Apples, anyone?

We spent a couple of weeks in eastern Washington, the Apple Capitol of the world (self-proclaimed, of course). Boy, all of their fruit was yummy! Lots of pick your own places, but we couldn't figure out what we would do with a bushel of apples, so we just went to the farmer's market in Wenatchee and had a beautiful fruit salad one night.

We didn't end up in the park we thought we were going to - our mistake. We stayed at the Wenatchee River County Park. Between a major highway and a busy train track. Might have been an error to stay there. Oh, well. Let's hear it for earplugs!

Wenatchee is a pretty nice town and Marv loved their bike paths. He's been exercising our recumbent tricycle pretty often. Naturally, I'm not into it as much, but it is fun, even for me!

One thing we saw in Wenatchee that I've never seen before. This official street sign was such a surprise that I had to turn around to get a photo. It was right near their Arboretum, so presumably there are peacocks, although we didn't see any, worse luck.

We celebrated our anniversary recently - 43 wonderful years. I can't believe how old we are getting! We ate at a very nice Italian restaurant. When our desserts arrived, each one had a lit candle in it. Nice!

This week we're making our way to Salt Lake City. We will be working at The Depot, a staging place for all those health kits Methodist churches keep making. The Depot crew gets to check every kit to make sure everything on the list is in it. (Otherwise the government on the other end can seize the whole shipment.) If you make health kits at your church, be sure to include everything. I had no idea it was so important. 

We are looking forward to being with people for a week and getting to know some new folks. We haven't done much except with one another for a while. There will be some quilters in the group, so you can imagine what I may be talking to them about.

We have had the enjoyable experience of staying not 1, not 2, but three places in a row with noisy trains all night! I don't know how we pick them. Just lucky, I guess. Maybe the KOA near Salt Lake City will be quieter.

We should be in Colorado Springs in by the 20th and hope to catch up with Mom and some friends (and doctors). Then on to the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque. Can't wait!

Catching Up

I can't believe it's been a month since I last posted. Sorry!

We have had an eventful month. We spent time with our son at his rocket launch - a 12-foot rocket which was worked on for a year. Chuck is a go-fer but looking forward to being part of the tech crew. It was pretty exciting to see it go up! Here's Chuck - and yes, he has an orange tail in his hair.

Next we visited Newport, OR. We stayed at a park ON the coast. We must have been less than 100' from the ocean! This was the view out our front window for those few days.

One night there was an incredible sunset - again, right in front of us. What a gorgeous world!

We went to Portland, OR for a few days to spend more time with Chuck and his wife Erica. Here we are at a special ice cream place where you can get a "flight" of ice creams, any flavors you choose. Needless to say, that was fun!

We took the kids on a river boat cruise. Great fun until the boat caught on fire. Memo to self: not as much fun when the boat catches fire!

Then we spent a couple of weeks in the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula, near Port Townsend. We really like the area and plan to come back, perhaps next summer. One highlight was a whale-watching tour. Four hours of driving around looking for whales - and one of them we spent between the US and Canada, in close proximity to a pod of transient orcas. They are my favorite type of wildlife: so lively and beautiful!

On to Seattle to visit our daughter, Genevieve, and her wife, Molly. It was wonderful to see them again! We had dinner at their house one night, and one night went out. Both were fun evenings for us all.

We also took in a chocolate tour of Seattle while we were there. The tour goes to six different chocolate places, where you get a sample of two or three of their items, from a cupcake to sipping chocolate to a cacao bean (bitter!) to fancy caramels. This was the last place we visited. It looked a lot like a jewelry store, and the prices matched, too.

This portrait was made from pictures of their various chocolates in their little wrapper cups. I could eat there all day, but it's too expensive! Actually, by the time we tried 16 different treats, even I was sick of chocolate. So worth it, though!

We are in Yakima this week, in eastern Washington. All people can talk about is the horrible fires in the area. We are close enough to smell the smoke quite easily. There are air quality warnings until Wednesday (at this point - they keep extending the warning) and you are not supposed to exercise outdoors. Schools may be canceling outside recess once the kids are back, this week or next.

Genevieve and Molly went to Chelan to attend a wedding a couple of weekends ago, just when the fire started in that area. The entire wedding had to be moved on the day of the wedding to another town because Chelan (pronounced shu-LAN, like land) was evacuated suddenly. Still, the couple did get married and everyone made it to the wedding.

We'll begin heading south in a few weeks, so we're trying to enjoy some cool temperatures while we can. It seems everywhere we have been has been hotter than usual. I'm almost wishing for snow. But not quite!

Quilt Week in Central Oregon

If you're not interested in quilts, just skip this one. But if you like pretty pictures, stay tuned!

Sisters, Oregon has had an outdoor quilt show for 40 years now. The first year 12 quilts were displayed on and around buildings. This year there were about 1200 quilts! The show is always the second Saturday in July, so we arranged our trip to include this fabulous event.

In addition, quilt stores in the area have many classes and special events the week before the show. Wow! No wonder I haven't written in a while. I've been busy! I took two classes and attended one lecture. I spent more money than I care to admit on items for the classes. I had TONS of fun!

Marv was a truly good sport and went with me to Sisters for the show. After about an hour, he retired to have coffee and read his book while I kept wandering around town. Here are some of my favorites from the show.

Quilts have really changed in the last 20 years or so. They are now more art than craft. I make more traditional quilts but with bright colors and intricate fabrics, like this one:

But I truly admire the ones who created the last two pictures above. The eagle is so accurate that you could swear it must be 3-D. The last picture is a "modern" quilt, perhaps created on the fly, perhaps planned carefully in advance.

The top picture (with me in it) and the fourth one are both made with many, many small pieces and carefully planned color schemes. The pieces for the fourth one are about 1" on a side and there must be thousands of them! They probably include hundreds of different fabrics. (For me, life is too short to put this kind of time into a project! I'd rather do more quilts and spend less time on each one. But they are wonderful to see.)

Another change is in the quilting. I wish you could see how beautifully quilts are machine-quilted these days. They are detailed and gorgeous! You can see some of the intricate quilting in the tan band below the peacock. If you get the chance to go to a quilt show sometime, you will be blown away. Many quilts have also been "embellished" - extra stitching in different colors to "paint" the fabric, added beads and hot-fix crystals, etc. If you enlarge the top picture above you can see little dots in the black fabric. Those are beads sewn on by hand - again, hundreds of them!

 Now back to your regularly scheduled blog.

P.S. Thanks to my son Chuck and his friend Mark who helped me figure out how to add photos to this blog. You guys are geniuses!

Still Rolling

I'm sure you have all decided we've fallen off the face of the earth. In fact, it's just me who's disappeared - or rather, quit writing. But I'm back and planning more great adventures!

We had a delightful time in Colorado, checking in with friends and family in several cities. We went to our storage unit and decided that much of what we had planned to pick up was really unnecessary or had been replaced already. I did get my sewing machine and box of projects! Fun, fun.

We spent a couple of days in Loveland so Marv could go to Annual Conference and check in with some friends and colleagues. It was a good day for both of us - I sewed all day.

Then four days driving and a couple of days in the middle to relax, and we got to Bend, Oregon. We're here for a month. It's a lovely town with lots of trees. Free concerts in the park, farmer's markets, beautiful mountains (like Faith, Hope and Charity, the Three Sisters).

The first couple of weeks were unusually hot. Everyone in town was commenting on how strange the weather was. By noon it was time to stay out of the sun. But we managed to attend the Bite of Bend. Many food booths with samples for $1 or $2. Lots of yummy stuff! Of course it rained part of the time, but that just cools things off. And I have discovered that I don't even melt in the rain. Who knew?

We walked around the park downtown one day and discovered many ducks in the river nearby, some of them "mooning" us as they looked for food underwater. Cute!

Next - Quilt Week in Bend and Sisters! 

Westward Ho!

We feel like we're finally on track. We had repairs to the car in Nashville, repairs to the rig in Alabama, and then a dead car battery in Missouri. Now we're in Topeka, headed back to Colorado for about 2 weeks, then westward towards the northwest.

We enjoyed Nashville very much. Scenic tours, river boat cruise/lunch, walks in Nashville's downtown Centennial Park, etc. Lots of bbq, sweet tea and pie! I have to admit I've had fun eating southern food. Even Fanta Grape, a soft drink full of questionable chemicals, judging from the taste, but a flavor I haven't had since I was a kid. Boy, that was definitely a trip on the way-back machine! I guess now that we're out of the south, no more Fanta Grape.

Nashville got pretty hot and humid so, while we waited (2 weeks) for the car to be repaired, we went to the mountains near Gatlinburg. Very nice RV park - spacious, pretty, lots of trees. Very refreshing! We went to a show in Pigeon Forge, TN called American Hit Parade - pop songs from the 50s through the 80s. For some reason they didn't include the Beatles or the Stones. :) Quite fun! They even sang "Sweet Caroline"!

I visited several quilt stores in the area. That was delightful, too! More fat quarters, of course.

Then back to Red Bay, Alabama. They called on Saturday before Memorial Day and said they had an opening on Tuesday if we could get there. We made it! Getting up for their 7 a.m. start time was a shock! But they finished some warranty work (our ceiling was sagging) in a day, and we were off again. 

We've missed weeks planned for Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Albuquerque. Now that weather is so bad in some of those areas, we decided to go straight through to Colorado. We had decided early on not to drive more than about 300 miles in a day, so we stopped in southern Missouri for the night and then on to Topeka. We're taking a day off today to get caught up on paperwork and maintenance. This is a fairly large campground with spacious sites. It is surrounded by lush trees but the camping area is completely cleared. And it's right next to a busy highway. So only two pie slices. On the other hand, although it is pretty full, we don't hear people noise. Most parks ask for quiet time from 10 to 7 and people do respect that. Thank goodness!

I'm having trouble figuring out what time it is. Some of our devices automatically change time zones and some don't. Our iPads only change if they get connected to the internet, and we don't always need to connect. Right now most of my clocks say 12:30 and one says 1:30, so I'm guessing it's 12:30. Very confusing! One more time zone change when we get to Colorado, and one for the west coast. Then maybe we can get everything sorted out for a while.

Still having problems with pictures. I take lots of them, but can't seem to get them from my phone to my computer. Any suggestions?

I enjoy all your comments! Please keep it up!

Motherhood

I've been thinking a lot about mothers lately, for some reason. A friend reminded me recently that every child has a different mother than his or her siblings. For example, the first child drops a pacifier and you sterilize it carefully before giving it back. When your second child comes along, you pick up the dropped pacifier, blow off the visible carpet fibers and give it to the child. The first child's baby book is full of pictures and notes (I kept a diary for the first and only time during my daughter's first year). Your second child is lucky to have his/her name in the book, let alone notes on what gifts you received when he/she arrived!

But there are bigger changes that take place for a mother. You have more (or fewer) responsibilities. Your relationship with your partner is different. You are more (or less) tired or depressed or content than you used to be. All of this impacts your children, of course. (I know you moms out there are resonating with these words. Dads - maybe not so much.)

My sisters are 7 and 8 years younger than me. My childhood and that of my older brother had a father at home. My sisters didn't. That made the level of stress on my mother and my sisters quite different while they were young. Just ask them!

But as Marv said recently, the goal is not to be a perfect mother. It's to do the best you can with the situation you are in and the background you came from. I sure hope my kids think that way, too!

My mother is quite a woman. She grew up in a time that women didn't work very often, but her mother did. I'm sure that affected her expectations for herself. And when she grew into adulthood, she had a different view of life from many of her peers, including my dad. She is a very intelligent, well-educated woman who wanted to contribute to the world through a career, and she did so for 50 years or so. I'm sure that impacted my expectations when I grew up!

Mom summarizes her life with three songs. Bridge Over Troubled Waters (Simon & Garfunkel) refers to her life of counseling as a missionary, college professor and dean, and private counselor. The Impossible Dream is how she describes her desire to be an ordained minister, which she achieved at age 60. I asked her one time when she felt called to the ministry, and she told me she was 19 at the time. No wonder it felt like an impossible dream! The third song she talks about (and any of you who know her know how appropriate this is) is I Did It My Way. She has always marched to her own drummer. She never goes to breakfast at the facility where she lives, and they have accepted that she's not a morning person. Just don't ask her to be happy about a 5 a.m. fire drill!

I think given her background and history she probably did the best she could. That makes her a successful mother. We still have some issues, but I can let a lot slide now that I understand her better - and also understand me better. She gets five pie slices.

We attended "Motherhood - the Musical" this week. It is a locally written play, but should be everywhere. It is hysterical! (For some reason, most of the audience was women. Marv was a little out-numbered, but he's a good sport.) The play concerns one woman who is about to give birth to her first child, and three neighbors who are "experienced" mothers, telling her some of what to expect. It ranges from the excitement of finding a bargain at Costco to the constant demands of children to the joys of being special because you're "Danny's Mom." Four pie slices for sure.

The Athens of the South

The motto for the company that built our motor coach is "roughing it smoothly." I guess when you have a washer/dryer, convection/microwave and TV, it's not exactly camping. But it's as close as I want to get.

We have figured out that we are doing what people on vacation do - seeing the sights, trying to find shows, going to museums - but at a much slower pace. That works for us, especially since we have to stay in Nashville at least two weeks to get the car taken care of.

Yesterday we visited The Hermitage, Pres. Andrew Jackson's home. It has been restored after years of neglect, and most of the furnishings (including some wallpaper) is original (with some reproductions). That they managed to pull together so much of the Jacksons' original furniture and decorations is amazing! The grounds are very large and beautiful. The original garden area has also been restored with many historical roses along with iris, peonies, even columbines! And one stretch of herbs for cooking and medicine: basil, thyme, feverfew, yarrow, etc.

The displays in the museum covered Andrew Jackson's life and accomplishments. He was apparently a very good general, a forward-thinking president, and absolutely brutal to local Native Americans. He's the reason for the Trail of Tears. I feel so sad when I think that certain groups have always been persecuted and denied their rights, and that it continues today. I keep hoping we are making progress. We've a long way to go.

Today we took a "hop on, hop off" tour. We love these because you get to see all kinds of places, and can get on and off all day if you want to spend more time at any of them. We rode most of the way through the tour and got off at Nashville's Centennial Park, created for (guess what?) the State Centennial in 1896. At that time there was a huge exhibition and a replica of the Green Parthenon in Athens. Well, not a replica but an attempt to recreate the way the Parthenon looked at its finest. Huge columns, big honking statue of Athena (gilded yet!), and the pediments with the statues now known as the Elgin Marbles (in England, I believe). Hence Nashville's nickname, the Athens of the South. Lots of people there, like a group playing some simple rhythm instruments while a couple danced / fought. I couldn't decide if they were practicing mixed martial arts or doing athletic dancing. It looked like the musicians had several extra instruments which they handed to passers-by. Why didn't I offer to play my tambourine!?