Long-Awaited: August Vacation Part 2

I noticed recently that I did a part 1 blog about our wonderful vacation with my sister and niece, but never went farther than their first full day in Crescent City! There was much more to our vacation. We had four or five days here so they could see where we live and enjoy the redwoods and the beach, but our solution to getting to take time off to visit with them AND have a vacation away was for them to join us for the first part of our vacation in Bend, Oregon. 

We rented a great house on the outskirts of Bend, but not too far away from downtown and fun stuff to do. Ev and I traveled to Bend via Eugene for reasons that turned out to be not valid, but had a great visit with a friend of hers who lives just south of Eugene. Michael took the girls more or less directly to Bend. Here are pictures of their journey:

Darcy and Liana review their Junior Ranger books at the Hiouchi Visitors Center on their way out of town.

 

Showing off their brand-new Junior Ranger badges!

They stopped at beautiful Crater Lake on the way and happened to run into our former neighbor from Mojave, Anne. They got a second Junior Ranger badge each -- in one day!

Crater Lake still had plenty of snow nearby, despite the calendar claiming it was mid-August. They stopped for some snow play, of course.

 

Michael's trip was made much more pleasant by the addition of the portable DVD player that made its way from North Carolina. More than five hours in a car is a lot for two Junior Rangers!

Hey! I just realized that this post actually goes with our blog title -- two National Parks in one day!

Rain: You Knew It Would Come

It is that time of year again. The weather forecasts now show much more rain than sunshine or even just plain old clouds and today was no exception. We woke up to rain, played out our day through showers and rain, and now it's raining hard. 

I'm not sure what our plan for the rain will be this year. Our first winter here, we lived in a very small rental, so finding entertainment inside was very difficult. Last winter, our house was a constant construction zone. This year, the house is a little closer to complete, although Michael has some designs on our bathroom that will involve us not being able to use it for a long stretch of time. But other than that, we have space to be inside and less pressure to be painting, installing trim, etc. Darcy is fond of board games now and played hangman successfully for the first time in the car today, so there are more options of indoor activities this winter.

The real joy is that Darcy can read books by herself now. I'm waiting for her to be able to spend hours reading novels so *I* can spend hours reading novels. She's not quite there yet, but it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that one of the first books she sat down and read by herself, cover to cover, was one of her Wright Brothers books.

Do You Prezi?

I think that almost sounds dirty, but it's not, I promise! Prezi is a new presentation tool that threatens PowerPoint as the be-all, end-all of meeting presentations. A really wonderful Prezi that makes the rounds of Facebook is "This Anthropology", a response to Florida's Governor Rick Scott's announcement that subjects like anthropology don't need to be taught in Florida's universities. Because, of course, anthropologists like the Glores don't do anything useful. It's well worth watching (which you do by clicking on the arrow at the bottom of the presentation when you're ready to move on).

So I've been playing with Prezi for work. I practiced by making a Prezi about our Food Day event. It's not perfect: Prezi makes it very easy to embed YouTube videos, but videos from other sources, so I had to swap out one movie. You can watch the Prezi and get a taste of the film festival we put on here. And if you'd like to watch the wonderful movie about a school bus renovation project we couldn't include in the Prezi, you can watch it here. It's only eight minutes long and it is awesome.

So, do you Prezi? If you do, you can post a link in my comments so I (and the millions who read my blog) can check it out.

(And as you may have noticed, I'm thinking that some work-y stuff mixed into the family stuff may make NaBloPoMo less stressful. Deal with it.)

This Just Writes Itself

Well, today's blog post is as easy as they come. I had some thoughts about what I should do for today, but then I started seeing class photos showing up on the Facebook profiles of local friends and I got excited. Could we finally be getting Darcy's pictures?? And yes, we did!

The folks who do all the class pictures around here offer multiple backdrops featuring local scenery. Darcy kept changing her mind when in the week before pictures were taken, but the day before, I had to make a decision and put it on the order form. I chose the redwoods. She was going back and forth between that and the lighthouse, but the lighthouse background seemed weird, so redwoods it is!

There was NO hesitation about what to wear. Darcy believes that her halter-top dress (very specifically requested because Rosetta-the-garden-fairy wears on) is the most beautiful piece of clothing she or anyone else has ever owned. I was good with it because the color would pop against the redwoods. I don't know how they got her to pose and smile, but I'm so glad they did! Here's our beautiful girl:

Angela Works Sometimes

I mostly stick to non-work stuff for this blog, but I thought I'd use a few days this month to let you all know about the work side of our lives. One of the things I get to do at my job is community gardening. This year, we started two large new community gardens that are thriving. One of them has been in the works since before we moved to Crescent City two years ago. The Elk Valley Community Garden serves our local Hmong community, many of whom were farmers before coming to the United States as refugees during and after the Viet Nam War. This garden is amazing, as the following series of photos will demonstrate:

Elk Valley Garden site, mid-March, 2011

We had a break in the rain early spring this year and we were able to get one of our volunteers to go to the site and till the sod. Unfortunately, he discovered that there was a lot of debris (large rocks, rusted metal, glass) that needed to be removed before he could till deeply, so he left the site looking like this:



About a month after that, the Hmong gardeners came out and combed the site, pulling out everything that could destroy a tiller.

 By the time all that was done and the site was tilled, it was late May. We went out and measured and marked the beds (each family has a 10' by 30' plot) and within two weeks, a blush of green was covering most of the plots:

The eagerness of our Hmong gardeners is overwhelming sometimes. When we marked the second half of the beds, gardeners were working within AN HOUR. By the end of the summer, the garden was so lush with plants at every stage of development (new seedlings that had replaced earlier plantings, plants ready for harvest, and plants going to seed because most of our gardeners are seed savers) that it was very difficult to remember that it had existed for less than four months:

This garden makes me happy. It's feeding well over a hundred people, many of them harvesting every day for their family meals. Twenty-four families are gardening here and it's common to see three generations working together on the same bed. There's a waiting list for space and we're hoping that the land-owner might allow us to fence more space next year and add 10 to 15 additional plots. Even that will not fill the demand for long, but it's a start. 

This is one of the most rewarding parts of my job, but there are others, too. We just did an interview with a local reporter this morning about our community gleaning project. In our first year, we gathered over 4,500 hundred pounds of locally-produced veggies and other food from farmers and backyard gardeners to distribute through our food bank. A week and a half ago, we officially elected 14 people to our Community Food Council, which was just a dream 12 months ago when we were planning the very first outreach meeting. Slowly, but surely, we're changing the face of food in our community. The need is great and there's still a lot to do, but we make a little bit of progress day by day.

In a shout-out to my wonderful husband, he helped bring about a system change in the school food system last month. There were several menu items on October's menu that were ambiguous as to their vegetarian status and Darcy is very keen on being able to have hot lunch every once in a while. Michael exchanged several emails with the head of food services for the district and this is the result:

Note the first Monday box on the lunch menu. No more ambiguity! And they even changed the names of some of the entrees. The "whole grain cheese pizza" was called "whole grain piazza pizza" last month. Yay, Michael!

GO!

Well, it's that time of year again! The time when I drive myself crazy by coming up with a blog post Every Single Day In November. The time when you flock to my blog by the tens to check for the newest post. The time when I catch up with all kinds of stuff I should have posted months ago. Yes, it's NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month! I will provide a link in the next few days, but it's quite a confusing time for NaBloPoMo as they've just officially switched from an independent site to BlogHer.

But enough of that. I signed up for the torture all by myself, so I'll live through it. I did last year, anyway. Here's a cute picture of Darcy-as-fairy for Halloween. She is fueling up on quesadilla and cucumbers before hitting the candy and the trick or treating:

Stay tuned for more scenes for our life in and around the National Parks all month long!

Get Set!

In just a week, it will be NaBloPoMo -- that means a new post every day. It's hectic for me, but fun for you! Here's Darcy and her friend playing pioneer at the edge of the corn maze when we went to the pumpkin patch two weekends ago. I'm going to try hard to figure out how to post video on the blog. Last time I tried, it didn't go so well, but we have some great videos we'd like to share.

(Darcy now reads and answers email. If you would like to correspond with her, let us know and we'll send you her address. Just be warned: You might write three paragraphs, but as typing on the QWERTY keyboard is very frustrating for her, her responses are generally one or two sentences.)