Fun with Annie & Steve

After the smashing success of Summerfest, we got to spend even more time with Annie & Steve. This does not happen often, so I was super excited!! We drove up north to camp at Humboldt Redwoods State Park. This was extra fun because Steve had just had shoulder surgery a few weeks beforehand. And yes, we really did need all this stuff, and more.....


Avenue of the Giants:


Sweet shady campsite:


We may or may not have taken all the leftover beer from Summerfest......


Nothing better than camping food:


And drinking out of squishy cups:


I love these two:


After a couple of days, we drove home along the coast, where someone who will not be named did some brutal carsickness-side-of-the-road puking. We also got to stop at a couple different beaches in Mendocino.

Annie discovered the Pacific Ocean is cold:


Jason & Steve did some serious kung-fu-fighting:


There were Bigfoot sightings:


And Shrek:


After a one-night detour in Ft. Bragg (which involved the very creepy Carnival-by-the-Sea and a lot of women's softball), we made a final stop at the Korbel winery for lunch & champagne tasting. Sweet!


This was the most time I've got to spend with Annie and Steve in a few years and we had a blast!! I miss them and wish we didn't live so far apart. Moving to Maine won't help, since I was informed that Minnesota is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the country. So hurrah for good times and good memories!!!!!

House for Sale!!!!

Have you been wondering what I've been up to during my long absence from the blogosphere?? Since our Memorial Week camping trip (which I'll post pics of in my next post), we have been working on our house, day in and day out. Cosmetically, the house needed a lot of updating. A lot. Especially if we wanted to sell it. Which, as you can tell by the title of this post, we have decided to do.

Jason has always planned to move back to the promised land of Maine and that was something I agreed to before I jumped on this marriage train with him. Although truth be told, even before he and I became "we", I was itching. Restless. Wanting a change. Looking for something different. somewhere greener and cooler. Maine is alright by me. Close to his family. Close to cheap lobster. A place where we can have an old house with some land. Maybe even some animals. I'm hoping this will bring me one step closer to fulfilling my childhood dream of being Laura Ingalls Wilder. And I'm not talking about Melissa Gilbert, I'm talking about the real deal:


This was always our "someday" plan, but thanks to the recent shenanigans of those wacky UC Regents, our "someday" plan has become our "now" plan. And so, we prepared our house. We painted and tiled and painted and recarpeted and painted and planted and remodeled and painted and cleaned and painted and packed and painted and painted some more. I am proud to say, the house looks fabulous. All things we have wanted to do, given a certain sense of urgency by events out of our control.

Which leads us to the next thing out of our control: selling the house. We hope and pray that someone will fall in love with it's quirky charms just the way Jason did when he bought it years ago. We have a wonderful realtor and we've done all we could to make this house beautiful and welcoming. Now, we wait. And curse the Sacramento weather for killing off all my new flowers after I planted them.

Welcome in...............









It has been completely bizarre to come home from work this week and realize that there wasn't a project waiting to be completed, a door that needed painting, a box that needed packing. We have an open house on Sunday and after that, I plan on getting my scrapping supplies back out (in a controlled fashion of course) and catching up on my pictures with all the free time I suddenly have!

Wish us luck!!!

Summerfest!

Annie & Steve are here in town -- YAY!!! Please excuse Jason. He was very excited to see them.



Lucky for us, their visit coincided with Steve's parents' annual Grass Family Memorial Day Weekend Summerfest Beer Tasting BBQ Extravaganza. Otherwise known as Summerfest. The premise is simple: everyone brings a favorite summer beer, all the beers are sampled and voted upon, and a winner is declared. There are no prizes, only the glory of bringing the winning beer!


The competition was pretty stiff this year, as there were 15 beers to taste! Trust me, even for a beer lover, that is a lot of tasting and ranking to do! There was definitely a clear male-female divide in the voting, with most members of one gender ranking beers the opposite of the other gender. I wonder if someone could get a grant to do a research study on that??



Of course there was also food. Lots and lots of food. Mainly involving things you can put on a BBQ.


We had a blast, of course catching up with Annie & Steve. This was also the first time I had seen Steve's parents in a few years; they got to finally meet Jason after hearing many tales! It was a wonderful way to spend the afternoon: beautiful weather, good food and beer, great friends, and lots of laughs.




As a bonus, Jason brought not only the winning beer, but also the close second. Let's hear it for Chamberlain Pale Ale and Sam Adams Summer Ale! It was a sweep for New England. Too bad the Red Sox couldn't do the same this weekend........


The darkhorse entry was Grandpa Earl's Big Ass Beer. It was a surprise tie for third! You never know what Grandpa Earl has got up his sleeve.


And that concludes our Memorial Day weekend. Tomorrow we're heading north with Annie & Steve, to go camping in the redwoods all week. I'll have lots of pictures when we get back and hopefully some good tales. Viva les S'mores!!

Outdoor Wednesday

I thought I would share with you all how well our little garden is doing so far. This past weekend it was over 100 degrees -- yuck! Thankfully, we'd been really generous with the watering and all our veggies seem to have taken off. The heat didn't seem to phase them and there is already evidence of deliciousness to come!

The red lettuce and Chinese cabbage are already going strong:


The cucumbers have a lot of flowers on them and the beans are happily climbing their trellises. Many of them already have pods!


The tomato plant is looking a little sad, but hopefully these yellow blooms will bear some juicy fruit:


And last we have the salsa garden. Green onions in the front, I've never grown them so I don't know if they look healthy or not?


I'm hoping for a bumper crop of all these hot peppers!


The roses in the front yard seem to be in their final bloom for now. They've still got a few gorgeous blooms left on them:



This little tea rose wasn't trellised and it got so heavy with blooms it just flopped over on its side!


And finally these little guys, some annuals that I had planted in my hanging baskets last fall. At least I thought they were annuals. Jason swore they were going to come back to life after the winter and I really didn't believe him. Now I have to admit, he was correct:


So that's what been growing around our little homestead! I still have a bunch of wine barrels to fill on the side of the front yard. I'm looking for something tall, colorful, likes partial sun, and will survive a brutal Sacramento summer. Any ideas???????


I'm linking up to Outdoor Wednesday at A Southern Daydreamer. You should head over there too and see what else everyone has been to up to outdoors. I'm counting on lots of spring flowers and early gardens!