Day 81

1. Admiring the snowy peaks while driving along the gorge

2. A park in Hood River

3. Winter wheat? and sagebrush

4. Stopping in Madras to watch the biggest fire I've ever seen. Sad but fascinating.

What else? Today we drove to Bend to visit our friends the Ayers. Because of snow on the pass, we turned a three hour drive into a four hour drive by coming around by the gorge. We then stopped enough times that we turned the four hour drive into an almost six hour drive. Sigh. But we made it!

Packing up

I'm in California right now. Visiting friends in preparation for a wedding...

Yesterday in a fit of why don't we have any of our flowers inside, I went a picked some bouquets (neverminding the fact that they'll die while I'm gone) and then I picked a HUGE sunflower to put in my room. I am sure it helped with my packing. (If I could've found my phone, I would be posting a picture of it. But I have no clue where my phone went which is very odd. I know it's in the house and I'm starting to wonder if it got scooped up into the garbage. Argh.)

I have a love/hate relationship with packing. I love the challenge of it (And yes, I pronounce that in my head as Inspector Clouseau does with a mangled french accent, "SHALLANGE!)"  yet sometimes my brain feels like it might explode with all of the options that I overthink.

I consider the perfect packing job to consist of an outfit for every situation that I'm likely to come across and for each item to have been worn once (depends on the item, that is). In my mind, the perfect packing job can be achieved. But it does take practice and it involves learning over time what works best for you.

Over the years, I've learned that the one item I can't live without is the denim skirt. No matter what. One time I forgot that rule and spent the whole trip wishing I'd bought it. I also always pack a swim suit, cause you never know when you might end up in a hotel and it would be a crime to miss out on a perfectly good swimming pool.

So yup, back to California. It's warm here and there are fresh tomatoes and peaches. I love visiting, but I definitely enjoy coming back to Oregon! And now I'm watching Cheers (season one) which so far is pretty funny...

Paper flowers

While in Spokane Rebekah and I took a make your own paper flower class at aNeMonE. It was fantastic. We had a lovely group session with 3 other gals and Mary, who founded aNeMonE with her husband Nate. At first the process looked really simple and easy, but once you started it you realized just how time consuming it was!

Forming my rose petals.

Rebekah posing with her rose.

Pieces for the dahlia

A sample dahlia. It was amazing.

My finished dahlia!

The gal at aNeMonE graciously let us take some photos around the shop. The flowers were amazing. The lilies for instance had painted detail on the inside.

A gardenia out of pearlized paper.

A boquet of paper flowers with feathery details.

If you want to see more, here is their photo gallery.

Deadly Paper

On Monday of this week, I got a mild concussion.

And if it's possible to get a lame concussion, that's what I got. A really, really lame concussion.

I wasn't tackled playing football, I wasn't trying to land a double axle, or I wasn't saving the world by some dramatic means. In fact, I wasn't doing anything. Really. All I was trying to do was fix a printer jam. Which isn't much of anything. And certainly is not usually concussion inducing.

To set the stage, we begin with the fact that our printer is located in our large kitchen pantry, and on the top shelf above the printer we store paper goods, like paper towels and paper cups. Now the key word there is paper. As in non-heavy paper goods. The paper plates for instance have a spot on a lower shelf. Because they are heavy. But unfortunately, the last time we unloaded groceries, some person in our family decided that the top shelf (on top of the slippery paper cup bag) was the perfect place to store a 10lb bag of paper plates.

So. while I was bending over wrestling with the printer, I, poor innocent me, received the full blow of a ten pound sack dropped on my poor little head. And my brain did not like it. I immediately had the oddest headache and for the rest of the day I could've cried at the drop of a hat (now I know what it means to feel hormonal). I was also slightly nauseated and hardly ate anything all day. I'm doing better now since I went to the chiro, (PTL for chiros!) but still things are taking their time to feel better. And I've pretty much doing nothing for the last two days.

The thing that makes this even more ironic is that the previous evening (Sunday evening if you are keeping track) I talked to my friend Rebekah who lives in Spokane. It was a good thing that we talked because I found out that I was not flying to Spokane next week like I had written on my calendar, but I was flying out THIS Friday. Thankfully, I don't have anything going on this weekend, so it was kind of like giving myself a surprise present. Of course, my mind starts whirling with list of everything I must get accomplished this week (else obviously the whole world is going to stop) and I was in the middle of my first task when the above happened.

Thus my list was thrown out the window of life. And you know what, that's fine with me. Because I can't even remember what was on it.