Photo time! Within this chunk of my life, my parents came to visit for 3.5 days and we had all kinds of fun times (like food, yardwork, driving around, house-stuff shopping, more food, farkle, beer, trivia, and some more food), and it was also my frantic club planning, building, sorting, etc time of the month… let’s go!
9th – Spent the day doing some cleaning and unpacking, and finally crushed these dried herbs into jars! I let them dry for longer than I was supposed to, because I didn’t have jars to put them into, so hopefully they’re ok, probably not the best though. The whole process was a lot of work for that tiny amount of dried herbs, so I might be using them fresh from the garden most of the time instead of doing this…
10th + 11th – I forgot to take a photo on the 10th, the day my parents came into town, so I snapped this shot the next morning of some of the boxes they brought with them – since we have a house with lots of storage space now, they loaded up the car with these plus several more boxes and bags full of all kinds of stuff from my childhood, artwork all through high school and college, etc… When I have time to go through it all, it’s gonna be so much fun! Their first full day here, we all headed up Mt. Hood to the Timberline Lodge – we met a dog in the parking lot who was awesome and named Bruno, then we saw this painting in the lodge! Ok, not the exact same dog, but it looks just like him…
12th – The next day of their visit was pretty nuts – I had to teach a class in the middle of it, Pete had to work all day, so I had breakfast and a little pdx exploring with them in the morning, then we went our separate ways and they headed up to the zoo. By the time we all reconvened in the evening, we were all super tired from long days, and we tried playing Taboo for awhile… our brains were all so wiped out that we all were terrible at the game, it was pretty funny. Anyway, also, see those rings on the table? My dad gave me those, which belonged to his parents – family story is that the bigger (non-gold) one was made by my grandpa during the war, from a nickel!
13th – The next morning was Waffle Window for breakfast! One of my favorites, for sure, and now it’s my mom’s number one favorite breakfast spot in the world!
14th + 15th – While they were here, we took a trip to my local nursery (which is HUGE, by the way!) and I got some new plants for the garden, to try out during my learning time – the more experience I pack in this summer, the more I’ll know how to have an awesome veggie garden next year! I got a pickling cucumber plant, a California Wonder pepper plant, carrot seeds, and an African Blue Basil plant! So when I was reheating some leftover pizza, I grabbed some of the basil, and some oregano too, from the yard and threw that on there – oh my gosh best leftover pizza ever! And, these days started my club-making, lots of unraveling! (the color in this yarn photo is super inaccurate)
16th – I was having some trouble making my club plans fall into place, so I took a brainstorming walk, browsed craft supplies at Jo-Ann, and headed to Lents park, where I wandered and brainstormed and found this table in the shade to sit down with my sketchbook. Perfect plan, totally worked! Sorted out all my issues and got the elements all planned out on paper!
17th + 18th – Taught a class in the morning, did some birthday shopping for Pete on Mississippi (after lunch at the carts), and headed to Scrap and Knittn’ Kitten for some club-related supplies (like recycled mailing envelopes). Of course, I got much more than club stuff! Oh Scrap, I can never leave without a huge box full of goodies! Also stopped at Twisted for this skein of yellow bulky Lanaloft – love!! The next day, after working hard on club patterns all day, we got to hang with birthday girl Elif and Vivian for some birthday drinks and pizza…
19th – Club package sorting this month included these gorgeous vintage 50’s chevron beads, found at Knittn’ Kitten – I wanted to buy all of them, in all different colors, but I limited myself to these three bags. Enough for all club members, plus plenty left over for me to play with! I already made 2 orange ones into a pair of earrings a couple nights ago…
20th + 21st – These two days were Pete’s days off, before his birthday, when he had to work, so we treated these days as his “birthday weekend” and did all kinds of fun stuff, like breakfast at Genie’s, watching a weird zombie movie, him playing video games while I taught a class…. He decided he wanted to have an Angel “party” – this was modeled after a Buffy “party” we had back in October, which meant we bought an assortment of junk food which could vaguely relate to the Buffy-verse (like garlic toast and monster candy, since it was Halloween season this was easy to find). So we found what we could – Devil Squares, parmesan+garlic Cheese Its, Twizzlers (blood colored), and I drank red wine (like blood) with a bunch of orange juice mixed in – instant sangria! It was a fun Angel party! Oh I know we’re supernerds, I know.
Oh then the next day was a little more of a real party – we ate pizza and homemade pesto crazy bread and played games with our buddies Star and Grant, fun times! We tried out Huggermugger – holy crap that game is tough! Star and Grant are not just word lovers, but crossword puzzle makers(!) so they did much better than Pete and I did, and before playing this I thought we were both pretty good with words too! It was fun though, just made me feel dumb, hah… oh yeah and I drank Busch Light, that was silly…
Well that was a wordy post! These photo-a-day posts are kind of like a diary for me – a glimpse into my life if you want to bother reading it all, but you can also just skim over the photos and leave it at that. Coming soon… interested in a garden post? You’ll probably be getting one! And, oh my gosh it’s taking me what feels like years to get this mitts pattern finished, but that’s my next top priority, so you’ll soon(ish) be seeing not just a new pattern, but a new technique!! Soon, I promise!
Lee Does Stuff 