OUR HOUSE!! (Part Three)

So this part was delayed a little by a promised trip to Ocean World to (not) pet the sharks. Darcy loves her sea creatures, although we've been living back in Wright Brothers land for the past couple weeks. This round of photos is of the area around the house, which includes a "fairy ring" of redwoods. Michael's already planning a little tree house for Darcy in the middle of it.

Our ring of redwoods! The building behind them is our garage.

Here's a view up the side yard to the house-and-garden area.

The proper front door of the house faces this lawn and garden area, but it doesn't face the driveway, parking, or garage, so like Cima house, it's sort of backwards on the lot.

This is what ends up being the main entrance to the house. Again, like Cima house, it means that you enter through the laundry room. Unlike Cima house, this laundry room is huge and has a built-in desk area along with a ton of cabinets. The cabinets are sort of cream and lime green. Original, of course, but these I actually like.

OUR HOUSE! (Part Two: Front Garden)

The yard is so beautiful that it feels like you're walking through a park. The "front" garden is along the driveway and has frontage on the main road. The lawn is mostly moss because it's so shady. This picture is looking from the driveway.

A picture from the farthest corner looking back up to the house.

We have our own redwood stump! (Plus our own living redwoods elsewhere!)

There are several of these little garden "nooks" around the property. Darcy is going to have the best garden tea parties EVER.

OUR HOUSE! (Part One)

This is our new driveway! Because we bought a house today!! We practically own a park now -- the property is an absolutely gorgeous 1.29 acres of redwoods, fruit trees, moss lawns, and rhodedendrons. About two weeks ago, we decided that maybe we should try to find a house before the Federal tax credit runs away. We looked at our first houses last Saturday and had our offer accepted today!

The property is very beautiful and someday, the house could be, too. It's a 1977 manufactured home that's been so well-taken care of that it has the original carpet. Unfortunately, that means that it still has the original carpet and toilets and cooktop, but those will all be gone before we move in. It is outdated, but in very good shape inside and out, with lots of space. Start planning your visit! (And please keep your fingers crossed for a successful house inspection!)

The property is divided into sort of four spaces: front garden, house-and-garden area, middle garden, and lower garden. I'll post pictures of each in the next few posts. I couldn't go in the house today, so there are no interior shots, but those will come soon, too. We'll have a series of before and after pictures over the next many months.

In the meantime, here are the driveway and parking/garage areas.

From the other approach, you can see the house.

Looking back down toward the road.

Oh! The Light! The Light!

The light from the end of the "I only eat bagels" tunnel is so bright, I'm blinded!

We've been seeing signs of the bagel fetish starting to end, but the last two days have been incredible. Last night, she ate green beans with garlic and red pepper flakes, and mushroom ravioli. She even chose to dip some of her beans in the mushroom sauce that Michael and I ate with the ravs.

Tonight, Michael made falafel. And I made tahina sauce for it. Darcy tried both for the first time, with no fusses at all. She politely refused the tahina at first, but then took a giant serving spoon and dug right in. Smeared it in her pita by herself. Put a puddle on her plate. Licked the spoon.

After finishing an entire pita, she decided to drop her falafel into her milk. Then she added her cucumbers. And some tahina. She created cucufalafelmilkini. AND DRANK SOME OF IT.

Who knew the darkness could end so abruptly??

Darcy Does Good Works!

Yesterday was a good day for the Glore household. I was watching over the first of a series of gardening classes I helped arrange with the local community college. We had 41 people show up on a sunny Saturday morning! And the farmer who taught it went half an hour over the two hours allotted for the class -- and only three people left before he was done! It was pretty incredible. I'm probably going to teach the next one in May because having been turned down by said farmer to teach it, I don't really have enough time to find someone else by tomorrow's deadline for the course listing.

As some of you know, I was in LA last week for training. In the Volunteer Development class, our table group had to create a poster representing our collective volunteer experience, including how many generations of our family had done volunteer work of some kind, and at what age we first volunteered. If Darcy is ever in that same position, she'll have some good tales to tell. While I was at the college yesterday morning, Darcy and Michael helped restore the Mill Creek drainage by planting redwood seedlings. Darcy was very proud:

And very protective and happy:

She and Michael made a great team on those steep slopes:

Right now, thanks to her trip on the pirate ship (ok, just a wooden sailing vessel, really), she's in bed singing the "heave away, haul away" lines from Bound for South Australia. Pirates didn't grab her fancy in the same way as the Wright Brothers, who have been making a small comeback recently. It's sad, but one of the best entertainments we have is listening to the things that come out of her mouth as she's supposed to be falling asleep. Tonight, she's in rare form with the sea shanties.

The Dinosaurs

Many of you may remember this picture of the Wright Family, taken last fall at the height of Darcy's Wright Brothers obsession. All animals and toys were available to play a part in Darcy's fantasy of the 21st century Cima branch of the Wright clan. The Wright Brothers have waned as play objects these days, although the blue baby and Mickey Mouse are still Orv and Wil about 50% of the time. You might be tempted to think that all the animals could now go back to being themselves, but you would be wrong.

Instead, they have been drafted into Darcy's current dinosaur enthusiasm. Almost every night after dinner, she asks if we can all go up to play with her "dinosaurs". She does own about a dozen solid plastic/rubber/whatever dinosaur figures and they occasionally get to play dinosaur with her. Tonight, they did not. They stayed put in the toy storage bin. The teddy bears (mostly giganotosaurus), dogs and cats (triceratops[ies]), octopi and monkeys (oryctodromeus), and assorted other dinosaur stand-ins do most of the heavy lifting. It's a little disconcerting, but then it's also disconcerting to watch Darcy page through a book about dinosaurs, get to a particularly fierce T. rex and hear her coo, "Oh! A T-rex! Isn't he so cute?"

Those of you who play Facebook have already heard this story, but for those of you who don't, Darcy was recently at a playground next to our community garden. I was working in the dirt while she and Michael went to play. A little boy was playing there too and he took out a dinosaur and showed it to Darcy saying, "Look -- a dinosaur!" And Darcy looked at it and said, "Oh what a cute parasaurolophus!" And she was right! When I asked her about it tonight, she told me that he had a hadrosaur. That's also correct, because parasaurolophus was a type of hadrosaur.

I figure that we have about two months left of the total fascination with dinosaurs before she moves onto something new. The Wrights stuck around for almost exactly six months and we're now on month four of dinosaur everything. It will be very interesting to see what gets her interest next.

Picnic At Yontocket

Today was sunny and actually warm. I was out and about for work during the afternoon and the thermometer read 74! In Crescent City! So I got a picnic together before Michael got home from work and we all went out to enjoy the evening sunshine. A coworker had told me about three hikes that share a trail head in the dairy lands of Fort Dick, so we decided we'd try those. One trail leads to Yontocket, a historic Tolowa village site. In the 1850s, the white settlers of Crescent City and Smith River attacked the Tolowa and Yurok tribes in a series of massacres. At Yontocket, local tribes had gathered for an annual world renewal ceremony and 600 people were killed.

This might seem to make for a strange picnic site, but it is an absolutely beautiful place and there's a picnic table just outside the fence for the memorial site. We weren't exactly expecting the picnic table, but we took advantage of it. Looking out over the mountains, dunes, Smith River, flowers, and incredible trees, it's hard to imagine how people could come to such a place for the purpose of killing other people.

The sun was still warm while we ate. Darcy enjoyed her standard sesame seed bagel with butter. Adventurous eating -- in other words, not-starch -- is not in her game-plan these days. She tried a bite of strawberry under great protest and then moved on to starchier and better things.

And then it was time to go play in the flowers. These rolling hills are really grown-over beach dunes and some of them were covered in these white flowers. After we packed up, we followed a second trail to the Smith River, almost at it's mouth. I have more pictures, but they'll have to wait. It's too late and we have another indoor farmers' market tomorrow morning followed by a haircut for Darcy in the early afternoon. It's going to be a big day.