A Full-time Life

Category: Family

  • AND NOW…FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

    GEOFF E-MAILED THIS PICTURE TO US — TAKEN TODAY (APRIL 23) IN BOULDER, COLORADO.  AH!! –NOTHING LIKE SPRINGTIME IN THE ROCKIES!

    ADDED SUNDAY AFTERNOON:  See Geoff's comment below — When I posted this I actually meant to add that knowing Colorado weather it was probably hot and sunny by the time I saw the picture — the weather is so changeable there.   He says it is raining — and my weather icon shows temperatures in the 60s there!  (Here in Ft Myers we have 80s with a chance of a shower — hasn't happened yet. 

    Boulder today

  • ISLAND SKIES

    SKYWATCH FRIDAY

    ANDYS FISH MKT 02_crop
    This is a sky view from Matlacha on a good day.  This little fishing and artists village is on Pine Island about 20 miles down the road from Upriver.

    Matlachea 015_crop

    It wasn't as blue a couple of weeks ago when we had out-of-town company.  That was the same weekend that we had eight inches of rain in one day!  Oregonians are used to rain, but not that kind.  Up there in the Pacific Northwest, it's more a slow and steady drizzle than that kind of gully-washer.  So it wasn't the best weekend to show off for company, but the important thing was that we got to see them of course! 

    Family matlachea is Putting on brave island faces, as the wind almost blows everybody into the gulf are Jeff and Cyndi (our son-in-law and daughter from Oregon), Bill, and our grand-daughter Kelsey (who lives in Charlestson SC now).  Visiting Charleston and seeing Kelsey and Bradley's new house there was the primary reason for Cyndi and Jeff's trip.   It was a nine-hour side trip to see our new (smaller) house. That was a nine-hour trip in pouring rain for them though!

    We also managed to get across the river to Manatee Park in between downpours.  These endangered creatures tend to congregate there because the water is warmer (it is runoff from a nearby power plant).   We saw quite a few manatees, but they  pretty much stayed just under the surface of the water.  They're really fun to see though and realize how huge these creatures are.  We saw one mother and baby.  Aww!

    Below are the girls getting up close and personal with a (FAKE) alligator as we walked around Manatee Park. 

    Cyndi fake gater018_crop Kelsey gator 016_crop It definitely wasn't the Florida weather that we know and love. 

    We look forward to future visits when — I'm sure –  the weather will be  more cooperative.

      

  • SAN ANTONIO FAMILY TIME – ROAD TRIP FEBRUARY 2010

    RIIVER WALK U031We spent time in the beautiful and historic city of San Antonio on one of our first RV trips.   We celebrated the new Millenium on January 1 2000 at the city-wide party.  We really enjoyed our stay then and loved the area, but now we love it more because we have a grandchild (and his parents)here!     

    We got to see the kids and their new home.  And we spent some Saturday time together on San Antonio's historic and beautiful River Walk and in one of the nearby artisan neighborhoods.

    ____________________

    Here are the three guys — Ryan, his Dad Pete, and his Grandpa Bill — on the River Walk.  As you can tell, it wasn't a very warm weekend.

    _________________________ 

    USE (2) Ryan is the grandson who spent a couple of weeks with us at Fern Ridge Shores last August while his mom and dad were finishing up their preparations for moving here from Tacoma, Washington.  Here he is at his new Texas home  with one member of his reptile and amphibian menagerie.  (It is a leopard lizard, which is native to Afghanistan and Iraq.  Because its habitat is being destroyed by the war there, Ryan explained to us, it is now an endangered species.) 

    It was a great visit.  Not long enough, but we'll be back!

    Here are a few more of Ryan's animals: (Click to enlarge)

    U012
    U018 U020 U 3 021

  • A FLAG-FLYING DAY!

     We lived in Washington State until our kids were aged around 12 down to 6.  In those days (before all the birthdays were combined into one President's Day), February 22 was celebrated as Washington's Birthday — both our first President's and the State's, because it was the date Washington was admitted to the Union. 

    FLAG Wa-flag ImagesCAQKA5R8 Bnr


     

    _______________________________________________________________________________________ 

    FEBRUARY 22 is also our daughter's birthday!

    One year on her birthday — she was about four or five — I heard her tell her brothers, in all seriousness:  "They fly flags on MY  birthday.  But not on yours."    Well yes.  You can't argue with the truth.   I don't know if they still fly flags on this date in Washington, but we still always think about flags flying on this red-letter day!

    So HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Cyndi. (It's the big _0  one).

    Temp

     

    May banners fly high on your birthday and all year long  — because you deserve it — and may all your wishes come true. 

  • SOME FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY HISTORY

    This is a post for  REMEMBER WHENSDAY  .  Visit it to read other memories — or post your own!  Thanks to Sally in Washington who gives us this meme.

    ImagesCABZE0YM When we were first married, one of Bill's jobs (while he was going to college) was working for the local daily newspaper as a professional news photographer.  It was a complicated and technical job.  Even snapshot photography was expensive enough that taking pictures was kind of a special occasion thing — holidays, vacations and the like. 

    We have talked a lot lately about how easy photography is now for amateurs.  Our digital cameras make it easy to take pictures — a lot of them —  and blogging and digital frames make it fun to enjoy and share the results, without digging out those photo albums.  

    In the late 1960s, my dad (who was sort of semi-retired by then) got interested in taking slide photos.  He was proud of  his camera, which he thought was the ultimate in modern technology  — and it was back then.  He got pretty good at it.  In fact, many of the everyday snapshots we have of our four kids are from slides taken by him.  (Who back then had the time or the money to take a lot of pictures of their own kids?)   I'm forever grateful that he made prints of those pictures for us. 

     

    Scan0003 I don't have very many snapshots of Dad, because he would usually have been behind the camera, but I guess once in a while he let somebody else snap the picture. (Here he is at the Spokane World's Fair in 1974.)

     In those years, Mom and Dad were able to do some traveling and from every trip they brought back a slide show of their adventures.*   It was pretty much mandatory for all the kids and grandkids to watch the show the next time we were at their house. 

     

    Scan0002 I know my Dad would have loved taking pictures with a digital camera.  But I can't imagine that he would have approved of blogging and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have enjoyed displaying his pictures in a digital frame as much as he did running the slide projector and narrating those trips for us.

     

    Well, we are not into mandatory viewings at our house, so the digital frame works great for us.  Visitors can look at the pictures if they are interested, but they don't have to.  For us,  it is really fun have our own album right there on the wall.     

    I wish though that my dad were still here so we could share our photography tips!  The picture above is my parents walking on the Snake River Path near our hometown of Clarkston Washington.  It is dated 1977 and Bill snapped it when we were there on a visit — by that time we had moved to Oregon.)

      

    *We still have boxes and boxes of mom and dad's travel slides stored away in our daughter's barn; after all these years, I still can't quite bring myself to dispose of them.

  • FAVORITE THINGS

       

    Raindrops on roses…..

    Last rosebud .jpg  
      

      

      

     

    ____________________

    And whiskers on kittens …..

    PC100014

    _________________________________

    Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

    Brown paper packages (taped up, no strings), PC180030

    These are a few of my favorite things.

    Cream colored ponies …

     

     

     

     

    L ohhh yummmm 14 …. and crisp apple streudels

    Doorbells and sleighbells and schnitzel with noodles. 

    Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings…..

     

    H sunset and birds 1450 

    These are a few of my favorite things.

    Girls in (red dresses with blue apron sashes) …

    Scan0001-1
     
     

    Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes (well maybe not)

    Silver white winters that melt into springs.

    These are a few of my favorite things.

     

    When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad

    I simply remember my favorite things and then I don't feel so bad.

    ____________________________________________

    Sound of Music.  "My Favorite Things", Rogers and Hammerstein

    Rose:  in a yard at Fern Ridge Shores RV Park, November 2009

    Kitten:  Jeff and Cyndi's house (Jeff's cat).  Sound of Music is Jeff's  favorite movie. 

    Package:  Given by Andy and Denae to everybody at Thanksgiving time  (because they won't be here at Christmas) — made us all think of this song

    Apple streudel:  This past summer, our friends taught us how to make real apple streudel 

    Geese:  On Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, Fall 2006

    Plaid dress:  Our granddaughter Kelsey (all grown up and married now and living in South Carolina).  We missed her and Bradley at Thanksgiving and I remembered this picture, where she is helping me cook cranberries for Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago. 

    RUBY TUESDAY MEME CLICK HERE: RUBY TUESDAY

  • GRATITUDE

    Buffet 081Gratitude is having Thanksgiving dinner with family – dinner that we didn't have to cook or clean up from afterwards!  All of the pleasure and none of the work. 
    Monopoly 088

    IMG_4890
    Jeff carving 069 Tg table 071

    Cleanup 096

    (Andy took the family portrait using the delayed setting.)

  • BIG CAR, LITTLE HOUSE

    We complicated our simple lives last winter after ten years of having everything we needed in one small space (our Fifth-Wheel trailer).  We accomplished that by falling in love with Upriver RV Resort  in Ft. Myers Florida and buying a park model there.  Click on the blue to see the post about our park model "canal cottage."  

    We decided to leave the 5th-wheel in Oregon; it will be our West Coast home.  So then we had to think about how to get from Oregon to Florida and back again next time — and how to do some traveling and exploring in between the two.  (We aren't ready to quit RV traveling yet.)

    Roadtrek_ext1 It doesn't make sense to drive the Freightliner when we're not pulling a trailer  — and the small car we've kept in Oregon (for me to drive when we're here) would force us to stay in motels all the time we traveled.  Don't want to do that.  So we bought this.  It's called a Class B Camper. 

    We will travel and camp in this van, but it will also be our daily driving vehicle.  The plusses include:  good gas mileage, not having to worry about whether we will be able to find a long-enough site, and (BEST OF ALL):  I can drive this baby!   It's not much bigger than the van I learned to drive in.   (I've never even wanted to learn to drive the big white truck, so most of the time that we've traveled I haven't driven at all.) 

    The negatives (you may be ahead of me on this one):  It is very small.  I've joked about how we have no choice but to get along with each other in the small space we've lived in for the last ten years.  But compared to this van, our fifth-wheel condo-on-wheels is a mansion.  We really won't have a choice but to put up with each other now!  We stayed in the Van on our trip to the Oregon coast last month.  We still liked each other after three days.  Next, we'll try three weeks!

    So we're getting ready for our Fall roadtrip in a much smaller space.  We have to decide what to leave, what to take, what to ship to Florida, what to give to Goodwill.  We have collected way too much stuff.  How does that happen? 

    Roadtrek computer 33 And, related to the previous post about home remodeling, Bill has already done some upgrading on the brand-new Van.  I'm not complaining though, because what he's doing is adding a space for our laptop and peripherals.   First things first.  We can't live without our Internet, no matter how small our traveling home.

    Below are a few more thumbnails of the interior.  The rear bed makes up into a seating area, but since we won't have extra people with us while we travel, we'll probably just leave it as a bed until we get to Florida.

    Roadtrek bed34 Roadtrek-170-table Roadtrek_170_3
    Roadtrek_170_P5 (Click any picture to enlarge.)

     

  • OH YEAH, I CAN DRIVE THAT (Remember Whensday)

      (Sept scans I haven't been sharing on ""Remember Whensday" lately because our scanner is not working. These are the last two pictures I managed to get done before the printer connection went gunnybags.  It's attached to the computer that will stay here when we go to Florida, so we're waiting till we get there to worry about it.  I'm taking photo albums with us.)

    Those are 3/4 of our kids peeking out the window of our Greenbriar wagon – sometime around 1968 or so.  This is the car we had when I first learned to drive.  I never saw much reason to learn before that and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into becoming a (semi)independent capable 1960s woman.  This was the year that Bill decided to go back to college and so if I were going to be able to go anywhere or do anything I pretty much had to get that license. 

    Sept scans-1 This is me (not in the driver's seat yet) and our kids — the oldest one, who wasn't in the top picture for some reason, is there this time too — and a cousin or two and a passel of neighborhood friends.  We are heading off to the circus.  Remember when the grocery stores used to hand out free tickets?   The Greenbriar looked like a circus wagon itself!  And inside it probably sounded like one  — full of noisy clowns.

    This Wagon had standard transmission (remember those?) and I did learn to drive that without too many problems.  Except I could never put it into reverse gear.  (I borrowed a car from my parents in order to take my driver's test).  Now the funny part of this is that Bill thought, with good reason, that it was just me being a beginner.  Because he didn't have any trouble with it. 

    Until one day we needed to borrow my father-in-law's pickup for some reason and so we traded cars for a day. When "Grandpa Al" brought it back he said quietly "Billy, there's something wrong with this (*&%) car.  It won't go into reverse gear."  Um — let's just say that he didn't get quite the exact reaction from Bill that I did when I made the same complaint ;>))).   I guess the wagon was just a one-man car.  

    I can't remember how we resolved this problem.  Bill probably fixed it — as he has done pretty much every other thing that ever went wrong — eventually!  The scanner's next on the list.

  • A PIONEER HERITAGE (Remember Whensday)

    Sept scans 002 Here's a backyard picnic with several generations of Bill's family.  The picture was taken in the late '40s. It is in Clarkston Washington, where both Bill and I grew up.  Third from the right on the right hand side of the table is his great-grandmother who, as a small girl, was on one of the last wagon trains to cross the country on the Oregon Trail.  She said she walked it twice.  (To get rid of her excess energy, her parents would send her to run ahead of the wagon for awhile and then back.)  Great-grandmother Elliot did not pass away until Bill was in his early teens, so he remembers a few good pioneer stories. 

    Sept scans 003 This picture of Bill was taken at around the same time as as the family snapshot above.  Back then, he would far rather play with the dog than have his picture taken with his parents and grandparents.  Weren't we all like that back then?  And now wouldn't it be nice to be able to go back and revisit those days, so we could hear more stories?

    (Click on the snapshots to see them better.  This is my first attempt to scan old pictures and it really works well!)

    When we were older than most of those old relatives in the first picture, we were lucky to get to visit the museum at the start of the Oregon Trail in St. Joseph Missouri.  And here is Grandmother Elliot's great-grandson standing at the point where she started her journey way backBilll, start of OR Trail St Jos. Missouri 0502 when.  We would ask her more about the journey if we could.

    Click on the link below to see other peoples' "Remember Whensdays":

    Remember Whensday