Stuff 8-28

Time is flying by….almost September already…obvious to some….a surprise to others of us.

This week we just got caught up after a week with our grandson Seth. I cleaned the house, Larry emptied the pool then it found a new home across the street with the neighbor kids, he cleaned and detailed the truck to rid it of all the dirt we picked up on the road to the mountain top, I ran errands and then yesterday afternoon Larry got the call to hit the road.

While he was waiting for confirmation he loaded up the camper and trailer, I beautified him with a haircut and he was on down the road to the Yosemite area. A controlled burn got away…again. I don’t get these controlled burns during peak fire season and conditions…I’m starting to think they do it on purpose…just a thought.

I’ve started a crochet project now that the days are shorter, the evenings are longer and it cools off a little earlier. I also tiled two steel crosses today using thinset mortar for the first time…easier than I thought…I just have to work on my timing with how it sets up but they are going to be pretty. After a couple days of curing I’ll grout them.

Today was hot, hazy with clouds and windy in the evening. I wanted to do some spray painting but it was too windy and hot to be out there…darn.

This picture was from a few nights ago…the moon looked so pretty there in the pastel colors left behind by the sun.

Long Day 8-23

Yesterday was a looonng day. We were up just after 6, got Seth up at 6:30 and hit the road at 7.

It was hard waking up…some fools had their music cranked up at 3 in the morning and it was 45 minutes or so before it got turned down to a easier to ignore irritation.

We got to Weed about 12:30. We made a couple of stops along the way and in spite of continually getting behind the same slow motor home it was a pretty easy trip. Seth was happy to see his Mom, we transferred all his stuff to her car and then had lunch at McDonalds….their new Angus burgers are pretty good. We said our good-byes; Seth kept hanging onto my arm…sweet boy and hit the road.

It was pretty warm; we saw 107 around Redding somewhere. We went home a different way today, down I-5 to Red Bluff and then up highway 36, a road we have been on many, many times. Lake Shasta’s water level is very low and I got a couple pictures at Bridge Bay while we zoomed by.

We were going home this way so Larry could go up to Turner Mountain to retrieve some of his equipment. From Mineral it is a 15 mile drive along a dirt road and the last half mile is uphill, rocky and needs 4-wheel drive; the site hasn’t had any road maintenance at all in the 5 or 6 years since we were up the last time and nature has taken over…the Manzanita and other shrubbery had grown immense and encroached heavily on the road….it was a tight squeeze for our truck, which we really didn’t want all scratched up.

It is almost always windy on the mountain tops and yesterday was no exception. The views are awesome but the view of the valley was hazy from smoke, Shasta was a ghostly shape off in the distance, but I was able to get a few decent shots of Mount Lassen and the southern part of the National Park.

After Larry got his stuff all loaded up in the truck it was time to bounce back down the mountain. We stopped at the snowmobile park at the top of Morgan Summit to use the restroom and noticed how all the Sugar Pine trees were loaded with their very large green, sappy almost foot long cones. We had never seen so many of the trees so full of pinecones…you never want to be under one when it drops one of those cones!

It was after 7 p.m. when we hit Chester, Ca, where we used to live…we decided to stop at the Knotbumper for some dinner. It annoys some people, but the one thing you can rely on NOT to change is the menu of the Knotbumper, which for us was nice because we knew what we would be getting and it was good as always. Steve the owner was there and sat with us while we ate and caught us up on all the business happenings of the area.

It was almost 8 when we hit the road again; we got fuel in Susanville and hit 395 south for the last leg of a long day. It was pretty windy the rest of the way home. We got home at eleven and we had traveled about 650 miles…whew, but a nice day.

It was hot and stuffy in the house and still about 80 when we got home; it never got below 67 all night.

This morning though a low came through, it was cloudy, breezy and cold. It got down to 62 and stayed that way until around 2 when the sun finally was able to break through a bit and it heat up pretty quickly to around 80.

Larry worked on cleaning the inside of the truck and checking out his recovered equipment. I spent the day cleaning, sanitizing and de-fingerprinting everything. I ran to the store for chili fixings…it was that kind of day, made chili and cleaned, did laundry etc.

Hard to believe that it is the end of August and summer is drawing to an end already!

Hummingbird Whisperer 8-20

Tomorrow is our last day here with Seth unless he decides to stay another day. We have been busy, busy, busy…mostly playing video games and playing in the pool. It has gotten hot here again and our Oregon boy doesn’t like the hot sun at all…unless he is in the water. Must be from living in all that rain!

I had the coolest nature experience ever today. A hummingbird that regularly visits my flowers in my backyard and sits and rests on the top of a wire art sculpture let me touch its breast! It was sooo strange and wonderful. It just sat and watched me and blinked every once in awhile as I moved closer, and with each step I took I expected it to fly off, but it just sat there and watched me. So I thought what the heck and raised my hand slowly and while expecting it to take off every second I kept moving until my finger was nearly touching her and then I carefully and lightly stroked my finger down her breast and she didn’t even flinch, so I touched her again and then I moved my hand back and she simply flew up and then drank from some flowers and buzzed off. I was in awe of the whole experience, and of course I was camera-less and Larry was in the house with Seth. I thought who would believe this?!

So I ran in the house to tell Larry and then I had to call my friend Mary and tell her and then I saw my hummer friend was back in the backyard and as I went out the door it sat again on the wire sculpture and looked at me, so I thought let’s see if this was a fluke. Out the door I went and moved up to her and touched her again and she fluttered away and came back…for a minute I thought she would actually sit on my hand…maybe another time…..but this time Larry was at the door and saw the whole thing….pretty amazing.

When we lived in Redwood Valley, Ca. we were in the migratory path of many varieties of hummingbirds and we would have 30 or 40 all over the place feeding at our feeder and it wasn’t uncommon for one to come hover at my head while I was working in the backyard to let me know the feeder was empty and they would start feeding before I could even get the feeder hung back up.

But here I don’t have feeders out because of the heat…I don’t have a shady place to hang it so it doesn’t get boiling hot in the sun….but I frequently have two visitors to my red salvia plants in the backyard and they love to sit on my wire goddess sculpture and they are used to me being out there puttering around or reading a book and I usually talk to them. But still….hummingbirds are just the most amazing little creatures and for one to sit still long enough for me to touch it…multiple times and not mind…..magical!

I think I posted a picture of the little gray hummer a month or so ago sitting on the goddess, …today’s friend was my green visitor. I’ll try and get her picture soon.

Day 3 with Seth 8-17

Today was another day of video games, swimming, playing and helping Grandpa Larry clean his "work" trailer!

The tornado named Seth is in bed asleep now....ahhh! It is a shame we can't all have this boys energy! He is recharging for tomorrow!

Sports day 8-16

Today Seth got us playing all the different sports on Wii that we hadn't tried yet. I had noodle arms by the time we were done and never having played softball...sports was never my thing....he had to tell me when to swing!

These pictures were taken yesterday of some of the Hat Creek complex burn and Seth in Weed.

50 years for Me! 8-15

Well, I don’t feel any different and I don’t look any different, but it feels weird to declare 50 years on the planet…this time around….smile! Many thanks for the calls, cards and emails and the lovely Happy Birthday songs!

We left the house a bit after 6:30 this morning, stopped at Starbucks and then hit the road for Weed, California, around 300 miles one way. We made some stops along the way and we got there about noon. The fresh burned area at Hat Creek is sad looking and a lot of homeowners were very lucky because a few were burned right to their properties. We had lunch with Michelle, Darel and Seth, …let Seth run off some steam in the playground at McDonalds and then hit the road for the trip back.

Seth drove us nuts the last hour wanting to know if we were close yet, when would we get there, so we kept him busy watching the numbers on the clock and he did a LOT of counting until we got here…laugh. Then he kept wanting to go into the trailer…that is the only home of ours he has ever seen.

He is currently teasing me trying to make the mouse do “something”. Gotta go!

Catching Up 8-14

These first two pics were taken when I left Fallon last Thursday. It was windy, cool and cloudy.

I had a great week visiting my friends, having a massage, taking a two day watercolor workshop and eating really healthy. Except for the molten lava chocolate cakes Mary made me and the black forest brownie Vickie made I had all kinds of healthy vegetables, fish…and I got to try different kinds of milk at all three of my friends’ places for different reasons.

At Vickie’s it was whole Raw milk…great, at Deb and Cathy’s it was Rice milk…good and at Mary’s it was Goat milk….ah, well, okay…the first sips aftertaste is tough, but then it starts to grow on you….

I had planned to come home on Monday, but stayed until Wednesday and had a wonderful visit with my friend Mary like we really hadn’t had since Larry and I hit the road five years ago. Larry was gone longer than we thought so I saw no sense in rushing home to an empty house!

Last Saturday he was home for only a couple hours from California when he got called out to Utah and lucky for us it didn’t take as long as first anticipated and he got home Wednesday morning and I got home early afternoon on Wednesday, which worked out nice…we weren’t running into each other trying to get our stuff put away. He had been gone for 17 days, the longest we've ever been away from each other now that I think about it.

I came home to this beautiful flower arrangement from my special Man….that would be Larry!

Yesterday and today we spent getting caught up.

There were a lot of garage sales on our walk this morning and I finally found a couple of bowling balls! Why you ask, when we don’t bowl anymore….well, I am going to turn them into yard art, mosaic gazing globes. I have a lot of projects, now I just need to get them started and done.

Tonight we had a stunning dinner for my birthday at the Slanted Porch here in Fallon. We loved them for lunch and we LOVE them for dinner too. A great place if you ever go through Fallon on highway 95.

Tomorrow we meet Michelle in Weed, California for the picking up of our boy Seth. He gets to spend a week here with Grandma Val and Grandpa Larry and then next Saturday it’s back to Weed to give him back to his Mom and Dad.

So that’s the past week in a nutshell.

It has cooled down into the 80’s here during the day which is nice, but the mornings seem cool and then evening’s even cooler with the breeze.

Hitting the road again 8-5

Today was mostly cloudy and cooler, only 90, but windy...I managed to get through the day without turning the a/c on.

Tomorrow I head over to Plumas County to visit friends, I am traveling around to each of my friends and spending the night with them and taking a water color workshop on Saturday and Sunday. You probably won't hear from me until the first of next week sometime!

I have to share these pics of my friends, the Silva's in Mendocino County. Terry and I have been friends since she was pregnant with her second of three kids, she taught me how to ride and care for a horse and helped me purchase and then ultimately sell my horse. It was her 50th birthday party I went to last week and I got this great picture of her, her husband Mark and the three kids, Tiffany, Stacey and Tony all together...aren't they a handsome family! Then I had to go back to my archives to find a picture of when the kids were little and here they are! My two girls are in the pool with them...my how they have all grown!!!!

Just Stuff 8-4

Today Larry has been gone a week and I really miss my man! I have plenty to keep me busy, but being together mostly 24/7 the last 5 years or so…..this is different.

Not much new here going on but I have to share the craziest thing I have ever seen, my Crabapple tree while loaded with ripening fruit is blooming again in August….weird. There haven’t been any fluctuations in weather so I don’t know why it thinks its spring.

I also am sharing my latest finished mosaic creation…it turned out pretty well considering I didn’t have a solid design before I started it. It is really pretty with a candle in it!

And the last is of the sunset tonight which was stunning.

To and Fro 8-1

Thursday I took Ian back to Ukiah. He was a great traveling companion…he slept half of the way and never once asked “are we there yet?”.

Friday I went to Andrea’s doctor’s appointment and via ultrasound got to see Connor. Friday afternoon Andrea and I went to my friend Terry’s 50th birthday party…dang she’s so MUCH older than me….laugh. It was great seeing the Silva clan and had a great barbeque.

Today after Ian came home from getting his haircut I headed back to Fallon. Other than crawling along a few miles on I-5 south of Dunnigan due to an accident I cruised on home. I must say that car designers could save a lot of money by testing new car models suspension systems on highway 101…boy California’s highways are in sorry shape.

I stopped at Cabela’s to stretch and use the restroom and um…did a little shopping too…my lucky day, the shorts I wanted were on sale…woo hoo!

Thunderstorms over the Sierra’s and lots of lightning in the Reno area…about an hour after I got home the storms caught up to me…it spit a little rain and the clouds were big and dark, but that was about it…the clouds hold the heat in though and it doesn’t cool off as nicely.