May 22, 2012



One of the deer caught
on our game cam last week.




Three of our hummingbirds.





















Wild Rose tilling the garden.



Right now the woods are thick with birds and are ringing with their music.  Up Here there are no other sounds to drown out their songs.  The only noise pollution we get is from jets from Sea-Tac and the local airport, and the occasional helicopter or small prop job. So nice!

On Saturday I finished tilling the garden, and we got most of it planted.  Three rows of potatoes: russets, Yukon gold and reds.  Two rows of onions: yellow, red.  Now we just have to plant the carrots and bunch onions.  It was drizzly all Sunday and Monday, which was just perfect for watering them. 

Sunday, solar eclipse day, was overcast for the first time in weeks, of course.  The sky didn't seem to get any darker at 6:30, so I'm not sure if I misunderstood the timing or shadow or what.  Hopefully Sandy in California was able to see it.  We'll just have to wait until 2022.

I washed the downstairs windows inside and out on Sunday, then tackled the loft windows.  The ones on which we had smashed yellow jackets during the winter.  I used one of the scrubbies that JB's Mother had crocheted with netting and it worked perfectly.  Between drizzles, JB cut the wood for the bathroom window frame and will urethane it today.  Should be all installed by the end of the week, and I can hardly wait! 

I mentioned having put away our winter clothes and unpacked our summer ones.  That is something I never had to do when living on the west side of the mountains.  Over there one pretty much wears the same clothes all year long, just less sweaters in the summer and occasionally shorts and tank tops for the few days that it is warm enough, but always the raincoat and lotion for your webbed feet. . .

In the current Better Homes and Gardens magazine, their garden editor has chosen a reblooming lilac as a favorite pick for 2012.  One that blooms from Spring to first frost.  Wow!  I definitely want to get a few of those next year for Up Here.  We had lilacs around some of the homes I grew up in.  I especially remember the ones in our yard in Lakeview, OR, where we lived for the five years I was in elementary school.  Funny how experiences of those younger days shape the rest of your life.  Those were the years when we spent so much time out camping and searching for Indian arrowheads and other relics.  It was also a dry climate with four distinct seasons. 

My Grandmother planted lilacs at the ranch where my Father grew up.  One summer, maybe twenty years ago, my Mother and I visited my Aunt in Spokane and she took us up to see the ranch.  Of course none of the buildings were there except for the brick pump house, but the lilac bushes were still there and in bloom, as were the many wild roses.  My Grandmother had their house at the ranch moved down to Veradale in the early 1940's, and my Grandfather dug out the basement with his team of horses.  She furnished the basement with all the items from the ranch house, including the old wood cooking stove from the kitchen (which I really wish I had now).  My cousins and I loved to play down there when we were kids.

Thought for the day:  Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a crime to waste it on children.  George Bernard Shaw