Garden Prelude

With my slug's pace in posting, it's almost impossible to show you an up-to-the-moment view of the garden. Will you settle for some within-the-last-couple-of-weeks pics? First up, Silas peers out from behind the beans. I just made a been and tomato dish with a few pounds of them yesterday.

Below: Yes, we will have a couple of pumpkins this October!

This is Silas' magic beanstalk. He is pointing up to the clouds in anticipation of how high he expects it to grow.

Broccoli:

This is the as-of-yet unknown flower that cropped up just about everywhere. It looks pretty in this picture, but trust me: it's not that great. The flowers are only open for a few hours in the morning. The rest of the day, it just looks kind of... blah. I think it might have to find it's way out of my garden, though I expect I will never be totally rid of it.
Soon, I will post more pictures of another much different garden that we visited with my parents, who are visiting from Wisconsin. Till then...

New header

For those of you who read the blog through FaceBook and don't actually see the blog itself, this is the blog header I've used since last fall:


And here's my new one:

I love love love the old picture of my boy with his curly blond locks, but it was about time for an update.

Hike to the light house!

There we are: A happy little family enjoying the view from the top of the Dungeness Spit lighthouse. We don't look a bit frazzled, over-heated or exhausted.
Well, maybe a bit. It's actually a hike of over 5 miles to get from the mainland out to the end of the spit, where the lighthouse sits. Here's a view from the mainland:
Can you see that tiny speck way out on the horizon, just to the left of the trees? Probably not, but that little speck was our destination.
As we started out, we thought, like all the other times we'd come to the Spit, that we'd just walk a ways and then turn back. After all, it was only mid-morning and already verging on intensely hot. But as we got a mile or so away from shore, a breeze picked up and it became bearable. By the time we stopped to eat lunch, we were far enough along that there was no sense in turning back, and we decided to go the whole way.
We made a deal with Silas that if he walked all the way to the lighthouse, Drew would carry him back.
We were all very proud of ourselves when we beheld this sight:
Still a 10+ mile hike with no shade did leave it's mark, although Silas was magically spared sunburn. Poor Drew was sore for days after carrying our 35 pound son on his back for 5 miles. But it was all worth it.

The Spit is a national wildlife refuge, particularly for birds. Along with a few seals, we saw...
A Bald Eagle...
a Peregrine Falcon (much bigger than an eagle, which I wasn't expecting)...
And a lone Brant.

Silas has spent the past week talking about lighthouses, and this morning, we built one out of blocks. This hike definitely left an impression on all of us :)

The Olympic Mountains behind you, the Canadian coastal range in front and water all around...If you are ever out on the Olympic Peninsula, DO NOT miss Dungeness Spit. Even if you don't go all the way out to the lighthouse, this is still one of the most gorgeous places you could ever find yourself.

Merymere Falls

...a few pictures from last week's adventure: Marymere Falls, near Lake Crescent.
Checking out the river...
...and crossing the old, narrow log bridges.
Goofing around on the river bank...
...and hanging out on moss-covered boulders.
That was last week's adventure. This week's: the Dungeness spit, where we will hopefully catch a breeze off of the water and have break from the heat.

Until next time...

Hiatus

I'm taking a bit of a hiatus...again. No Book of the Month this month, and expect infrequent postings...We are minimizing our computer usage in favor of, well, everything else.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!