Raised beds

I've been dreaming of raised vegetable beds for years.

Or precisely, since I was 11 and discovered that I liked gardening. That spring, mom had declared that there was not going to be a vegetable garden - you know, something due to her being pregnant - and I realized that my goal in life that summer was to have a vegetable garden. And that I would miss pulling weeds. Well, not really. But I realized that there was more to gardening then pulling weeds. Since then we had various incarnations of mounded beds, or at the least, nothing but weed cloth laid on the ground with holes poked in.

But this year, unbeknownst to me, was destined to be different. God had heard my prayers.

In April we realized that our shed needed to be resided. The siding (batten wood) was failing to keep out mice and all sorts of nasty critters and had to come off. Well, if you're familiar with batten wood siding, you know that it consists of wide planks (about a foot wide) battened down with narrow strips. Well, the narrow strips weren't much good for anything but the wide planks, usually sized one foot bye eight feet, were/are perfect for raised boxes.

So... Tah Dah! We now have eight beautiful raised beds in the vegetable garden, and four flower boxes near the shed.



Today, Hannah came over and we got the pea trellises up, did some weeding and planted some squash and cukes. You can't really tell in the picture below, but we are using a bent over stock panel as a trellis for the cucumbers and squash. Hopefully, it should work!




I'm also being particularly ambitious by weed clothing everything. :) Should pay off in a month!

So I posted this and then realized I should give credit to those who deserve it. First off, I think Jacob and Daniel helped with almost every single box. They're pretty awesome! Andy certainly helped with at least half of them, and Scott, I think, built the first two, plus he did the majority of work tearing them off in the first place. Also, all the younger men helped with pulling out the original nails, which was rather tedious. I wasn't able to do a lot until yesterday but since my neck is doing so much better now I actually got contribute by doing the chop sawing. I now have a lovely sunburn, thanks to our last push to get them finished. I think we made five of them in an hour and a half!

Eight not-so-little ramblings

So, most days I don't feel like writing much, thanks to point four of this post but today was one of those special days (I don't have to do it on Sunday) so here's a couple of weeks worth of thoughts* in one post.

1) Most importantly, I'm going to be a bridesmaid this August. Yay! Little happy dance for Jason and Ellen. :) This will be the third time I've been in a wedding in August and once again, I'll have to pay attention to tan lines. Nothing worse then a farmers tan with a bridesmaids dress. I think it would be so much easier for them to get married in June at Family Camp. :) And this will be, drumroll please, be my sixth time being a bridesmaid. I watched 27 Dresses recently, and yeah, I could actually relate somewhat. :-P When I get married, I'm just going to avoid the whole issue and elope.

27 dresses

2) And talking about chickflicks, I finally finished My Girlfriend's Boyfriend yesterday and with watching that and the royal wedding hubbub of last week, I had the perfect chick flick dream last night. You know, the kind where at the last minute you realize the guy who wants to marry you is actually, ooooh, a Prince! It was a little weird. I don't think I've ever had a dream like that.

Inspired by Pinterest, a felt flower.

3) I love Pinterest. If you, like me, have millions of bookmarks/favorites, you should seriously check it out. It's basically a visual bookmarking service. So instead of your link being a line of text that you may or may not remember what website it goes too, Pinterest allows you to "pin" a photo from the website onto a catagorized board. It's awesome for saving recipe, book, crafty, house, photo and really anything besides just plain text website links. There's also a main page (which is currently my home page) which feeds everyone's "pinnings" onto one giant board. It will be interesting to see how it grows. Based on the giant board, you can definitely tell that the majority of "pinners" are female, you know, with lots of decor, recipe, and clothing pictures.

One of my torture eye therapy charts. :)

4) Vision therapy. I go in for an evaluation next week. I'm very interested to hear what he's going to say. My neurologist told me that the eyes are the last to heal, and it might take up to a year. Bummer. And my concussion isn't healed until the eyes are healed. So no sports for me this summer. Unless a miracle occurs, which I'm all in favor of! Oh, well, I guess it's not all about me. The one advantage, and I'm not sure how much of an advantage it is, is that I loose my appetite thanks to it. I get full with half to a third of what I used to need, and I could probably eat vegetarian if I wanted too. It's nice not to be hypoglycemic anymore!

5) Posture exercises. I get to start doing them for my neck. My x-ray results came back and I have some degeneration in disk C5/6 and my neck doesn't want to arc forward correctly. I've always admired people who have perfect posture, and now I'm on my way! Of course right now I'm totally slouching, but you can't tell...

6) Ceiling fans. They are the bane of my Sundays... I'm seriously contemplating my sitting options at church.

7) It's spring. Well kind of. I have a million plants sitting on the porch waiting for me to plant. Or more accurately, direct my ever lovin' brothers to help me plant.

8) Music. I'm trying to listen to music more to give my eyes a break during the day. I have a list of about 25 bands, and a couple of times a week, I type one into Grooveshark and listen to some selection. I think I find the music world overwhelming. Plus, how many girl/guy songs can one listen too? There's just not much more to be sang that hasn't been sung. Feel free to leave me suggestions. :)

*And these are just the thoughts I can actually remember. My memory still ain't what it used to be. Good thing I can't remember everything, else this post would be a mile long.

Herbert (Paint, lights and wheels)

Well, here's a long overdue Herbert post. Since I last wrote about him, something monumental has happened. Herbert got driven on the road. Successfully, no less! We had to deliver some lambs to the butcher and Herbert performed his job admirably. And while Scott did the actual driving, afterwards, I got to practice backing him up, which felt pretty sweet.

Here you can see where Scott worked his magic.
The steel tube that contains part of the hinges had broken and he replaced it and re-welded it.

Here's where a light is in the middle of getting replaced. Scott helped me, or really, I helped him, rewire the lights for the trailers. I'd always thought wiring trailers was supposed to be a nightmare after all of the Patrick McManus books I read growing up, but apparently if you just have the right chart, it's a synch. And apparently we had the right chart. :) You can also get a good close up of one of Herbert's original colors.

And another classic color that Herbert used to be painted. This is in the wheel well where we replaced one of Herbert's wheels.

So anyways... wiring is now finished, and it's onto the brakes!

And then PAINT! What color? I'm leaning towards red or teal with cream detailing. But, you never know. :)

Waiting, Weed and Water

So today I had my first MRI ever. I thought it was rather ironic that while I was filling out the standard "Why-are-you-here?" questionnaire, the refrain of the song that was playing included the phrase "conked on the head". Yes, God does have a sense of humor.

The waiting room was amazing. Let's just say that it looked like the Pottery Barn or Rejuvenations model for waiting rooms. My, it was fancy! I was actually sitting on a couch when I took the picture.

I was quite curious to see what the MRI would be like, and thankfully, it wasn't horrible. When they put the mask over my face and started to slide me in I had the feeling that you get when you are about to take off on a roller coaster. Which wasn't the feeling I was expecting but it was much better than feeling claustrophobic! The only thing I found annoying about it was how loud the banging could be, but I was quite entertained by the variety of banging and I mean to look up the different types. Sometimes the banging would be the same beat as a hymn and then I would have that hymn playing over and over and over for three minutes in my head. Entertaining for the first three rounds only.




Here is a picture of some local "street art" in Portland. When I first saw it, I'd just finished watching Banksy's documentary, so I actually noticed it. If you can't tell from the picture, it spells M_ddle Class with a hangman on the side. So far I had come up with two meanings for the missing "I", but as mom pointed out today, maybe it's supposed to say "Muddle Class"



Also, I thought you would all like a picture of the store that's recently moved in across from our chiropractors office. You can't really tell from here, but it's a weed store. Portland is weird.



And finally a shot from yesterday. Mom and I had to drop by Champoeg State Park while running errands and we took twenty minutes to walk down to the river. It was beautiful and felt so full of spring for 10 minutes and then, of course, it started raining.

The chicks have arrived!

We had some young friends over to admire the baby chicks today.

It was a wonderful day full of sunshine, little kiddos, chicks and lambs.

I took lots of pictures, but I don't know where I misplaced the camera, so I've stolen this picture from today from my dear friend.

The evening's been pleasant too. Watched Mama Mia with Dad... and I realized the thing that bothers me the most about it is that the young couple think of marrying as a burden to deal with later. I mean can't they get married and then travel the world? Ugh. But I still enjoy the music and scenery. :D I also got to bake a little... Apple Turnovers and Apple Pie...mmm.

Randomness

I baked a apple, cranberry and raisin pie today.

Amy from A Little Busy tagged me...

Apparently I'm supposed to come up with seven random facts about me. Hmmm.

I'm not sure how this is going to work but I'll try...

Oh, I know, I'm going to mimic Amy's themes for each one. Phew, that sounds easier.

A week later, here it is!

1. I am ticklish. Okay, no big surprise there.

2. I have brown hair with red highlights. My hair lightens in the summer and then grows out darker in the winter. My mom claims it looks like I have "roots". During the summer, if I'm lucky I get a little splotchy freckles if I'm in the sun a lot. I start looking for them in July because I love freckles! I do tan easily and I still have some tan lines and it's April. Of course I'm pretty pale to begin with so the darkest I get is about as light as my mom is naturally. I'm sure the reason that I tan well is that I could care less...

3. I've never made easy money like Amy. But I think one of my coolest possessions is a 1867 Springfield Rifle with a bayonet. I don't know why I'm not married yet. I mean, doesn't every guy want one of those?

4. I don't care for green shag carpeting either... in fact I was horribly allergic to the original shag carpeting in my current bedroom. It took me a couple of months to figure out why I didn't like hanging out in my bedroom. I'm a little slow at times.

5. I love sports. It doesn't matter how bad I am at them. And of course, now that our church is renting a gym every Sunday afternoon, I get a concussion and can't play anything. Argh.

6. I love traveling... If I had to pick one place to go it would be Egypt or England...

7. Since I got this concussion, I've discovered why people eat chocolate.

The boys do Parkour!

Over the last year Andrew, Daniel and Jacob have enjoyed learning how to do a little bit of Parkour/Freerunning stuff.

They've come up with some videos that demonstrate their "amazing" Parkour skils.

I've been wanting to share them with you for a while, but we kept on forgetting about them. For me, to put them on and for them to show me the actual link.

This is the fourth in their little series... if you enjoyed it, you can see more at their youtube channel.

Saturday Ramblings

Well, I haven't been doing a lot of posting here this week, thanks to my eyes. I started vision therapy and it's been much more tortuous than I thought it was going to be, ie, my eyes don't like it, so they're giving up on me easily. And since I usually blog at night after I've done my exercises, it means I'm reading one eyed (think Popeye!). So since I usually blog near the end of the day when I want to relax, I'm just heading to bed, 'cause man, the exercises are killing me and I'm exhausted.

But don't go feeling too sorry for me because really, I've been able to do more outside then I have in months, and that always makes me happy. My neck seems to have made a leap or two forward and I am so thankful!

The pictures are from today and they were just taken with my little phone camera. The first is from my hot date with Dad this morning. We had a lovely jaunt into town. First, we stopped at Les Schwab to drop off Herbert's flat tire. Then it was to Bi-mart where I spent probably too much money on flowers. (And now I have to make sure they get planted!) We also went to Napa and I bought some new trailer lights for Herbert. I felt so grown up buying something like that! Now that Scott is helping me with Herbert, he is getting some decent attention and care. In fact, we got some wiring done today... which I will post about later. :)



And on the way home, we stopped to get the mail and this was the view. Love the clouds!

Mom Saves Money: Giveaway & Review! Lilla Rose Flexi Clip!

Mom Saves Money: Giveaway & Review! Lilla Rose Flexi Clip!

I don't often do giveaways... I think this is my second one ever.. but it really is a clever hair clip!

Education and Imagination

I think I got this off of Facebook.. don't remember now who linked to it, but it was quite fascinating. I don't know if I agree with everything in this video, and I was a little confused by the mixed American/English symbols (and the map of America?!) but it was very thought provoking. He provides a striking argument against traditional public schools.