rachel@home

The Three-Hour Slide Show

The good thing about looking at pictures on the web, instead of sitting in someone's living room at a slide show is that you can quickly scroll by on the web, rather than listening politely to a ten-minute speech with each slide. (Was I ever bored in my growing-up years by long slide shows? Well, maybe once or twice. It's funny to think that the girls will instantly think of powerpoint when someone says slide show!)

I have several collections of pictures that I've sorted through and uploaded tonight, that cover the activities of the last two weekends.

Both weekends included trips up Highway 9. Last weekend, when the girls were with their dad, I drove all the way up from Redmond to Bellingham up Highway 9. I stopped in Snohomish for a bit, found the best used bookstore ever. I can't remember the name of it, but it was so fun to wander around in. The books were loosely sorted, and also piled everywhere. I felt like I could discover almost anything there if I looked hard enough!

I also took a wrong turn at Sedro Wooley, and ended up driving out Highway 20 for a while, until I saw the Baker Lake Road and realized I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. Because I was already there, and had really no idea how far I'd have to drive to get to Baker Lake, I drove down the Baker Lake road for a while, until it became clear that I wasn't going to reach the lake anytime soon.

This weekend, the girls and I went to a Washington State shaped corn maze that is near Snohomish, then into Snohomish for a lunch that included pie, and some wandering through the shops there. The girls fell in love with an orange kitten named Woodchip, and wanted to take her home with us. I had to frisk them before they got in the car to make sure she wasn't hidden under someone's shirt.

Woodchip was pretty adorable, and she had a real thing for Katrina's lap. She was curled up asleep on her lap, but Abby wanted the kitty to sleep on her lap too, but every time she tried to move her, she'd meow in a screechy sort of way, and if Abby did put the kitty on her lap. the kitty would stand up and walk back to Katrina's lap. Finally, Katrina got her lap out of sight and Woodchip sat on Abby's lap for a while.

Corn Maze Pictures

Pictures of Snohomish Buildings

Pictures down by the Snohomish River

Pictures taken along Highway 9 (and Highway 20)

I've also updated my pictures pages so that comments can be left there.

Katrina on the First Day of School

This is what Katrina wrote when asked to write a little bit about what the first week of school was like:

The First Week of School

The first week of school to me was very educational, fantastic, and, fun!!! We learned things like there's 30 hundreds in 3,000 and to drop the e when you add a ing. We learned how to plot a story. We learned how to read music and what digiwalkers are. We learned how to solve your feelings and what people do when they're in different moods. At recess we played around on the bars, fliping and twirling. Alexa swung around the bar 13 times in a row!!! I tried, but I couldn't do it. We played basketball, and we played teatherball(I never won) We played house, and we rolled down the hill. M y teacher is Dr.Forbes. He's nice, but strict.We have groups of two boy and girl!! We don't have homework till the third week of school. and after that, we only have homework on Tuesday and Thursday.
So far school is defenetly cool

First Day of School

Katrina on the first day of 4th grade, and Abby on the first day of 5th grade.

Now that the first week of school has finished, the reports are still good.

Abby says that her teacher is 'the tallest man in the world' and says she's been doing a lot of partner activities, most of them seem to be with Preston, and it sounds like she's ready for a different partner. She's explained the many different ways that her teacher has for picking partners, so it's surprising she's been stuck with Preston so much! She says that 5th grade is going to have more homework than 4th, that they could have up to four sheets of homework per day.

Katrina seems ready to jump into the homework, and took it upon herself to ask for extra assignments when she discovered that her teacher wasn't planning on giving any for the first two weeks of school.

Downtown Portland

When the girls and I were in Oregon last weekend, we spent some time in downtown Portland. We went to Powell's, which we all like. The girls like it when I tell them how much money they can spend, and they especially like it if it's a nice large amount.

Abby got a big book of a series I've never heard of, called the Cheetah Girls. It kept her busy all the way home!

After Portland, we went to the Chinese Gardens. It was very pretty and peaceful, set in the midst of downtown. In the middle of walking around, we stopped at the little teahouse, which was full of expensive and hard to pronounce teas, with super-fancy descriptions. I had a cup, and was instructed about the proper way to drink it, with two hands, and using the lid of the cup as a sort of strainer as I drank.

I found many gorgeous photo opportunities at the gardens. The orange tree is one of my favorites:

I thought this one was nice too:

Many more are available here.

We took a few minutes to drive through the area around Multnomah, where we lived when the girls were born. We knew that the house had been taken out, but we got a good look around. They took down the whole row of tiny houses that lined Glisan Street, and built a big brick building back from the street a bit, and the place where the houses were is all dark green grass.

Also while we were in Portland, we stopped at Coffee People to get me one of the Black Tiger mochas that I always used to get before going to work at the bank. Earlier, I had been quizzing the girls about what they remembered about Portland, and they don't remember much. Abby remembers LaDonna, their beloved babysitter, and Lindsey, LaDonna's daughter. Katrina says she doesn't remember her at all. They both, however, remembered that they always used to get gummi bears from Coffee People. Katrina's one remaining memory of Portland... gummi bears.

On our way out of town, we stopped at a 7-11 to get Slurpees, as it was really hot. There the guy gave me the news of how badly the UW lost to Ohio. And then my Slurpee cup leaked. That wasn't too bad, except that I forgot to take it out of the cup holder in the car when we got back to camp. So the next morning I had a huge puddle of cherry goo all over the cupholder in the car.

It's All About The Food

Throughout our camping weekend, I finished reading my book of food history (From Hardtack to Home Fries). This, combined with the challenges of cooking away from home, provided a great deal of food-related navelgazing.

I'm planning on interrogating my parents on the sorts of foods they ate growing up, after reading this book.

The girls were highly impressed and disgusted by one of the recipies used by the White House housekeeper during FDR's presidency. It was a salad that combined tomato soup, cream cheese, gelatin and vegetables into a single dish. I suppose the kindest thing one could say about it is that it's a sort of gelatin gazpacho. But still, eww... gelatin gazpacho?

We tried to keep it simple at camp by cooking foods that did not require a great deal of skill to make. I think the best dinner was the chicken foil packets that we wrapped up and stuck in the campfire. The biggest challenge was getting the foil packets out of the fire. It was a good thing we had fireproof plates.

I found the chapter about food and POWs to be the most interesting chapter in the book. It discussed prisoners in the Phillipines during WWII, what they ate during their internment, and what they dreamed of eating instead. A cookbook was even published that contained recipes the men provided, entitled Recipes Out of Bilibid.

The highlight of the food on our trip had to be the ice cream we had at a little ice cream shop near the bookstore in Portland. It came highly recommended, and we were not disappointed at all!

The most elaborate meal we cooked must have been the bacon and blueberry pancakes for breakfast Saturday morning. The fresh blueberries were delicious, and the bacon was not bad, considering I'm really not cut out for cooking bacon.

We were planning a repeat of the pancakes this morning, but the stove started burning in places it ought not burn, so we boiled water over the fire and finished up the leftover cookies instead.

Home Away From Home

We arrived at the campground at about 8:00 after struggling through Labor Day traffic for the last 5.5 hours, with just enough light left to set up our tent and get a few other things out. The tent, which looked very big when we set it up in the living room, looked quite small in the campsite. Especially compared to other tents in surrounding campsites! It served us well, though, and was plenty big enough for the three of us.

We bought firewood, and tried to light a fire that night, but even using a great deal of firestarter, we were unable to convince any of it to burn. Instead, we heated up some water on the camp stove, and got our hot chocolate in spite of the uncooperative firewood. I was amused when the ranger came around and told us that there were no open flames allowed, and we'd need to put out the candle that was on the picnic table. Dude, we're incapable of getting anything to burn! We're lucky the candle has lasted this long! I suppose it's karmic justice from all the times I refused to build the fire at home, claiming that I didn't know how, and making my brother do it instead.

The park we stayed at, Milo McIver State Park, is located along the Barlow Road, the first overland road into the Willamette Valley. Because of this, many very interesting old houses are located along the road to the park. I mostly restrained myself from pulling off the road and scaring residents by taking pictures of their amazing houses, although I admit that this was due more to a lack of good places to pull off the road rather than consideration for the privacy of the owners of the houses.

A church near the campground.

I didn't know that we would be camping in the middle of Christmas tree land. Many Christmas tree farms occupied the surrounding area. The trees were all lined up neatly in rows, and often times the orderly fields were surrounded by huge evergreens, maybe encouraging the littler trees to grow!

Saturday morning, we walked down to the Clackamas River, where we encountered two men who were snorkeling for glasses. Evidently one of them had been kayaking there the day before, and had flipped and lost his glasses. They headed upstream from us with a length of rope and a snorkel mask, and while I'm not sure if they ever found the glasses, we didn't see them being washed helplessly downstream either. So it could have been worse.

Also providing us with entertainment were two kayakers. One was obviously more experienced than the other, and for a while the less experienced one was swimming down the river, holding onto his kayak. Much shouting back and forth ensued. In the middle of the river, they were having a hard time hearing each other, but we could hear them both quite well. They stood up on a piece of land in the middle of the river and dumped out huge amounts of water from their kayaks.

The Clackamas River from a viewpoint at the park.

Saturday afternoon, we drove up to Estacada and visited the Bonne Lure State Park, which was really a parking lot next to Eagle Creek. It was a good place for the girls to play in the water, and passed the time I eavesdropping on the people next to us who had a herd of very cute very little blonde boys with them. For a while, they were having a heated debate about how gross it was to eat cold hot dogs. Some were firmly in the camp of it not being gross at all, others thought it was disgusting under any circumstances, and another seemed to be in the middle, but said she hadn't eaten since yesterday morning and was going to have one.

We also made a quick stop at Foster Farm, the site of one of the original settler's houses. The farm was evidently the first real sign of civilization in a long time, on the Oregon Trail, and the farm's website says, "Every overlander who kept a diary on the trek over the Barlow Road to Oregon City wrote of Fosters farm." We got there just a few minutes before closing, but were able to walk through the house and the barn, which both had lots of period items.

Because it was Labor Day Weekend, the campground was full, although I was surprised on Saturday morning when there was no wait for the showers. It seemed like the campsite next to us had enough people all by itself to provide a wait of at least ten to fifteen minutes. They were charming neighbors, who loudly complained about other loud campers, and shouted endearing phrases such as, "You both be quiet afore I knock you on the head with this stick." At least one of them was constantly burping throughout the weekend too. Ahhh... the great outdoors.

Saturday was capped off by a session with a visiting astronomer, who told us about all kinds of constellations and how the stars moved throughout the night, and other very interesting nighttime sky facts. One guy in the crowd was really impressed with how light that we see now left the star many years ago. He kept asking about it over and over! We were able to see the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, the North Star, and several other constellations that I have since forgotten. We also saw Mars, which was neat, but the other things he talked about were more interesting. He said that the best time to see satellites was the hour or two after sunset, because the angle of the sun is still close enough that the light will reflect off of the satellite. Later, there's nothing to reflect off of them, so they're not visible. We went up to the star-viewing field again Sunday night, and managed to find Vega and the North Star again.

Monday morning we managed to fit everything back in the car, which I had been slightly concerned about. We were packed in pretty tight going down, and things always seem to expand. We got everything all ready to go while our dear neighbors were still rousting members of their group out of bed. Burping guy had been up for a while, though!

Here the girls show their class by posing doing the first thing they thought of to do when they saw this memorial site -- sticking their fingers up the sculptured nose. More pictures of the weekend are here.