Hold On To Your Hats!

The deluge will soon begin. I have (perhaps foolishly) signed up for NaBloPoMo, otherwise known as National Blog Posting Month. It started as a tie-in to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I was briefly considering participating in NaNoWriMo, but decided that November was busy enough without contemplating writing 50,000 words of fiction! And since I learned last night that I'm headed to Washington for the second half of this week, I'm glad I made that decision.

I figured I could handle NaBlogPoMo a little easier than the novel, so you can look forward to new blog posts EVERY DAY in November. I'll do a little catching up of our lives in the beautiful redwoods.

We spent part of today in the redwoods, as it happens. I'll save some details for November (see how I'm already thinking ahead?), but the park opened its first new trail in a decade this morning with a dedication ceremony near the plaque commemoring Lady Bird Johnson's dedication of Redwood National Park and a ribbon cutting at the trail head. We didn't join the inaugural hike because Michael was a shuttle driver, taking folks back to their cars if they weren't hiking either.

Wish me luck and check back every day in November for exciting new blog posts!

In Which I Bring The Pretty

I got chastised this evening for not updating the blog more regularly. It's a fair criticism. Life has been busy and the blog has suffered. But because recent posts have featured such lovely creatures as slugs and sharks (which I actually love -- the sharks, not the slugs) and because I know I'm going to post pictures of the slug buffet that is our front yard these days, I thought I'd throw in some pretty pictures.

I used to think of fuschias as potted plants. Really, I thought of them as hanging basket material and not much more. But in Crescent City, they become trees. I've had one blooming since before we bought the house and it is currently loaded down with flowers. I have at least three different kinds growing in the yard, but the white-centerd ones are the most prolific. They hardly look real:

I also inherited three or four more fuschias that are in large pots. They were waiting to be transplanted into the ground, but the previous owner never did it. She said that she always took end-of-season hanging planters and put them into larger pots for a while before putting them in the ground. So I just need to figure out where I want them and I'll have a whole fuschia forest!

Shark Attack!!!

As you may know, Darcy's current obsession is with all things ocean. We play fishy games pretty much non-stop at home, and she had my cousin Tina, her friend, and me all "growling like barracudas" with her a couple nights ago. It's fish, fish, fish all the time.

And so she loves going to our (very small and overpriced) local aquarium. Often. She went with Betty when she was here. And then last week, her preschool took a class trip there. And she's already anticipating going with my parents when they visit starting this weekend. Oh, and she had already been there three times before the aforementioned trips.

One of the highlights of Ocean World is that you can pet sharks. Darcy never has, but she talks about it a lot. She pets the starfish and has touched the anemones, but never the sharks. She will, however, hang out in a great white shark's mouth:

She doesn't seem too concerned about Michael's well-being, does she?

Slug Fest (And I'm Not Talking About Punches Or Hard-hit Pitches)

No, I'm talking about the slimy beasts that are among my least-favorite of all the animals. I'm trying to learn to like them, but I can only muster a sort of horrified fascination. Here they are, in all their glory.

Ah, banana slug courtship rituals. So beautiful. I just wish they weren't on my house.

This is a very big banana slug. Even for banana slugs around here, it's pretty big. Just so you know that I'm not being hysterical about this, I took some pictures for scale, too.

See? It looks big next to Darcy! Who loved it, of course, and tickled it with her tickle-grass. It retracted its antennae, much to her delight.

It's even big next to Michael's head! Isn't it nice how we include the very big slug in family games? We're very hospitable to them. I don't love them, but since "we're completely surrounded by slugs", as Darcy trilled happily this morning during her pre-departure slug survey, I'm trying to get used to their company.

Our Fruit

I apologize for the lapse in blogging. It's the whole buying a house, going to a family reunion, painting, flooring, moving...all in the span of two weeks. It'll really take it out of a person. But now we're well-settled into our new house and we have time to breathe occasionally. We also have wireless internet in the house now, so our "old" computer, the one with my beloved Photoshop, is connected to the internet on a regular basis. So blogosphere, watch out! I'm back.

As I may have mentioned in May, when I last blogged, we have a beautiful, very large yard at our new house. It is full of fruit trees and vines and canes and bushes. Almost any form fruit can grow in, we have it. And it is all starting to ripen now. Even though it's been a very foggy late July and August, the fruit is doing well. Today, we finally had sunshine, so I expect to be harvesting over the weekend.

We have several apple trees, with two bearing heavy loads of fruit. I was told that some are baking apples and some eating apples. We'll see as they get ripe. I'm looking forward to both! Apple pies. Apple butter. Apple crisp. Apple snacks.

I need a ladder to harvest these blackberries climing up our holly!

Kiwis! We have kiwis! Real fuzzy ones, too, not the smooth-skinned, yellow-fleshed kiwis. These are the real deal and our vines climb at least 25 feet into the air, with scores of the fuzzy beasts. When they were true babies, their fuzz was quite red and they were beautiful.

Darcy's already done some harvesting. She was so proud. Here she is reaching up to test some beautiful...

...peaches! We've already eaten two of our very own peaches, but none were ready for picking on this day. After all our sunshine this afternoon, I'm counting on three or four of them being ready this weekend. We don't have tons of peaches, but we have a couple dozen, at least. I've been told this is a bad year for fruit trees in the area because we had some late, frenzied storms that damaged a lot of blossoms.

You really should come visit.

Darcy And The Sea

We are in the midst of a great holiday weekend. We started with a parade in neighboring Brookings, OR, and associated festivities tied to the Azalea Festival on Saturday. We all had a good time and then Michael went to softball practice. Today, it was warm right from the get-go, so Darcy and I walked to a playground while Michael slept in. Then we packed up a picnic and headed inland where it got as warm as 77 with glorious sun. We hiked a short loop trail to see the Darlingtonia (pitcher plants) in all their wild glory and then hit another botanical trail along the Rough and Ready River. There's a picnic table at the end of the trail overlooking the river and that's where we ate. Then we drove home, with a detour towards Happy Camp. Darcy fell asleep and one minute later, we were in snow! Lots of snow! When we got home, Michael went off to another softball practice and Darcy and I went to the beach. Where she ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and ... you get the idea. For an hour.

The ocean was incredibly calm, almost flat, so it was a much less anxious visit to the beach than it often is. Darcy chased the seagulls and the waves, and I chased her.

As you can see, especially in the first picture, she had a lot of fun. I did, too, in part because of the lack of waves. I picked up pretty rocks with a plan to make them into a craft project for our family reunion in July. There are such gorgeous stones on our beaches, but I feel like I need a reason to collect them.

And just in case you didn't notice, we were in the ocean, the redwoods, the serpentine fens (where the pitcher plants live), and the snowy mountains of the Siskiyou National Forest, all in about seven hours.

Please Help Me!

As many of you know, I started a new job in February. It's humming along quite nicely so far and I even got one of the grants I applied for already. One of my favorite projects I'm working with is a new community garden that's starting in Klamath Glen, a very small community in the southern part of our county. Klamath Glen is part of the Yurok Indian Reservation and is more than 25 miles from the nearest store selling fresh produce -- they need this garden!!

Nature's Path Organics is sponsoring a contest for the best new organic garden idea and I've submitted the Klamath Community Garden for consideration. The women running this garden are amazing and they are bringing together their community from the ground up.

The contest works like this: from now until June 15th, people vote on the ideas that have been submitted. The top five vote-getters will be the finalists and Nature's Path will choose two winners. Each winning garden will receive $10,000 in cash, $5,000 in technical assistance from Organic Gardening magazine, and $10,000 for a fundraising community breakfast. Their community will also get up to $100,000 in Nature's Path food products for a local food bank -- and the non-profit I work for runs a food bank. This would be huge for our community. We have the worst health outcomes of any county in California, with mortality rates almost double the state average. We need all the healthy food and activities we can get.

This is important to me and my community! Please go to the website and vote now! It does require a very brief registration in order to vote, but it's worth it. If you have a Facebook account or a blog or a Twitter account or any other method of urging other people to vote: please do so! We are late getting on the board here, so we have some catching up to do. I think we can do it -- one of the garden founders has 1000 followers on Twitter and she'll be tweeting soon, too.

THANK YOU!!