the cottage – Page 3 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

A Treat in Grants Pass, Cathedral Hills and a Skunk

Current Location: Rocky Point Oregon, 34 degrees F with a 50 percent chance of snow

The cottage in Grants Pass is a great stopover spot when we are returning from our coast travels. Daughter Deborah is living there now, so we camp in the MoHo when we are there. During the winter months we pull the MoHo inside the big RV shed for protection, and sometimes we decide to camp inside as well when we are there.

day at the cottage Reminds me of those RV storage shed campsites that were developed in North Dakota for the oil workers. Although the shed has all around windows at the top, the interior is rather dim. Wouldn’t want to live there indefinitely, but it is great protection from weather and falling tree limbs in a windstorm. Yes, we do have some very large, very old white oak trees on the cottage property.

There are always chores associated with staying at the cottage. Mo is still working on the bathroom drywall and taping project after we put in a new bathtub, and now there is finally a shower as well. Deb is quite happy with that project since she has had to settle for baths in the morning before work until now when she can jump in for a quick shower.

This time of year there is always leaf burning, and leaf raking, but Deb has kept on top of most of the raking, so Mo had a big pile to burn this time. Of course, inversions are common in the Rogue Valley of Grants Pass, and Josephine County is judicious about allowing burn days. The first day was a no burn day, but on the second misty rainy morning the 6am phone call yielded good results. OK to burn!

day at the cottage Funny thing, though, those big sloppy leaves didn’t want to burn, in spite of the big tarp that was protecting the pile. Mo burned most of the day and only managed about 1/3 of the pile. I raked a bit, and then retreated to the cozy house to finish the binding on some kids quilts I have been making for Christmas. kid quilts (2 of 7)

The house was cozy because we finally managed to get the new gas stove heater installed and running. When the Avista guy came last month to light the pilot, he refused to approve the old stove, which had seen better days. It heated great all last winter, but was no longer safe. Time for a new stove.

That whole process was a bit of a kerfuffle, because no one in several towns had any gas stoves in stock. After much research, we finally found a great little Williams stove with a bit of a fire view for several hundred dollars less than anything we could find in town. The town shops said they could special order something, but even so the big delay was finding someone to do the installation.

Total Home Supply on the internet provided excellent service, with free shipping, and we had the stove at our door within two days. It took another month to get the installation completed, but now the cottage is again warm and cozy, and safe! Deborah hung in there as the month got colder, staying in front of her little electric heater most of the time. Now she has heat AND a shower. All that is needed is some kind of way to figure out the crazy electrical problems.

Remember, this little cottage wasn’t really something that we needed. Our only wish was for a place to store the MoHo. When Mo was trying to trouble shoot the electrical situation in a house built in 1926, she shook her head and wondered whether it was worth it or not. Someday we will get it all figured out, and it is still great to have a warmer climate for storing the MoHo in the winter. No winterizing, and we can head north or south without worrying about deep snows in the Klamath Basin. That was the plan.

The cottage is in a rural neighborhood, with rather narrow roads and deep ditches on either side of the pavement. The amount of passing traffic is a bit surprising, but I thought I would have enough room and warning to manage it for walking. What I didn’t expect was the number of big dogs, although why I wouldn’t expect that in a rural Oregon neighborhood, I have no idea. Big barking dogs, even behind fences, scare me. Adding to that fear is the sight of a big barking dog that has managed to get outside his fence. I have to remember to get some pepper spray.

After one day of walking Summit Loop for a few miles, I decided I needed another alternative for my walking project when we are at the cottage. Enter Cathedral Hills County Park.

Just a mile west of the cottage lies the hidden treasure of 400 acres of BLM protected wild land with more than 12 miles of trails for hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding. Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine dominate the forested portions of the park, with madrone, manzanita, and yes, poison oak on the warmer southern slopes.

I drove to the Walker trail head, with a small parking lot for just a few cars and found it completely empty. I also found a nice notification of a black bear seen in the area just a few days prior to my visit. I wasn’t concerned, however, black bears usually stay well hidden and run when approached. I was worried that there might be loose dogs or crazy people wandering about, but turned out I had the entire trail to myself.

It was a great hike, accompanied by a large flock of turkeys, I walked up the steep eastern flank of the hills toward the ridge, enjoying the switchbacks. Unlike Humbug Mountain, these switchbacks actually have level areas in addition to the steeper parts. Good knee resting sections for the trip back down!

I was appreciative of the trail signs, and once on the ridge hiked south to get some amazing views of the Applegate Valley and the coast range mountains to the southwest. It is easy to forget just how mountainous this part of Oregon is when driving around in lower parts of the Rogue Valley and Grants Pass.

The cottage in on the terrace mid photo toward the east

I had the iPhone tracking my route, and as I continued on the ridge trail, was having a big of difficulty figuring out how that route fit with what I was seeing on the trail. Turns out I was completely turned around in my head, and thought I was looking west toward the valley, and instead, with closer inspection realized that I was looking directly at the terrace below where the cottage was barely visible toward the east. Sheesh. I don’t think you could actually get lost in the hills, but you can definitely get turned around and end up somewhere you might not want to be.

I am so happy that there is this amazing resource for me to explore so close to home. I only walked a few miles, and later, looking at the park map, realized just how much there is left to discover through the seasons at this hidden gem.

Our last adventure at the cottage was a bit less fun, but no less exciting. Deb had been hearing activity under the house, and there was a large excavated hole indicating that some creature really liked living there. She bought a trap and set it, with no results. However, a bigger trap did the trick, and when Mo and I got up on our last morning, we saw the cute little black and white visitor curled up in the back of the trap, watching us with her twinkling eyes.

Skunks are really cute critters. Really. Deb had to go to work, and couldn’t wait around to deal with it. Oh dear. Too Bad. Mo and I said not to worry, we would handle it. We not only had the pickup, but had the trailer with us for hauling the lawn mower, so figured the skunk could be relocated without much damage.

Mo threw a blue tarp over her, but she didn’t spray until Mo actually picked up the trap and put it in the far back part of the trailer, covering the tarp with the wheel chocks so the tarp wouldn’t blow away as we drove down the highway. Critter control had told Deborah that at least 20 miles away was required for release to keep the animals from returning.

We settled for about 15 miles, where we found a nice area near the Merlin dump, with no houses around, lots of brush and a ravine with a small stream. Ms Skunk should have been delighted to jump out of her cage. Instead she hung back, and when Mo upended the trap, she managed to stick to the back of the cage and refused to come out! Finally with a bit of pushing and shaking and some more spraying (did you know a skunk can spray straight up?!), she fell out of the trap and ambled off into the brush.

Mission accomplished. I do hope she doesn’t try to find her way home. So far there has been no activity under the house, but we saved the stinky blue tarp just in case, and will know what to do next time. Even though Mo didn’t get sprayed directly, we had skunk smell everywhere, especially on her shoes and clothes and in the truck and in the baby car. That smell is just amazing. I found out that hydrogen peroxide and baking soda works better than tomato juice, but in the absence of a quart of peroxide around the house, I learned that ammonia works almost as well.

Mo’s shoes are still on the porch here at home airing out, and the truck still smells faintly skunky. Ah well…at least we didn’t get hit directly and Deb’s cats didn’t get sprayed either. Life can be fun if you let it.

Life and the Rest of May

Current Location Rocky Point Oregon Sunny and 45 F with a predicted high of 75. Perfect

If the month of April at Rocky Point is mostly about winter cleanup, the month of May is definitely about gardening. Real gardening, not just all the cleanup, but the kind of gardening that rewards one with watching beloved perennials grow lush, shopping for the hundreds of annual plants required to keep some color in the yard over the summer, and planting all of them.

The house at Rocky Point is on land that isn’t really that big, even less ground than the Grants Pass winter cottage, but there is a lot more to do here it seems. Lots of nooks and crannies, lots of different planting beds, and of course, lots of pine needles to keep digging out of the rocks.

A big job this time of year is getting those pine needles off the roof. Mo does the climbing and I hold the ladder and manage the electric cord for the blower. I laughed this time as she carefully crawled back down from the steep side of the eaves and I said, “How much longer do you suppose?” We love it here, so much. But it IS a lot of work at times, and the question lingers…how long will Mo be able to climb that roof to blow off the needles.

In the mean time, after returning from the coast before Mother’s Day, we spent some extended time over at the cottage, doing some of the cleanup jobs that are on the list over there. The nice thing about the cottage is that there is really no deadline. Other than burning the debris in the springtime burning window, we have as many years as we need to get that .89 acre cleaned up and ready for us to live there. The defining moment may never come, then again it could come all too soon, maybe when Mo no longer wants to plow snow or blow needles off the roof at Rocky Point.

As luck would have it, we decided to be in Grants Pass for Mother’s Day, with a plan to do the classic Mother’s Day activity of Sunday Brunch at a beautiful restaurant. Daughter Melody and the kids drove over on Sunday morning to see the cottage and share the morning with me, Mo, and Deborah at the Taprock Grill next to the Rogue River.

Mothers Day 2014_039 I had so much fun watching all the moms and grandmas and seeing all the flowers and presents and everyone posing for family photos at the various lovely sights in the park adjacent to the restaurant. I felt like I was right in the middle of a middle America tradition that somehow remains the same in spite of a changing world.

During our time in Grants Pass, Mo split the rest of the oak from the tree we took down last year, moved a flower bed that was right in the middle of the planned new drive entry to the MoHo shed, mowed the acre and did a ton of weed eating. We cleaned up the outside corner and built a mound, bought a couple of crepe myrtle trees for color, planted the mound, and Mo burned a ton of debris.

We parked the MoHo along an old cement patio and it felt just like our own private campground. Even though Deb was gone and we could have stayed in the cottage, we chose to enjoy our own space in the MoHo, sitting on the patio watching the sun set over the hill to the west is a special pleasure of the land in Grants Pass. At home, our sunrises and sunsets are blocked by the high Cascades and the immense forest.

sue Deanna Deb on Mothers day

Our choice to be in Grants Pass that weekend was especially auspicious, since daughter Deanna and husband Keith once again were traveling south along I-5 and I got to see them twice in less than 30 days! On the Saturday before Mother’s Day, they parked at a nearby rest area for the night and met Deb and I for breakfast at Elmer’s not far off the freeway.

Sad thing about the Grants Pass cottage, even though it has more land than Rocky Point, there is no place to park the big rig there, and the roads leading to the cottage are too narrow with weight restrictions so the kids can only park downtown at WalMart to spend some visiting time with us.

With their LA arrival time scheduled for the next day, they had a few hours to do some sightseeing with us, and Deb and I drove them through the gorgeous Applegate Valley not too far south of the cottage. Deanna and Keith are saving money while trucking with a plan to buy property somewhere eventually, and of course I am hoping that will be close to me here in Oregon. Grants Pass_005

Lucky for me, the springtime beauty of the Applegate was fabulous, with blue skies dotted with puffy whites and new fresh green bursting out all over. I love the Applegate area, with farms and wineries, and for Deanna and Keith, who love being a lot farther away from town than I do, it was perfect. We spent quite a bit of time looking at some interesting properties that really caught their eye.

Nothing was decided, but I am glad that there will be sweet visual memories of the lovely Applegate area in their minds over the next few years as they make decisions about where they might want to settle down. No snow, kids! Although they also love Alaska, so I suppose snow isn’t yet much of a deterrent to them. Deanna and Theron

Deanna became a grandmother for the fifth time in May, and once again I am a great grandmother. Theron was born in Wenatchee this month, brother to Orion and Tearany. I am glad that Deanna has the opportunity to be close to these grandchildren in spite of family complexities.

I have that crazy obsessive feeling that often happens this time of year: too much to do and not enough time: too many choices: too many things I want to be doing! Obviously, writing has slipped to the back of the list and I am simply keeping track of what is going on with short notes on my Google calendar. I do love that particular application.

On another note, an application that I don’t love quite so much is HGTV’s House and Landscape program. I actually paid for the stupid thing and spent quite a bit of time trying to at least get a rudimentary replica of the cottage and grounds set up so we could get some ideas about what me might like to eventually do there.

Not so much. The learning curve is huge, and I am not completely stupid. The software is cumbersome and after a day or two of fiddling with it, I decided that a piece of graph paper and a pencil was the better option. Maybe some snowy winter day I will get back to it.

In the midst of gardening and landscaping work at two homes, I am trying to have time to quilt. Our quilt group gives away “huggie” quilts to anyone in the community who is hospitalized or has lost a loved one. They have given away 141 quilts in the last six years since they started doing it. As a fairly new member, I have yet to complete a huggie quilt, and am now working on one. I am a new enough quilter that it is extremely hard for me to give away a quilt to someone I don’t know. But I decided it is time to step up to the plate and the quilt is in the works.

Tiny living room in the cottage all painted an pretty thanks to Deborah’s hard work

Late in the month, Deborah was sent to Dallas for a work related training, and her company allowed her to fly home to Grand Junction instead of Grants Pass. When she moved home from Colorado last year, she had to leave most of her belongings in a storage facility and this was her chance to get everything back in one place. With a bit of complexity due to missed flights, she finally got everything on the truck and headed west via I-70 and Highway 50, the Loneliest Road in America, and pulled up to the Grants Pass cottage late on Sunday evening.

Mo and I were waiting with supper and hugs. The next day, with help from neighbors Glenn and Karen, we all unloaded the truck into Deb’s new storage place, just a couple of miles from home. The cottage is tiny, but at least she can go down to her storage and get things like her blender and spices, and other small things that she has missed so much in the last year while adjusting to her new life.

John Jr, Deanna, Sue, and Deborah in 1966 in Oroville California

For me, getting Deb’s stuff out of storage had another benefit. Deb was the caretaker of several boxes of very old family photos. When I think of my “bucket list”, getting all the family photos scanned, organized, named, and catalogued is huge on the list. I took back the boxes and started the scanning project. I know it is morbid, but there are many people my age leaving the planet, and the one thing I want to have completed before I do so is the photos to the kids project.

My mother who passed away in 1952, me at 3, and my grandmother who passed away in 1993.

I knit during the early news programs, quilt till it gets warm enough to get outside, garden as long as my back holds up, and then try to work on photos the rest of the time. I barely scan blogs any more, and like last month, I rarely comment. Thank goodness for Facebook, a bit quicker and I can at least let folks know I am still around and reading.

Friend Jeanne sent an email yesterday, complaining that there was no blog and wanting to know what in the world I was doing. Friend Mary Ann from Albuquerque sent an email asking if I had done something with the Mother’s Day blog she thought was up there and couldn’t find. Nope, no blog. Just a quick facebook post with photos! So, for my two most loyal friends and readers….here is the blog!

April

Current Location Rocky Point, Oregon 55 F and overcast today with rain coming tomorrow

When I look through the previous years of journaling my life, April is notoriously empty. I looked at the calendar and couldn’t believe that we have been home almost an entire month and I haven’t written a single word about ‘life’. Thinking I could do a bit of comparison, I traveled back through the blog and found that almost every single year since I started blogging has just two posts or even less during the month of April.

One is usually about Easter, and the other one is about gardening. In fact, I could almost post last years blog from April and it would fit this year without a hitch. I can remember times in my life when everything shifted at such a pace that there would most certainly be huge differences from year to year, even from month to month. I have to say how grateful I am for a life that is just a bit more predictable, a bit more calm, a life where April means gardening, cleaning up the pine needles, and decorating for Easter.

If I had lived a safe, predictable life for the last 69 years, it might be different. I could be hankering for change, for adventure, for variety. I have been blessed with more than enough adventure, more than enough variety, with parts of my life so long gone and so unrelated to this current existence that I barely recognize myself in those old stories. Instead, I am celebrating sameness, celebrating the repeat of the seasons, celebrating watching planted trees mature and gardens fill in over the years. You might have had to have lived a mixed up life like mine once was to really ‘get’ this. I now have adventure and unpredictability in small manageable doses, enough to keep me energized, but not enough to make me crazy.

Predictably, this year in April, we have been working daily at the big house in Rocky Point. The beautiful forest makes for lots of springtime debris to be raked and burned. Gorgeous flower beds must be uncovered, trimmed and weeded in order to once again be gorgeous. Grass needs mowing and fertilizing, raking and over-seeding. (Mo handles most of the grass stuff and I do most of the flower bed stuff.)

In between all the yard work, I have been quilting. When my sweet little Bernina 1230 needed some serious repairs (she is after all more than 30 years old), I succumbed to the siren call of a new sewing machine, the Bernina 550 Quilters Edition, outfitted with a special stitch regulator for free motion machine quilting, and a superb walking foot for getting through all those thicknesses of fabric and batting. Mornings are cool enough that I can spend them at the machine working on a springtime quilt I started a year ago before going outdoors as the days warm up for afternoon work.

We took a few days early in the month to work at the Cottage, with a chance to mow and rake and share meals with Deborah. While Mo and I were gallivanting around the country this winter, Deb was busy painting the cottage interior, making things look so much cleaner and brighter. Mo and I loaded up the tractor to take over the hill so we could do some dirt moving and tear down an old building or two. The burning season will be short this year, with the serious drought, so we needed to do this job as soon as we could manage it. More to come, but it is nice to see the place looking cleaner outside as well as inside.

Daughter Deanna and her husband Keith managed an I-5 run through Medford, and we celebrated with a spontaneous morning breakfast. I can’t believe just how quickly those two move back and forth across the country. Just two days prior to our breakfast, she and Keith were having breakfast with son John and his dad back in Missouri. Deanna and Keith are dealing with new rules for California emissions that have created epic troubles for their truck and for them. They haul to Canada and Alaska, haul all over the country, have to have a heating system that will work in sub zero temperatures, but the new law requires some sort of emission thingy that is giving them tens of thousands of dollars worth of headaches. Deanna is needles to say, furious. Once again they are back at their home base in Washington, waiting for Cummins to get the dang thing fixed.

It is amazing to me that after three months on the road, with almost daily writing, that I have no desire whatsoever to track my life with a journal. Or maybe not so amazing. After sewing all morning and gardening all afternoon, I fall into bed much too early, attempt to read some blogs or a book and am usually asleep within minutes. Now and then I attempt to make a comment or two with the ipad fingers, but that usually results in some stupid sort of typo that I can’t undo, so I just give up.

To all those loyal readers out there, who followed along on our travels, I am glad you have so many other places to go for entertainment. To all those bloggers who may or may not have noticed my comments, sorry. I am trying to read, but commenting isn’t coming very easily these days.

I decorated the house for Easter almost immediately after taking down the Christmas tree in early April. That felt just plain crazy, actually, and I hope I don’t have to do that again. If we travel quickly after Christmas in the future, I will make an extra effort to get the Christmas decor put away before we leave!

It has been nice this year to have Easter late in the month, and for us it will be even later. Due to some family commitments, we are having our traditional Rocky Point Easter celebration next Sunday. The weather has been gorgeous for the entire month, with moderate daily temperatures and nights barely near freezing. The sun has been invigorating, an unusual thing for April in this part of the world. There have been times when we are still looking at snow on the ground in April. It is beautiful, but does engender a bit of concern for the coming summer season. The predictions for mixed snow and rain next weekend will be a bit of a damper for our Easter celebration, but are definitely a good thing for the water situation here in the Basin.

Another little extra time user in my life has been the addition of the Adobe Lightroom software. I started shooting RAW format photos while traveling, but didn’t have the time or the computer hardware to handle them well. Once home, I installed Lightroom, and with encouragement from both Erin and my daughter Deanna, I have learned to import, develop, and manage the huge RAW files into something useable. Of course, with all those old files from the trip, including several hundred from Antelope Canyon, I haven’t picked up the camera once this month to shoot anything new. The few photos on this blog were actually shot with my iPad. In addition to taking a break from journaling and reading, it seems I also have taken a break from carrying the camera around!

This time last year I was still working part time, and as most full time retirees say, how in the world did I have time to work? Hopefully after next Sunday I will manage at least one more post for the month of April with photos of our belated Easter celebration.

Oregon Fires

Photo Credits to the Douglas Forest Protective Association from their (Facebook Page Link )

Time for a little bit of update now that we are back home in Rocky Point. We planned a few days in Grants Pass, and as luck would have it, we arrived the morning after more than 3,000 lightning strikes from a summer storm ignited at least 54 fires on private and BLM lands in Southern Oregon. Living in the west as we do, keeping track of the fire situation is part of the routine, and we aren’t surprised to see smoke rising from one direction or another. Some years are worse than others. The year I moved to Klamath Falls in 2002, the Biscuit Fire burned more than 500,000 acres in the Siskiyou National Forest and the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. Much controversy continues to this day about whether or not to allow salvage logging in these wild areas.
Several times in the last few years we have cancelled an August camping trip to one place or another due to smoke, and some of you may remember our travels last summer in the upper West that were marred by smoke from huge fires in Idaho and Montana. There are many good resources to help keep track of fires and smoke, the best of which is found at the Incident Information website, http://www.inciweb.org. This year, however, it was several days before the webmasters of this amazing site were able to keep up to date with all the rapidly changing information for the Douglas Complex fires. Another very helpful website related to fire and smoke is on Weather Underground, where the WunderMap for an area has a layer for active fires that shows the current fire situation and the extent of smoke cover.
Actually, by the time we reached the pass last Saturday morning we didn’t need a website to know that smoke was probably going to be an issue for the entire time we planned to work at the cottage. Once these fires start, it takes some serious weather to calm them down, and our rains don’t usually show up until October. In the mean time, we get thunderstorms, with or without dry lightning, and very little real moisture. Sometimes a marine system will come in and cause a shift and the smoke clears a bit, but it is usually around one way or another after a fire like this gets under way.
Our main goal for the trip was to make sure we got the wood split from the trees we took down last month before it got too dry. Mo loaded up the splitter in the big trailer and hooked it up to the truck for the trip. We took the MoHo since daughter Deb is now living in the little cottage (one bedroom only) and we didn’t want to completely invade her space.
It turned out to be an incredibly productive trip, in spite of the heavy smoke. We got all the wood split, with close to a cord of oak and about 3/4 cord of madrone, probably the best firewood around in Oregon. The big rounds were heavy, but with the three of us working, (Mo does the splitting part) we managed to get it all done on the first day we were there. We have a good ten cords stored here at home already, so plan to let the hardwood dry at the cottage before bringing it back here in a year or so. We heat with wood in Rocky Point, but the cottage has a gas heater that works just fine. No fireplace.
We had a great time with Deb, and she had a chance to show her strength and skill at demolition, tearing out a lot of the old wood and shelves and yukky “stuff” that was in the old bunkhouse. We will eventually tear down the bunkhouse add-ons, but the main part of the building will be saved for Mo’s workshop. Mo worked a lot on the sink plumbing again, and on building the wall and new cupboard that separates the bath and kitchen. Finally we don’t have to hang a quilt for bathroom privacy! Of course, her projects are not made any easier by the fact that nothing is even close to plumb in the little cottage and the reclaimed wood she is using is rarely square. Lots of measuring and sawing involved.
Deb and I managed to get a full load of metal for the recyclers and made almost enough money to pay for the full load that we took to the dump the next morning. I have no idea how many dump loads we have hauled out of that place, but sooner or later we will get it all cleaned up. In the midst of all the work, we cooked some good meals and enjoyed sitting at the table in the old fashioned kitchen in front of the windows. Deb and I took time to play some rousing games of Hand and Foot, my favorite! I taught her how, but she is fast catching up to me. Dang!
We also took an evening to go see “The Lone Ranger”. Mo didn’t want to go, so we had a mom and daughter night with popcorn and one of the most entertaining movie experiences I have had in a long time. There were some great sight gags, gorgeous photography of very familiar places I have traveled, including the exact spot where I built a campfire in Valley of the Gods back in 2004. We both love Johnny Depp and his performance was great. I am really glad that I didn’t let some of the negative things I have heard about the movie keep me from at least giving it a try.
We came home to Rocky Point to discover smoky skies on this side of the Cascade crest as well, and our first night back included another big thunderstorm that ignited a few more fires on this side of the mountain. One bolt hit right on top of us, and I had an especially good view of it through the skylights! Do you suppose that lightning could come in through those roof windows??
We live in the forest. Fire happens here. It could happen to us. This part of Rocky Point hasn’t burned in more than 100 years. I hope I don’t ever have to live through what so many have endured in the last few years. I read about Nan trying to help her daughter save her cabin near Idyllwild, and Gaelyn returning home to her lot in Arizona with sadness. But for the grace of God, we could be there as well. I am thankful every single day.

Let there be light

Rocky Point Oregon clear and 59 degrees F Today’s low 42 high 75

It is mid June already. Solstice is less than a week away and the skies are still light late into the evening. I know there is rhythm to the patterns of the seasons, but it always seems to me that the longest day of the year should come in mid summer and not while I am still trying to feel summer is coming. Even in our forest, where sunrises and sunsets are obscured by the huge firs that surround us, the light lingers. I remember my days living in North Idaho, when the skies would be light after ten pm and I would rise with the sun and the birds at 4:30 in the morning. Sometimes I miss that, those incredibly long days, but I really don’t miss the winter dark at all.

Speaking of light, we have honored the solstice month of June with light. As mentioned before, we live in the forest, and in addition, the house has long wide porches. I love the porches, but they do limit the light coming into the house. We started the project last year, ordering special heavy snow load, no leak skylights, but by the time they were delivered, the weather had turned and our contractor thought better of opening up the roof to the skies during winter. I was getting impatient with the wait. Somehow as spring progresses and the sun moves higher into the sky, we get even less light in the house than in winter when it is low on the horizon. In winter, we also get reflection from the snow that makes the house brighter. As spring progressed, everything just seemed to get darker and darker.

Until finally, Peter showed up with the windows and his happy crew to install our skylights. Peter is one crazy guy. I know contractors can be an eccentric bunch, but Peter was especially so. Still, he did a great job, got it done on time, and kept us entertained in the process. He was the proud poppa of a new baby and wasn’t getting much sleep. The nice thing about Peter was that he actually worked right alongside his crew throughout the project. It is wonderful to have light in the house, somehow it just changes everything. Jeremy loves to sleep on the carpet in the brilliant beams. That warm sunlight is good for his achy old bones, I am sure.

Of course, with all that gorgeous light, it became obvious that we needed a good carpet cleaning. I called some company called Blue Heron in Klamath that uses a dry cleaning method involving organic materials made from corncobs. He did a great job, with barely any dampness to the carpet at all, so now everything feels really fresh and nice.

We were looking around today and talking about just how incredibly busy we have been. I guess June is always like that, and if you throw in a second house to think about, it just gets a little bit crazy. We spent some time at the cottage, after Mo had an arborist take down the two most dangerous trees that were hanging over the roof. I am sure some of those oaks must be at least 100 years old. The madrones are probably not as old, but they seem to lose their tops with age, so I suppose more tree work is in our future. I counted more than 20 trees on that .89 acre Grants Pass property. Love that shade, though.

Right after we got back from our camping excursion, Dan and Chere (Mo’s brother and his wife) brought their motor home to the cottage for a long weekend visit. Mo and Dan spent the entire time working with wiring, eliminating some of the most glaring problems, and figuring out what was what with the breakers. It IS an old house, and for some reason almost everything was hooked up to just one circuit. Dan and Mo are a great working team, and Chere and I spent a lot of time watching them run back and forth with a mission. Then part of the time Chere and I just went to town to check out the Old Town section of Grants Pass, buy goodies at the Saturday Farmer’s Market, and do a little shopping. I found a pair of Oofos, and after reading Sherry’s rave about them, decided to get a pair. What luxury. It is kind of like falling into one of those Memory Foam beds, only for your feet. Luscious.

After all the hard work, we went to dinner at the wonderful Taprock Grill and watched the beautiful Rogue River sliding by on what felt like a very summery evening. Of course, we had picnic lunches out under the trees, and big breakfasts to share. It was a nice time spent with family and we got a lot done. I spent a long time dealing with a weed in the field that is on the noxious weed list for Oregon. We will see how that goes. I took some hand quilting and knitting with me, but I haven’t had my sewing machine out for more than six weeks now. Mo thinks summer isn’t quilting time.

Gardening has been big on the list as well, at both places. After being in Grants Pass with our limited water, I love so much coming home to Rocky Point and our deep, cold, fabulous well with unlimited water. Here I can hose down driveways and run sprinklers as long as I want to. Funny though, I keep catching myself thinking I need to turn off the hose. Oops, nope, I am not in Grants Pass where I have to make sure the hose trickles at 2.0 gallons per minute. I test it with a bucket, and that way I can run the hose all day to water the fruit trees and shrubs without running the well dry.

Then of course, there is kayaking. I am sad to say that today was the first time we have had our boats out this year. But oh what a perfect day it was. We were on the water by 9am, early enough that it was still cool and the birds were out in force. We decided to go south into Pelican Bay, and then back north through the marsh on Crystal Creek, crossing the Wocus Cut back to Recreation Creek and back south to the Rocky Point boat launch. Crystal Creek was thick with birds today, especially the terns, which must have been breeding with the black tipped orange bills and all the ruckus they made as we passed. It was fun to watch them dive for fish.

I saw a beautiful great egret, a couple of blue herons, American white pelicans, some kind of hawk, and even a turkey buzzard, a bird I don’t often see soaring over the lake. Red wing blackbirds were everywhere, and I am pretty sure I saw a tri-color blackbird as well. The surprise was a night heron flying right in front of my boat, low over the water to disappear in the tules. The weather was perfect, and the stiff breeze coming from the south made paddling against the current in Crystal Creek a bit easier, and wasn’t hard enough to slow us down when we were traveling with the current on Recreation Creek.

Crossing the Wocus Cut is always beautiful, and this time of year the water was deep enough to make the crossing easy. There are canoe trail signs to mark the route, because it is easy to get lost in the refuge when the tules are high. On the northern horizon are the peaks of the Crater Lake Rim, to the west is Mt McLoughlin, to the east, the expanse of Klamath Lake, and to the south the beautiful, still snow covered Mountain Lakes Wilderness.

We have been just so busy this spring, and when the weather would break, it seems we were always doing something else. Out there on the water I was reminded of why I should just drop whatever I am doing and get out in the boat more often. What a treasure we have right here in our back yard. Of course, I took my camera with me. I do have a Pelican waterproof case, but I usually hang the camera around my neck while paddling so I can get photos of the birds. I also had my cell phone with me so I could play with the MotionGPS app that tracks our route. Coming into the landing, I decided to put the camera back in the case and took off my life vest (where the cell phone was located) before exiting the kayak.

Does anyone remember my little video from last year about how easy it is to exit a kayak? Well I am glad I wasn’t taking a video today, and I am especially glad that I had taken off my vest and stowed the camera. Today I managed to dump myself right into the lake as I was trying to get out of the kayak. The very cold lake! Luckily we live less than a mile from the launch, and when we got home I dumped my very shivering self right into the hot tub in the bright afternoon sunshine! I was warmed up in no time!

Speaking of back yard, we are planning some summer camping trips to take advantage of our choice to stay around home this season. After the fourth of July we will go camping at our favorite little lake just south of the state line, Medicine Lake. I think the last time we were there was in 2009 before I moved back here from California. A short trip to Lapine and the famous Sisters quilt show will be extended by camping up at East Paulina Lake south of Bend. In August we hope to get back over to the beautiful Oregon Coast and try out a new campground that we always drive past and never actually camp. Harris Beach is so wonderful, but it is time to give some of the other coastal campgrounds a try. Then right after Labor Day when the heat dissipates a bit, we will head for John Day country, Joseph, and Wallowa Lake.

I spent some time fiddling around with the blog, attempting to use a new template. It seems that my old template (borrowed from Laurie of Semi-True Tales) is out of date and won’t allow me to add the Google plus buttons at the bottom of a post. I thought it would be nice to have that, since I do use Google Plus, but some long time honored readers didn’t think much of my new plan. No one else said much, but if one person was disturbed, I suppose others might have been as well. Besides, it was really bugging me that I no longer had that nifty “stretch” feature I inherited from Laurie, and that I couldn’t get the header photo to be in the center of the page. I backed up the old blog template before changing, and it was a simple matter to just reload the old template. So no Google plus buttons.

I also tried to shift to the new Google plus comments, but that was a fiasco as well, since anyone who isn’t a member of Google plus could no longer comment. Like Erin, I dumped that one as well. Hopefully with all the Google changes, everything will still work. I do really enjoy reading Rick’s updates on what Google is doing, and how to deal with the little stuff that comes up now and then. Every single time I have asked Rick a question, he has responded almost immediately and unselfishly with help and advice. They charge big bucks for that, you know, and Rick just pops in and answers detailed complicated questions for so many of us.

In my spare time, (yeah right!) I decided to get down to the real planning for our winter trip. As usual, after Christmas this year, we will travel south to our favorite little desert haunts, Joshua Tree, Desert Hot Springs, and Anza Borrego. This time, however, we are just going to keep going and travel east and south for at least three months. I am having to plan a bit more in advance than I might like because we will be in Florida in February, busiest time for some of the places we want to go. It is hard to try to figure out exactly where we will be on an exact date in order to make some kind of reservations. But I am trying. I have been pinning and saving all sorts of campground, kayaking, and sightseeing information from some of my favorite southern bloggers including Sherry and David, Karen and Al, Randy and Pam, TravelBug Susan, and lots of other blogs.

No, we didn’t start in the middle of the creek, that is just when I turned on the MotionGPX app.

We hope to be in Big Bend National Park in Texas by mid January. Although I read several blogs that talked about visiting Big Bend, I didn’t keep track of who was there when. If you happen to read this blog, and you happened to have posted about your visit to Big Bend, could you drop a note or comment and let me know where to look for those posts on your blog? I have tons of stuff of everything from South Padre Island east to Key West and back north into Georgia. We have traveled south to Tucson and Bisbee and east to Las Cruces, so those are knowns. I even traveled across I-10 with my daughter last year, and Mo and I looked longingly south toward Big Bend on our very first trip in the MoHo after we bought her in New Braunfels. But Big Bend? Nada. You know who you are, send me a note, please?

Oh yeah, in the midst of lying around eating bonbons, I decided that I needed to refinish my dining table. I am just doing the top, thank goodness, because the rest is fine. Sometimes I can be really stupid, and last year when learning to quilt, I used some spray fabric adhesive without protecting the table properly. Wouldn’t you know it, it took the finish right off! Ugly and yes, very stupid. So I bought a can of Formby’s, some steel wool, some oak stain, and some polyurethane and tackled that project this week. By the time company arrives on the 24th, I’ll have a very smooth, very shiny, very new looking table top. It is actually kind of fun seeing the transformation, and so far it is looking really good.

Stuff comes in threes, and my third stupid move for the week was freaking out with Jeremy. Now Jeremy is very old, 17 years, and he has been a perfect cat for all those years. Until recently. Now sometimes he gets confused and forgets where his box is. Gah. Thank goodness at least he doesn’t spray or urinate. But still, I saw him in a familiar pose on the newly cleaned carpet and picked him up and put him out on the porch. Jeremy is an indoor cat, and he is also very arthritic. Within minutes he was gone like a shot, and we had no clue where he was hiding. I felt really bad, and Mo and I walked the area for a couple of hours calling him.

Finally, just as it was getting dark, he came up to the porch. He was pretty quiet and very slow, and was completely saturated with dark brown heavy dirt. Who knows what hole he found to hide in. The rest of the evening he was quiet and stayed under the bed. I woke up at 5 this morning thinking I had probably killed my cat and was scared to look under the bed for him since he never came up to sleep with me as usual. But no, my very dirty cat was in the living room waiting for Mo to build a fire. The mornings are still cold enough for a fire here, and once the hearth was heated I dunked Jeremy in a warm bath and tried to get the worst of the dirt out of his fur.

My gorgeous, sleek, 13 pound perfect cat has become a very skinny crippled up 7 pound old man. He can still see and still hear, although not as well as before, but his life most of the time seems good. Most of the time he is happy, but sometimes when he gets quiet and sleeps all day and doesn’t move around a lot, and when I see him stumble when his back end doesn’t work properly my heart knows that he won’t be around for long. Like so many of us, I may have to make that choice someday if I see he is hurting too much, or if his eyes tell me it is time. I certainly don’t want him to disappear into the forest and get eaten by a coyote because I have put him out on the porch in a fit of frustration! Geez!