For approximately 1 minute this afternoon, as the thunderstorm was boiling over the hillside, we had a downpour of giant hail.
I've never seen hail this big. It was awesome. Of course, being the smart people that we are, Emma and I were out running around the yard looking at the hailstones.
Let me tell you, it hurts to get clunked on the head with a 2-inch ball of ice falling out of the sky!
Thursday, July 12, 2012
I really am trying to organize my pretty pictures into a coherent post or two, but I keep getting sidetracked by other cool things to post about. To wit:
I've been hearing this really, really soft bird sound at night recently. One of those almost-not-heard-at-all sounds that teases me just as I'm falling asleep. It sounded like a screech owl, but honestly I was so sleepy all three times I heard it, that I wasn't sure I wasn't dreaming.
This afternoon Emma was out playing in the neighborhood, and came running inside to get me in a great froth of excitement. She hauled me out to look at the trees on the next block down, because she had seen BABY OWLS!
These are juvenile western screech owls, and they are still half-and-half baby down and adult feathers. So the mystery of the night dream sounds is solved, and my sleepy mind identified them correctly.
How cool is that??!
Monday, July 09, 2012
How is it that I've lived in this corner of the world for almost six years, and have not until this last month fully appreciated the intoxicating perfume that is a ponderosa pine forest in mid-summer?
It's like a drug that I can't get enough of. Emma and I go out geocaching and I feel like my lungs aren't big enough- I breathe in that scent until I'm lightheaded and giddy and convinced that the world has a purpose and I have a place in it.
I guess I've just never noticed before, as impossible as that seems, beyond "oh, pine tree smell"... Granted, last summer was a miserable blur of Shaun leaving me, and the summer before was a miserable blur of anemia. I wanted to curl up in a ball and shut out the world, and hiking through the forest was absolute last on my list of things I wanted to do.
Now, though- now I drink in the waves of ponderosa and sagebrush scents that billow down from the hillsides in warm golden resinous clouds. Even in town, it washes over me. I can't turn on the air conditioner, because that shuts out the living air. The forest exhales and I come alive.
There is really nothing like it.
(The first two pictures are from a geocaching adventure in the Wallowa Whitman National Forest, 8 miles northwest of my house; the second two are from Catherine Creek State Park, 20 miles southeast, measured as the raven flies.)
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Before I get to the adventure pictures, I have to post some glamor shots. Last night, Emma and I had a hairdresser moment.
She's been talking for a while about cutting her hair, and last night she decided that she was ready. Actually, she was ready last week, but I made her wait a few days to make sure she was ready.
(Actually, I made her wait because I wasn't ready. I finally just cut it, because I was never going to be ready.)
She loves it, and I must admit that it's easier to manage. She. Has. So. Much. Hair. She can actually brush it by herself, now.
I miss the waterfall of golden silk, though.
Friday, July 06, 2012
Ahhhh! I've been without a computer for two weeks! I don't think I've been computer-less since... I don't even know when.
no email (except by stealth at work),
no Googling interesting things,
no downloading geocaches to my GPS,
no Pinterest,
no spelling/math practice websites for Emma,
no downloading pictures from my camera,
no Ravelry,
no blog-reading,
no bank-account-checking to make sure everything's hunky-dory,
no changing around the music on my iPod,
no Google Earth browsing,
no designing weaving drafts,
NO BLOGGING!
It's appalling how dependent on my computer I am.
The good news is that the computer wasn't dead. The fan stopped working because it had cat hair in it {blush}. The computer gurus opened up the back, took out the fan, removed enough fur to make a small kitten, and put it back together. Voila- my computer works again! The only part that ticks me off is that they had the computer in their shop for TWO WEEKS while they looked for a supplier that had a replacement fan in stock, without even opening it up to see if it actually needed to be replaced.
Anyway, I have oodles of pictures to download and go through, then I'll have more geocaching adventures to show!
Monday, June 18, 2012
"Mom," said Emma, "when are you going to make some more fruit candy?"
Mangos on sale at the supermarket and strawberries from the Farmer's Market. Last jar of 2011 plums (from our yard) pulled down from the top shelf.
Candy accomplished. No added sugar, nothing but fruit.
Have I mentioned that I love my dehydrator?
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Want to see some more geocaching adventures? OK!
Last weekend my friend Anne let me and Emma tag along on a trip she was
taking with a group of friends to northern Idaho to go garnet hunting.
It was super fun, and over the course of the weekend we found 27
geocaches!
This is the view back generally toward Lewiston on Friday evening, as we wound our way along the Clearwater River toward Idaho. We geocached along the way, and found lots of pretty places.
On Saturday, the entire group (10 of us) went to the Emerald Creek Garnet Area. This is a developed area within the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, where people can "dig" for garnets in a much more controlled fashion than if everyone randomly started digging up the streambed and forest. They haul in the garnet-containing sediments, and the sieving troughs where you extract the garnets from all the mud run on a self-contained flume with a settling basin. This way, the large quantities of sediment that are the inevitable part of mining don't end up choking Emerald Creek.
It was a drizzly rainy chilly day, and we got very muddy, but we also found garnets!
I found a total of 6 ounces of garnets, shown with a dime for scale. I have no idea what the quality of these are, but some of them are nearly complete dodecahedral crystals. Probably some of them are worth polishing. Super cool! (Anne found the prize of the day- one that weighed two ounces by itself and was the size of a ping-pong ball!)
Emma got pretty cold pretty fast, and bailed when half the group went back to the cabin after lunch. I think she liked it, though- she asked if we could go back this weekend.
We left on Sunday morning, and tootled home the long way, through Moscow, ID, stopping at a few more geocaches. Here's Emma at a BIG log on a little nature walk we took at a campground to find a cache.
She's holding up a snail to show me, but I like how she is mimicking the tree!
One geocache we stopped at was super cool. It's an EarthCache, so there's no physical cache container or log to sign. EarthCaches are learning stops, to highlight some geologically interesting feature of that point.
This one was near Kendrick, ID, and was about plant fossils! You can pull up to a roadcut, get out of your car, go look at the rocky rubble at the base of the cliff, and find FOSSILS! Real ones! Just sitting there!
We finally continued on home, up and over Rattlesnake Grade, which is a very twisty, winding road in southeastern Washington that took us south into Oregon.
It was an amazing weekend.
-----------------------------------------
Today after work, Emma and I went on a much tamer trek to find a couple closer geocaches at Bird Track Spring campground and Red Bridge campground. We've been both these places many times, but the nature trail at Bird Track, especially, is always worth a repeat visit. It's one of my favorite places.
The trail winds out to the river through the cottonwoods and willows. We always look forward to The Tree Gate.
The wildflowers were pretty, and the weather was lovely and sunny and warm.
This pretty little butterfly, a Greenish Blue (Plebejus saepiolus) was fluttering around the whole time we were having our drink and snack. There were several other species along the river bank, but the weather was so warm that they were too active to sit still for a photo.
We poked around the river for a while,
and saw a juvenile garter snake hunting in the water, lots of insects under the rocks, a few mussels, and tons of itty bitty fish.
These are salmonids that probably hatched this spring (tiny ones) or last fall (bigger ones).
We couldn't find any of the three geocaches we went out after, but you know what? It doesn't matter. As Emma said on the way back to the car, "We found our own NatureCaches." And that's really what geocaching is all about.
