Growing forward
Happy New Year to everyone. Here’s to pushing through the frozen times and remembering to bloom anyway.
Category: Seasons
Apple Processing Day
Our backyard apple tree produced 14 pounds of usable fruit this year. It took two of us, with the ladder and some careful contortioning, to harvest nearly all of it. I don’t do anything to protect the fruit from the rest of Nature, no spraying and no little fruit socks. (I bought a package of fruit socks one year, and the process of getting one sock on one apple while I was still standing on the ground was challenging enough that I’ve never been inspired to try to do it from the top of a ladder.) The resulting fruit is …
May’s report
It’s official: individual detailed reports of what I’ve been doing are completely beyond my capacity at the moment. So, here’s the overview of what we did in May: We joined some friends at LUCO‘s Chamber Music Cabaret. There was a piccolo trio, and Caitlyn got pulled from the audience to read raffle ticket winning numbers. Caitlyn and I joined some of our homeschool friends for another field trip to a farm. This time we drove across the mountains to Little Wing Farm where we spent the day touring the orchards and generally traipsing around. Caitlyn has been having a digression …
Field Trip: Snow at Mt. Rainier
Caitlyn loves snow. That’s a horribly brief and to the point sentence that doesn’t convey the degree to which Caitlyn loves snow. Of course, we live in a place that gets only occasional snow. When it snows here, it’s pretty and it’s fun, (usually) not enough to seriously snarl things up, although to an eight year old, I think the snarling is part of the fun. I’ve explained how more snow in Seattle wouldn’t be a good thing, but I guess I’ve not been terribly convincing. I’ve made some effort to explain how months of snow might not be fun, …
Field Trip: California, Coast, and Cousins
Welcome to March! I’ve got little daffodils blooming in the backyard to remind us that it’s not going to be cold and gray forever. It can rain some more, though. I’d feel better heading into summer with more snow in the mountains first. Back at the beginning of February, to help my grandmother celebrate her 90th birthday, we took a week off from the chill of Seattle and trekked to California. We had a lovely birthday dinner with family, and Caitlyn got to spend time with her cousins, whom we don’t see nearly often enough. The adults managed to pry …
Snow Day
Despite our general northiness here in Seattle, we don’t generally get snow. Thanks to Ye Olde Pacific, we get rain, wind, and cold, but not much snow. When it does, everyone celebrates (at least as long as it hasn’t shut down the city – we’ve done that, too). Last weekend we had perfect Seattle snow: just enough to make it pretty, not enough to cause problems. Although perhaps a half inch more would have been good. Just so Caitlyn’s snow angel wouldn’t be full of wood chips. She did make a grand effort at getting in some sledding. There was …