Hmmmm...

It's late and I'm tired. The day has been full of packing, moving, cleaning, more cleaning, and tomorrow will be more of the same.

But we all seem to be mostly healthy, we have somewhere(s) to move TO, and we got the news today that our stuff will be delivered on Friday. As in the day after Thanksgiving. As in a day that we have family guests. As in three days earlier than we had requested.

But it doesn't matter! Because what matters is that we should be able to have the carpets cleaned before the stuff arrives and then we will have somewhere to go when the vacation rental runs out on Sunday.

I delivered wine to our wonderful host/neighbors this evening. They have been unbelievably generous with their "back house". Darcy and I have been here almost two months and the only rent I've been allowed to pay is in wine. They live across from one of the most spectacular stretches of coast anywhere, and we've gotten to be one house away from that all this time. We have wonderful friends.

By the end of the day tomorrow, we will probably have belongings in three different houses. But by Sunday or Monday, everything will have gathered together into one house and we can start the process of settling in, putting up art, and deciding where everything goes.

And now I'm going to go blog at Growing Tables and go to bed.

One Up, One Down

So just in time for us to move to a different temporary place of residence (before moving to our permanent place of residence in a week and a half), Michael has come down with what Darcy had. So they're both in bed, she because a fun, active day after being sick wears a girl out, and he because being sick wears a man out.

And I'm here blogging about it, hoping that Michael recovers as quickly as Darcy did and that I don't get it.

Darcy and I drove up the coast today, to one of her favorite places: Bandon, OR. We had a good time, as the sun was shining, we didn't need coats, and we hit all the hot-spots, which now include a new cheese maker. I got a significant amount of Christmas shopping done at non-chain stores, which feels good despite the need to move the gifts a couple times. In speaking to a merchant, I actually built a great work connection and got a lead on a regional funder I didn't know about -- so yay for networking. 

The one downside was that we learned that our favorite beach-trash art group (and yes, we have one!) has opened a new and beautiful venue in downtown Bandon, but they are closed on Sundays! We could only peek in the window and dream of our next visit. The Washed Ashore Project is amazing and you should all check out their website to look at pictures. They collect trash from beaches (and accept donations, so I need to figure out a storage system so I can keep the stuff we pick up to take to them) and then sort it by color and material before making amazing sculptures out of them. The photos online do not do these things justice, but they're still worth checking out.

I'm hoping tomorrow brings us three healthy people, continued sunshine, and speedy packing.

It Was An Almost Perfect Day...

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, I started thinking about what a great blog post I was going to have for last night. It was a gorgeous day, I had a very productive three hours of work in the morning, attended a lovely Thanksgiving potluck at Darcy's school, had a little free time while Darcy enjoyed herself at a birthday party, and then Darcy and I spent some time on the beach.

We wandered the sands and wondered about the odd arrangement of LOTS of seaweed, just in two small sections of the beach. And we watched an amazing sunset over Castle Rock.

It was all going so well. 

And then an hour after Darcy went to bed, we heard noises upstairs where there should be no noises. It was not a pretty sight. Poor girl was covered in vomit and we had a miserable three or four hours before her body was done getting rid of whatever had tried to invade.

That's my excuse for not blogging last night. 

And I'm blogging early-ish today because puking for half the night wears a child out and she fell asleep on the couch just before 5. I carried her up to bed without an eyelash moving and I will keep my fingers crossed that she can sleep straight through until morning.

Waiting For Downton

So Michael says that he might be "over" Downton Abbey because of the way they ended the last season. I agree that the fate of new parents on the show isn't fun, but I'm still looking forward to its return.

Today, I got a suggestion for something to while away the time until Downton returns. Broadchurch is a BBC detective series, something we often like. One of the more recent ones we've watched is Vera, with Brenda Blethyn as a detective on the moors. Apparently, there are more seasons than we've watched, so there's more waiting-for-Downton fodder. And in searching for a link to Vera (which is on Hulu), I found this article about Brit binge watching with a couple more suggestions including the UK version of House of Cards. Didn't know there was one.


(Had to make a new label. Apparently, I've never really written about tv before.)

Trees Of Mystery

So there's a slightly (?) cheesy tourist attraction just south of Crescent City called Trees of Mystery. There are good parts of it, but there's also a giant Babe the Blue Ox (anatomically correct) in front. I find it an odd place to go see redwoods, though, because there's beautiful old growth forest nearby, so I don't understand going to see named, not terribly old redwoods instead. But that's just me, and Trees of Mystery is a venerable institution.

The real trees of mystery are the redwoods themselves. I always appreciate them when I get to drive through them (as I may tomorrow). They are overwhelmingly ancient and wild and beautiful on an ordinary day. But then there are days when the sun and fog play together particularly well and people are able to get photos like this:

Michael was in the redwoods for such a day today. Pretty good for an iPhone, once again.

The Wonderful World Of Cheese

In true Darcy form, she has decided over the last six or eight months that she loves cheese. All cheese, of course, because she doesn't do anything by halves. 

At Halloween, she won the award for best girls' costume and got to choose a prize from a big basket of prizes. Her category was the first awarded. The basket was filled with chocolate bars of many kinds, games, toys, jars of olives. She chose the round of Humboldt Fog cheese, an rinded goat cheese with a layer of ash. And she loved that cheese.

As part of her birthday present, I found this magazine about cheese. It became her bedtime reading. Michael tells this story as if it is an odd choice, but this comes from a man who used to keep three encyclopedias of classical CDs by his bedside. 

Sunset

Moving across the country and back again in just over a year was never our choice of how life would go. But here are a couple reasons we did the "back again":

These pictures represent more than a gorgeous sunset on the beach. Darcy and Michael could go to the beach easily to enjoy that sunset because of our amazing social network here. When living with our friends became detrimental to Darcy's sleeping needs a month after we moved here, other friends offered their "one and a half bedroom" guest house for more or less as long as we needed it. The guest house is separated from this beach by one house and one road. So Darcy and Michael walked down the driveway, across the street, and there they were, on this unbelievably beautiful stretch of the Pacific coastline.