Hobbies

Chased off a whole family of moose tonight.  First the mom, who jumped down the rock wall into the street to get away from me.  Then as I was standing proudly in my front yard, watching the momma moose munching on the neighbor's trees, a cyclist came cautiously down the street.  He was watching Momma Moose... making sure she didn't turn around and bolt at him... when a bull moose with a huge rack came trotting right down the side of my yard.  I hollered at the cyclist, who finally looked up from the momma moose to see the bull barreling toward him.. he started backing his bicycle up the street, toward my driveway.  He probably would have trundled right into the bull if I hadn't yelled.  The bull basically ignored him, and went over to join the lady moose.  My neighbor whose yard was now being munched was out mowing her lawn.  She hollered at them to get back to my yard, assuring them my trees are much younger and tastier.  The bull was unimpressed and came over to see what she was yelling about.   She abandoned her lawn mower and went inside for her camera.  She sent me these pictures - you can see Thing 1 on the porch with the dog.

Then two baby moose came over and started munching on my trees!  The cyclist was still at the edge of my yard, watching to make sure the adult moose were distracted enough to not mind him cutting between them and the babies.  I started throwing bark and small branches at the babies.  I am such a lousy shot they ignored anything but a direct hit. Thing 1 came out and started huffing and growling at them and one left, I finally landed a piece of bark and the 2nd left.  I don't see how my little trees are going to survive.

Thing 2 has been doing really well at her riding.  She was in a school show a couple of weekends ago.  

She did really great on the dressage part, but she got muddled on the jumping part and missed a couple of jumps, and went around to do them again, and her time was bad.  But she had fun and I guess we learn a little more each time she does it. 

I am coaching Thing 1's Lego League team.  There are only three kids on the team, Thing 1 and two of her friends, I don't know how I'd handle more than that.  The 4H group held a coaches meeting to give us some advice, and one of the more veteran coaches said his first year they were just happy to have a robot that could do one or two missions, and that he kept reminding himself "Every hour spent on Legos is an hour not spent on Minecraft."  Amen.

This Thing 1 is trying out for yearbook photographer at her school.  I think it's absolutely wonderful that she's opening up to new experiences.

Yes We Have Moose

Construction has finished!!!

HUZZAAAHH!

Our two month project was stretched into two years, but it didn't stretch into three and we are DONE.  ALMOST!

It's down to me puttering around, moving grass, putting in a few plants.

But it took so long, I had a friend asking me about our new landscaping plans. 

She said "A lot of your neighbors have a wagon wheel in their front yards... There's an old rusty mining cart up the street, and I've seen an old plow.  But you went a totally different way... that Excavator is a really bold statement..."

I mean the thing as basically been there for TWO YEARS!  It would move around on occasion, it left for the winter, but Hubby was suspecting that our Excavator guy didn't really have anywhere to park it, so in order to avoid storage fees over the summer he just gets a job, and lets it sit on those people's property all summer.

It's a pretty bold statement...

But now it's done!  The excavator is gone!  I need to add a picture of the finished product.

But in the mean time, I would like to call your attention to the trees, pictured just behind the excavator.

We put them in last fall.  About a year ago.  They leafed out nicely in the summer, but haven't been doing as well as their counterparts on the other side of the yard.  These aren't just any old aspen, mind you, I don't like any old aspens.  These are special Swedish Aspens.  Ya!   They don't just turn yellow in the fall, they turn red and orange!  And they don't sucker as much.  And they're much more expensive, of course.

I was wondering why they were more scrawny, when I saw that the moose and deer follow down the side of the house and just stop right there and munch on our trees!

I thought it was quite charming... so rustic...

So outdoorsy!  Yes that is a baby moose in my trees!  Awwwwww!  No wonder the trees are kind of scrawny on that side...  But the moose were here first...  they can have a few leaves... it will leaf in next year.

Then this morning... I saw this.

And the stupid moose have earned my ire.

Three for three.  They broke off each of the trees right above the tether level.  

Stupid moose.

The summer of fun

We had a super lousy summer two years ago.  Between all the pain in the neck of decluttering our house to put it on the market, Thing 2 breaking her arm, and all the furor of moving, the kids seemed to feel like they'd been robbed of most of what should be the funnest time of their annual lives.

Last summer I did my best to make up for it, and we did have a nice summer, but I felt like I missed the high mark I'd hoped for. 

This summer is, in my opinion, nailing that mark.

It is always a challenge for me to balance activities to keep the girls entertained with down time that my girls seem to need.  Too much down time and they're bored.  Too many activities and they complain that they never got a chance to relax and play around the house.  They play really well together, and like to do their own things, so having them around the house is really not a problem.  We've done pretty well at taking time for both this year.

One reason I'm feeling good about this summer is because of the overwhelmingly successful trip to the Oregon coast taken by my extended family.   A lot of that success was due to the choice of house to rent.  It came down to two houses, a more expensive house that was roomier and probably more centrally located to what we thought we'd be doing, or a little bit cheaper house that didn't claim to have as many beds but looked more private.  The decision was up to me and my sister-in-law, as we are the ones with the kids and would have to figure out the sleeping arrangements with the smaller house, possibly putting someone on a couch or floor or something.

We went with the private house.  And we won.

I had a hard time stopping congratulating myself on what a fabulous choice we made.  The house itself contributed greatly to what a wonderful time we had.

We had a beach mostly to ourselves...

The girls found a chest of buried treasure on the beach...

 There was a comfy couch that we relaxed on a lot...

 We went on a fishing expedition.... and had fabulous fish dinners  for the next couple nights!

 We went to a glass blower, returned a couple times, and bought some glass

 Spent a lot of time playing on the beach!

We watched a lot of sunsets from the house (Yes this was our view!)

 One of the highlights was escorting a baby seal back to the water..

 We had a totally fun time and can't wait to go back next year!

It was hard to leave.

As we were packing up Thing 2 asked "What is our next big vacation this summer?"

"Honey, this trip to Oregon is a really big vacation.  Bigger than we usually do.  We're not really going to have another one like this this summer."

"You mean the whole rest of the summer is going to be totally boring?!"

No, there is your birthday, there is horseback riding, there are a couple of summer camps.  There will be dinners on the deck, and bike rides, and hikes.  Totally not boring.  Not nearly long enough, but totally not boring.

Good Dog

Kelso picks up socks and gloves and walks around the house whining with them in his mouth.  We can leave all sorts of other articles of clothing out and he ignores them... but socks and gloves, clean or dirty, get carried around, accompanied by a sort of imploring whine.

He did this once with some donuts a friend of mine made... little hard donuts that we couldn't eat all of. Once we had eaten all we could there was a couple left in the bottom of a paper bag, I put them next to the trash to go out next time we went out.  Apparently the paper bag unrolled, and Kelso got himself a donut, which he then carried, whining, around the house, until he got my attention and I took it away from him and tossed the rest of the donuts in the trash.  It was like he was saying "I know I'm  not supposed to eat this.  But you need to put it away.  Because it's bugging me.  Please clean up after yourselves better."

We ate outside tonight.  Pork Roast grilled on the swanky new grill Hubby bought himself for his birthday.

There was a little bit of Roast left over.  A piece about the size of a smallish apple.  As we were shuttling the dishes and plates into the house when we were done, somehow the little end of leftover pork roast went missing.  I don't know if it fell off the cutting board somehow, or if he helped himself to it, but the girls were sitting in the front room when the dog walked into the house, whining.  Only he didn't have a sock, he had the roast.  Which he carried carefully in his mouth, not biting, or chewing.  Just whining.  He gave it up when we asked, and of course I treated him...

But why didn't he eat it?

I threw it away.

But he is such a good dog.

From Last Year to This

The 2011-2012 school year was difficult beyond belief for Thing 1.  Crying herself to sleep at night.  Begging to move back to the old house.  Trying to talk us into trading back all the advantages of moving if she could just Go Home.

This year was completely different.

I attended the 5th Grade "Graduation" ceremony on Tuesday.  I know, I know, you're not really graduating in 5th grade, but in this area 6th and 7th grade are at a different school, so the kids are leaving elementary school, therefore they have a little ceremony.  

They handed out a "moving on" certificate to all the kids, then they distributed a few awards.  There were presidential awards for good grades.  There was a silver award for a GPA of 3.5-3.75 and Thing 1 got one of those.  They had some awards from the gym teacher for kids who had done so many push-ups and laps and whatever.

Then they did what they called the Citizenship Award.  Each of the four classes was asked to vote for three of their classmates on who best represented the class for honor and fairness and bravery and all around good citizeny stuff.  Three students were chosen from each class.

And Thing 1 was chosen.

I was totally floored.

She is so quiet, so reserved.  There are other kids in her class who are very dynamic and outgoing and noticeable, a couple little girls I know of who are really lovely little girls.  Of course I think Thing 1 is all those things, but I'm her mother and I'm aware there is a certain bias here and she is not very self promoting and I imagine she blends into the background a lot...  But apparently the other kids noticed her too.

It was really lovely.  There was a certificate with a little pin attached.

Then right at the end of the whole ceremony the music teacher said she had an award.  She said there has been one student all year who has helped on every promotional banner, has stepped up every time and made herself available to help at every opportunity.  She had one award to give out, and she gave it to Thing 1.  Thing 1 pretty much swept the award ceremony.

The school had a 5th Grade concert last Thursday, and Thing 1 sang a song.  When she announced that she wanted to try out for this performance because the kids could sing solos if they wanted to, her sister and I didn't know what to think.  When she announced she had passed the audition we murmured to ourselves that we weren't sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing.  In a brilliant move, Hubby found her a voice coach and I have taken her down  to the valley for voice lessons.  She's had 4 lessons, and the teacher taught her to relax and sing out and just the extra practice and singing in front of him did her a lot of good.  She did beautifully at the performance.  I had suggested she sing The Show by Lenka, which was a good choice for many reasons, except that it starts bam on the the first note.  No introduction, no preamble, the music starts and the song starts.  So it's really easy for her to get off.  And she has a hard time getting back on until there's a break in the music, and she can hear where she's supposed to be.  Sure enough for the performance she didn't come in on the right beat and was a beat behind, until the first point that the music pauses and she can catch up.  She was by no means perfect, but she hit a couple notes she usually has trouble with, and she sang out, and did really beautifully.  I was tensely watching her perform, noting every little thing she did wrong, instead of letting her wonderful performance wash over me...  I have heard her sing it enough that I don't sit and cry when I listen to her. Which is a good and a bad thing.

It has been a very good year for Thing 1.

Arts Festival May 3rd

Look how behind I am.  

The Friday after we got back from our Disney Cruise was the school's Arts Festival.   

I kind of feel responsible for part of the Arts Festival, because they changed the way they do it because of me.  One of the other mothers, who is instrumental in the Festival, was at my house last year and saw some of the pieces of art I'd purchased at our old school's Art Fair Auction.  These are pieces made by the kids, and auctioned off at the festival.  When this other mother was admiring them (as the most interesting art in our house) she was floored when I told her they were made by my daughter's class in 2nd grade (she made the bottom heart)  This piece is about eighteen inches long by about eight inches wide.

and by the 1st graders in our old school.  I am not related to any of the kids who made this piece, it was just my favorite that year.  This one is about three feet long and weighs a lot, as the clay pieces are glued onto an old piece of metal, the swirly things are welded on.

Anyway, you get the picture, they're kind of neat unusual pieces of art.

So she proposed we do collaborative projects like that for this school, and sell them at the festival, and asked if I'd help.

So this year they totally changed the way they do the festival to include these collaborative projects.  And my biggest disappointment here is that I don't have pictures of the pieces, because they were TRULY AMAZING.  In this school, instead of the Art Ladies running the whole show and picking out with the teacher a project for the class to do and making it, the parent volunteers, who run the art projects in the class every month, picked out a project for the classes to do and did them.  At our old school there was a lot of pottery, and a lot of welding.  We don't have a kiln in the school here, and no welders that I know of.  So we had to resort to other things.

I am in charge of Thing 2's art class of 4th graders, and this is what we did.

We did two copper weavings.  The kids wove copper strips and wire into a larger sheet of copper, and rubbed texture into all the copper to make it more interesting.  Then I took it over to the woman's house who first saw the art in my house and suggested we do collaborative pieces, she is a real artist, by the way, and she helped me cook it with a torch to make it have the burny patina.

I didn't get close ups... but I may provide a close up grab from my picture.

We made two weavings.  Because only a couple of kids could weave at a time, I had to come up with something for the rest of the kids to do while waiting for their turn.  So I came up with a copper rubbing idea, keeping with the copper theme.  Each kid rubbed a little five by five piece of copper.  I strung them together in sets.  There were three sets of five, and one set of three, which my artisty friend helped me distress.  That is the one I bought, which is why I got a picture of it.

I was at a friend of Thing 2's the other day and found she had bought all three of the five panel pieces, and was hanging them side by side.  I should have got a picture.  They looked great together.  We didn't distress them, just let them stay shiny coppery.

The other thing about this arts fair is that they let the kids have booths.  Normally they let local artists display their stuff for sale, but this year they opened it up to the kids, instead.  I knew Thing 1 would come up with something,  but had to help Thing 2 come up with something.

From the Epbot blog, which is one of my first go-to spots for all things interesting, I found this idea of baking baking pony beads to make little flowers.  Bingo.  Thing 2 is going to love this.

The problem with putting up a booth, is you have to have inventory.  Both girls and their mother (ME!) worked night and day for the month leading up to the cruise, and the week after, making sure there was enough inventory to sell at their art booths.  

I suggested Thing 1 start with Polymer clay necklaces.  But once she made the beads they were SUPER labor intensive for me to assemble.  Then she made a tiny little polymer clay animal.  All that was required of me was to put it on a pin and make a pendant out of it, and put the clasp on a cord or chain.  Eventually Thing 1 was even able to do most of this herself, though she never really mastered the bending of the pin to make a perfectly round bezel hook, so I did that part.

And this is the result.

 This is just a close up from the previous picture.   You can see a red flower, then a little piece of cake on the left, going right there are penguins and hedghogs and other little animals, ending with some birds.

She sold the little animals for $5, the bigger ones for $7, and some of my more complicated necklaces and earring sets for $12.  

Thing 2's inventory was a little less labor intensive, and she had more items.  

She sold these hair clip sets for $2.00, the necklace and earring sets for $3.00.   Bookmarks and magnets were a dollar a piece.

At the end of the night I was somewhat frustrated that the collaborative pieces auctioned off so low.  Those big pieces I had done, easily 2 feet by 3.5 feet of copper, went for about $50.00.  The copper alone in them was worth I don't know how much, but at least twice that.

The little pieces went for about $20 each.  The school made about $3000.00.  I wish they'd made twice that but the other art ladies were very pleased, saying it was the first year we'd done it this way, and seeing this great art in each other's homes will be a good advertisement for next year, when they intend to do it this way again.

My girls made out great.  Thing 2 cleared $120, and Thing 1 made over $200.00.  

They want to have booths again in next year's arts festival.  I told them now I've shown them how to do it, next year they're on their own, and they have to pay for more of their supplies, though they both have a lot to start with already from leftovers from this year.

They were so tickled, though, it was a lot of fun to watch people coming over and admiring their items, and it's been really neat to see people wearing their jewelry and things around town.  Is this what it feels like to be a real artist?

Catch Up

Five more weeks of school.

I can't wait.

The last two weeks  have been insane.  The build up to the last two weeks was equally insane.

Two weeks ago was our spring break.  Hubby suggested we go on a Disney Cruise.  Okay.

Then he suggested we take my niece, my daughter's favorite person in the world, who is between them in age.  She is a natural peace maker, and a great foil when Thing 1 and 2 start bickering...  Brilliant!!

Her parents (my brother and his wife) agreed even though it didn't coincide with her spring break and would require her to miss a week from school.

We flew to Orlando on the evening of the 20th of April, and after riding around in the biggest personal rental car on the planet, just shy of being a city bus, the girls loved it.  Our car at home has a third row, and is big... but this was ridiculous and Hubby couldn't wait to turn it back in and get on the boat.

Which we did the next day, Sunday the 21st.

Since there were five of us, we got the extra big stateroom on the top of the boat, right under the swimming pool deck.  It was lovely.  And alarmingly convenient to the self dispensing ice cream machines.

 I was especially pleased that there was so much room in such a tiny little space.  The bathrooms were brilliant - two little bathrooms - one with a sink and a toilet, one with a sink and a terribly clever shower/tub combination.  Had I known such a thing was available when we refinished our basement, I would have seriously considered it.

Though they consider it a five day cruise, it's really three days on the ship.  The days at either end boarding and disembarking hardly count.
The first day was in Nassau, which we had heard from my brother was a tropical resort where you can go look at all the beautiful people hanging out.  So we decided to take advantage of an excursion where they take you out to swim with the dolphins.  We had the worst weather on our trip here, and had to interrupt our dolphin swim experience to go stand under the gazebos while a tropical deluge rained down on us.
This is also where I ruined Thing 2's underwater camera.  I was so proud of myself for remembering it, but must have not closed it  up tight somewhere along the road, and it filled with sea water and died in the middle of our excursion, shortly after I got in the water.  Not sure if or how I can even get the pictures off of its corpse.  Hence the only photos I have of this excursion are the ones that we paid for before we got back on the boat to ferry us off the island.  But it was delightful and memorable, and we all got to get the foot push across the pen from the dolphins.  Though there was a beautiful beach there and I had scheduled us the earlier swim so we could stay and play on the beach, it was raining, so we went back to the boat.

The next day was Castaway Cay, which we learned is confusingly pronounced Key.  I feel compelled to edit out the whole long paragraph of how we found this out. Suffice it to say our assigned dining companions were very very informative.  Very.

Castaway Cay was just beautiful, and not as crowded as it could have been, based on the number of empty deck chairs on the beach all around us.

We were late on the beach because we had to stop and buy some flip-flops for the girls, who had left their crocs in a cubby by the AquaDuck the night before. (They had been picked up by the Disney crew but were slow to get turned in to Lost and Found and we didn't get them until the next afternoon.)  Our only other real problem was that my cool super strong sunscreen was totally and completely inefficient.  I have posted a scathing review on Amazon and thrown away two bottles of the stuff I brought, but it was too late, Thing 1 was completely fried and the rest of us were merely badly burned.  Except my niece, who used a much less powerful but actually effective sunscreen.  Luckily I used an effective non-pore-blocking sunscreen on our faces, and the girls wear rashguard shirts, but still all other exposed skin was red.  Thing 1 put on her long sleeved rashguard (shown in the picture above) too late.

The slide was fun, the ice cream was fun, the beach was lovely.  Hubby napped on the deck chair, I hovered and relaxed.

The sunburn made everyone crabby the next day, our day on the boat.  Also the girls decided they were too old for the kids area they were registered for, and would rather come back and watch movies in the room.  They did go to a screening of Oz in the big theater, but other than that we just kind of puttered around the boat and our stateroom and veranda, enjoying the proximity to the ice cream machine one deck up.

When we got off the boat the next day, Hubby's luggage was missing.  We had put it outside our stateroom as instructed, but it was not waiting for us with the rest of the luggage in the big luggage warehouse after getting off the boat. Poor Hubby was rather limited in his wardrobe and was doing washing for the rest of the trip.  Spoiler - His bag somehow partied its way across the country and turned up at a United luggage desk in Los Angeles two days after we returned home.

When we gave up the search for the lost bag, we drove to Universal Studios for two more days of fun.
I found that Universal is neat but a little dodgier than Disney.  The rides are rougher, and maybe I've reached a certain age but I found myself getting more nauseous than I ever have before.  There's not quite so much Magic.  I was glad we went, but not sure I need to go back. Our favorite part was Harry Potter World, where the Dragon Challenge ride was probably as close as anyone could get to riding a real dragon.  A dragon who would be happy if you were to be flung from off its back.

The girls bought wands, and of course we had butter beer, pumpkin juice, and bought chocolate frogs and bertie botts beans.

At the end of the 1st day at Universal, the girls were getting so run down that we left early for dinner, and both Thing 1 and my niece fell asleep in the restaurant waiting for the food to come.  We had pretty much run them down to the nub.

I think we were all getting tired and ready to come home, but all in all it was a lovely vacation.