect them.
Mom, your snowy tree gives us a pretty good indication of why you haven’t been out and about much last month. With snow ice and cold weather like you have been having it is much safer to just stay tucked in warm and cozy at home. Now that you have finished “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie”, can you share with us what that sweetness was?
Paul, that beautiful bay gracing last month’s cover is indeed a bay off the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Sea is fresh water but since it flows right into the ocean it is lightly salted as a result. So, you get slightly salty fish out of there! I’ll let you figure out what kind of fish that might be. How was the Portland Sportsman Show this year?
Diana and Maggie, if you still are on the trail of Lewis and Clark – O the Joy! – a wonderful book to read about their journey is “Undaunted Courage” by Stephen Ambrose. I think it is so amazing that L&C’s team made that journey into the unknown and back again with the loss of only one man. And, at that, it was early in the journey, and due to appendicitis, so the poor man would have died whether he was traipsing in the wilderness or not. Ambrose obviously loves his subject matter and his book is a really great read. By the way, did you remember that Seaman took the journey also? He’s a Newfoundland like Kodiak and Kodiak has a book about Seaman’s adventures. If you find Ambrose’s book too intimidating, give “Seaman’s Journey” by Patti Reeder Eubank a try. Good luck to Dan on finding the next job. It is pretty tough right now with the economy still so depressed.
We found Stev’s Ice Age photo in the Polish magazine. Greg used his Google Toolbar to translate the article. Its title is Catastrophic Thaw. The computer translated the rest of the article and we got a pretty good laugh at the translation. We got the gist of the story but the actual language was pretty funny. The computer translates the words literally. Did Stev get his $50 and was that in Polish funds??? I hope Sepia’s ear infection has cleared up. Any of you with kitties know what a huge to do it is to get medicine into a sick one. When we were babysitting Kodiak after his surgery, he had to take 20 pills a day. I groaned when I first heard about that, immediately thinking of trying to get a pill down Jasmine, but puppies are a whole different story. Get that cheese out and pills go right down. Come on, 20 wasn’t enough – give me some more!
Jenny, it is very exciting to think of you in your last semester of school. I knew the snow was getting pretty deep back your way and things were getting desperate but I didn’t realize how bad it was until you told us you were eating puppy chow!
Julie and Matt, I bet you especially enjoyed your trip to Jamaica last month as a very welcome break from all that snow and blizzard and ice and cold you had. The pictures in the paper were hard to believe. You really couldn’t have gotten ALL that snow, could you?
I am glad to hear that you are back to work Heather even though that arm still has some healing to do. Take special care so you don’t re-injure your arm.
Tim, your bird photos are wonderful. Sorry about the technical error on your contribution last month. As you know, we rarely hear from you, so to get the original two-pager from you was a downright long winded discourse. Who would have thunk you have FIVE WHOLE PAGES in ya????? Well, it looks like the birds are doing it to you and I can see why. I don’t know much about birds so when you find out what the big to-do over the pine warbler is, you will have to fill us in. Is one of the four birds you sent for the newsletter the pine warbler? It’s fun to hear you sing the praises of snow. You love the stuff while most everyone else is bad mouthing it. I enjoyed all the family ice skating adventures – even the wet ones.
February brought us snow on four different days. Three of them were short lived, but the other one gave us 4 inches and the temps fell into the teens so the white stuff stayed with us. We were babysitting Kodiak again when we got the big -for us - snow. Kodiak loves the snow and it was fun to watch him romping in the backyard and chomping away trying to catch the snowflakes in his mouth. He would come in to warm up a bit and them was ready to run out again. The falling snow was even better than his tennis ball for entertainment.
Greg started right in doing taxes the beginning of the month and they were swamped the first few days. Things have slowed down a bit and are more manageable now. His favorite customer so far has been Trixie, the tattooed lady. She was pretty well covered in tattoos.
I have continued working on my Architecture Survey project. I did another group of houses doing the field work inventory. I am up to 50 houses now. Then we had a workshop to start in on phase 2 which identifies homeowners. We use a directory (Polk Directory) in the Clark County Historical Museum to look up an address and the directory provides us the name of the homeowner for that year. There is a stack of these books by year and then once we have the name we start to look in books in prior and later years to try to identify who lived there and for how long and it also it tells the occupation of the owner. The attractiveness of this phase is that it is INDOORS and out of the cold and rain.
Have you noticed that the days are getting longer? We are up to 11 hours and 3 minutes of daylight as February comes to a close. That’s up from 8 hours and 46 minutes the beginning of January. Woo hoo!! Come on Springtime!
Love,
Carol and Greg
Holy Tree, Batman! I enjoyed the acorn stash tree photo with all those snacks just waiting for the woodpeckers to come collect them.
Mom, your snowy tree gives us a pretty good indication of why you haven’t been out and about much last month. With snow ice and cold weather like you have been having it is much safer to just stay tucked in warm and cozy at home. Now that you have finished “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie”, can you share with us what that sweetness was?
Paul, that beautiful bay gracing last month’s cover is indeed a bay off the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Sea is fresh water but since it flows right into the ocean it is lightly salted as a result. So, you get slightly salty fish out of there! I’ll let you figure out what kind of fish that might be. How was the Portland Sportsman Show this year?
Diana and Maggie, if you still are on the trail of Lewis and Clark – O the Joy! – a wonderful book to read about their journey is “Undaunted Courage” by Stephen Ambrose. I think it is so amazing that L&C’s team made that journey into the unknown and back again with the loss of only one man. And, at that, it was early in the journey, and due to appendicitis, so the poor man would have died whether he was traipsing in the wilderness or not. Ambrose obviously loves his subject matter and his book is a really great read. By the way, did you remember that Seaman took the journey also? He’s a Newfoundland like Kodiak and Kodiak has a book about Seaman’s adventures. If you find Ambrose’s book too intimidating, give “Seaman’s Journey” by Patti Reeder Eubank a try. Good luck to Dan on finding the next job. It is pretty tough right now with the economy still so depressed.
We found Stev’s Ice Age photo in the Polish magazine. Greg used his Google Toolbar to translate the article. Its title is Catastrophic Thaw. The computer translated the rest of the article and we got a pretty good laugh at the translation. We got the gist of the story but the actual language was pretty funny. The computer translates the words literally. Did Stev get his $50 and was that in Polish funds??? I hope Sepia’s ear infection has cleared up. Any of you with kitties know what a huge to do it is to get medicine into a sick one. When we were babysitting Kodiak after his surgery, he had to take 20 pills a day. I groaned when I first heard about that, immediately thinking of trying to get a pill down Jasmine, but puppies are a whole different story. Get that cheese out and pills go right down. Come on, 20 wasn’t enough – give me some more!
Jenny, it is very exciting to think of you in your last semester of school. I knew the snow was getting pretty deep back your way and things were getting desperate but I didn’t realize how bad it was until you told us you were eating puppy chow!
Julie and Matt, I bet you especially enjoyed your trip to Jamaica last month as a very welcome break from all that snow and blizzard and ice and cold you had. The pictures in the paper were hard to believe. You really couldn’t have gotten ALL that snow, could you?
I am glad to hear that you are back to work Heather even though that arm still has some healing to do. Take special care so you don’t re-injure your arm.
Tim, your bird photos are wonderful. Sorry about the technical error on your contribution last month. As you know, we rarely hear from you, so to get the original two-pager from you was a downright long winded discourse. Who would have thunk you have FIVE WHOLE PAGES in ya????? Well, it looks like the birds are doing it to you and I can see why. I don’t know much about birds so when you find out what the big to-do over the pine warbler is, you will have to fill us in. Is one of the four birds you sent for the newsletter the pine warbler? It’s fun to hear you sing the praises of snow. You love the stuff while most everyone else is bad mouthing it. I enjoyed all the family ice skating adventures – even the wet ones.
February brought us snow on four different days. Three of them were short lived, but the other one gave us 4 inches and the temps fell into the teens so the white stuff stayed with us. We were babysitting Kodiak again when we got the big -for us - snow. Kodiak loves the snow and it was fun to watch him romping in the backyard and chomping away trying to catch the snowflakes in his mouth. He would come in to warm up a bit and them was ready to run out again. The falling snow was even better than his tennis ball for entertainment.
Greg started right in doing taxes the beginning of the month and they were swamped the first few days. Things have slowed down a bit and are more manageable now. His favorite customer so far has been Trixie, the tattooed lady. She was pretty well covered in tattoos.
I have continued working on my Architecture Survey project. I did another group of houses doing the field work inventory. I am up to 50 houses now. Then we had a workshop to start in on phase 2 which identifies homeowners. We use a directory (Polk Directory) in the Clark County Historical Museum to look up an address and the directory provides us the name of the homeowner for that year. There is a stack of these books by year and then once we have the name we start to look in books in prior and later years to try to identify who lived there and for how long and it also it tells the occupation of the owner. The attractiveness of this phase is that it is INDOORS and out of the cold and rain.
Have you noticed that the days are getting longer? We are up to 11 hours and 3 minutes of daylight as February comes to a close. That’s up from 8 hours and 46 minutes the beginning of January. Woo hoo!! Come on Springtime!
Love,
Carol and Greg
Saturday, August 14, 2010
July News
Yah! Summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest. It is so great to see the sun again.
We went to see another Shakespeare play in the park. This time we took a picnic and explored a new park in Sandy, Oregon, which is about an hours’ drive from our place. We saw Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. This is one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays. It was well acted and entertaining. Greg’s only complaint was that it didn’t have any of the famous quotes like “double, double, toil, and trouble” and “alas, poor Yorick” and “something wicked this way comes”. Part of the pleasure of the play for Greg is arriving at the quotable moments.
The nice weather arriving made it more difficult to stay indoors, but the World Cup still called us for the first couple of weeks. Most of the games were very exciting, but my favorites kept getting beat and falling off the schedule. Spain was the big winner this year with the Netherlands coming in second. One of the best games was Uruguay versus Germany. Little Uruguay was the only South American team to reach close to the top. Surprisingly powerhouses Argentina and Brazil got sent home early. Germany beat Uruguay and came in third place, but wow was it a great game.
Greg added another year to his existing 60 this month. We celebrated by going to see the Patrick Lamb band in the big park downtown Vancouver. It’s a jazz and blues band and they are very good. He was part of the summer festival they have every year. We pack a picnic and our camp chairs and sit back and enjoy the music. We took Mom to one of these concerts but I forgot who we saw on her visit. This month we also saw the Antics who do 70’s and 80’s tunes, and Quarterflash who rock.
I replanted several sections of the garden. Many of our seeds that I planted earlier were no shows – no green beans, no yellow beans, no carrots, no beets, no zucchini, no cosmos flowers. I don’t know if it was just the wet spring or whether the birds ate them or what but nothing sprouted from all those seeds. The potatoes are doing great – at least the big billowy green stalks above ground and my tomato plants are finally getting a few tomatoes forming. It is a very disappointing year for the garden.
We babysat Kodiak for the last week of the month. Ericka had a mandatory work retreat to attend. It was in Eastern Oregon in the Wallowa mountaims and they had to camp out for the duration. Her company, Ecotrust, has about 45 employees with six of them in her group of Edible Portland. They traveled in four big vans plus two cars pulling trailers with all their camping gear. Hopefully Ericka will write about her adventures. It ended uncomfortably with the car she was traveling in on the way home being hit by a drunk driver. She is ok except for a very sore back and is still pretty shaky. Two of her co-workers were transported to the ER via ambulance. They are now home and recuperating. Ericka went to her own doctor the following day who prescribed pain pills and ice packs for the back. The car was totaled and the pictures she brought home to share were pretty scary. Thankfully it was not worse than it was. The police still haven’t found the guy who hit them. He ran away after the wreck and no one answers at the house where the car is registered.
We had a good time with Kodiak with his visit with us here. He needs daily walks but prefers two walks a day so I got more walking in this week than I normally do. Yes, it was good for me, but, puff, puff, it was a work-out. I scheduled two play dates for Kodiak with our friend, Irene, and her Norwegian elkhound, Misty. We had ball tosses in the backyard, sticks to chew on, and squeaky toys to play with. I don’t think he missed his mommy too much.
I hope everyone is enjoying the summer. We are now that it has finally arrived!
Love,
Carol and Greg
Yah! Summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest. It is so great to see the sun again.
We went to see another Shakespeare play in the park. This time we took a picnic and explored a new park in Sandy, Oregon, which is about an hours’ drive from our place. We saw Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. This is one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays. It was well acted and entertaining. Greg’s only complaint was that it didn’t have any of the famous quotes like “double, double, toil, and trouble” and “alas, poor Yorick” and “something wicked this way comes”. Part of the pleasure of the play for Greg is arriving at the quotable moments.
The nice weather arriving made it more difficult to stay indoors, but the World Cup still called us for the first couple of weeks. Most of the games were very exciting, but my favorites kept getting beat and falling off the schedule. Spain was the big winner this year with the Netherlands coming in second. One of the best games was Uruguay versus Germany. Little Uruguay was the only South American team to reach close to the top. Surprisingly powerhouses Argentina and Brazil got sent home early. Germany beat Uruguay and came in third place, but wow was it a great game.
Greg added another year to his existing 60 this month. We celebrated by going to see the Patrick Lamb band in the big park downtown Vancouver. It’s a jazz and blues band and they are very good. He was part of the summer festival they have every year. We pack a picnic and our camp chairs and sit back and enjoy the music. We took Mom to one of these concerts but I forgot who we saw on her visit. This month we also saw the Antics who do 70’s and 80’s tunes, and Quarterflash who rock.
I replanted several sections of the garden. Many of our seeds that I planted earlier were no shows – no green beans, no yellow beans, no carrots, no beets, no zucchini, no cosmos flowers. I don’t know if it was just the wet spring or whether the birds ate them or what but nothing sprouted from all those seeds. The potatoes are doing great – at least the big billowy green stalks above ground and my tomato plants are finally getting a few tomatoes forming. It is a very disappointing year for the garden.
We babysat Kodiak for the last week of the month. Ericka had a mandatory work retreat to attend. It was in Eastern Oregon in the Wallowa mountaims and they had to camp out for the duration. Her company, Ecotrust, has about 45 employees with six of them in her group of Edible Portland. They traveled in four big vans plus two cars pulling trailers with all their camping gear. Hopefully Ericka will write about her adventures. It ended uncomfortably with the car she was traveling in on the way home being hit by a drunk driver. She is ok except for a very sore back and is still pretty shaky. Two of her co-workers were transported to the ER via ambulance. They are now home and recuperating. Ericka went to her own doctor the following day who prescribed pain pills and ice packs for the back. The car was totaled and the pictures she brought home to share were pretty scary. Thankfully it was not worse than it was. The police still haven’t found the guy who hit them. He ran away after the wreck and no one answers at the house where the car is registered.
We had a good time with Kodiak with his visit with us here. He needs daily walks but prefers two walks a day so I got more walking in this week than I normally do. Yes, it was good for me, but, puff, puff, it was a work-out. I scheduled two play dates for Kodiak with our friend, Irene, and her Norwegian elkhound, Misty. We had ball tosses in the backyard, sticks to chew on, and squeaky toys to play with. I don’t think he missed his mommy too much.
I hope everyone is enjoying the summer. We are now that it has finally arrived!
Love,
Carol and Greg
Monday, August 09, 2010
Thursday, August 31, 2006
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