Holy Freaking Hot Weather

This is how we've been cooking dinner lately:


It is positively too hot to cook in the house. Yesterday was the hottest day recorded in Corvallis EVER at 108. This was the temperature in the sun room two days ago.


The rest of the house got up to 92 at one point. This is ridiculous.

When my parents came to visit for my birthday this weekend my mom brought me some wonderful squash from their garden.


We've pretty much just been eating some form of this meal all week. (Except for Aomatsu for my birthday dinner!) Fresh summer squash, basil from the garden, tomatoes, garlic, feta and Parmesan over pasta.


Tonight, more food from my garden: snow peas, zucchini, salad (if it hasn't gone totally bitter from the heat), and eggplant from a friend. No complaints about that!

Year in Review

This last year I...
Visited Aaron in Minnesota

Went on a road trip with Megan to Vermont and added 3 new states to my list


Went back to Minnesota, my first time to a Great Lake


And seeing spectacular fall leaves


had surgery at the Mayo Clinic


Started dental hygiene school 4 days later


Spent lots of time with these two, thanks for all the wonderful dinners!


Met this one and had a blast


Visited the Redwoods


Went canoe camping for the first time


Camped near Clear Lake


Spent time in Olympic National Park


It's always amazing to me how much happens in one year if you go back and think about it. I had kind of a rough year, but overall I did a lot of wonderful things.

Up and Coming:
Road trip to Colorado for the Muddy Buddy
Trip to Utah to visit Megan?
Finishing school!
Aaron finishing school as well!
Continuing to heal and feel better

Happy Golden Birthday to me!

Great Way to Spend a Saturday

One of Aaron's friends from the hospital has cancer and has been feeling tired from all her treatments. It was her wish to have her house all in order since she hasn't been able to keep up with everything. Her friend organized this huge project and it was awesome to see so many people show up to help her out, over 30 at one point.
Our first job was to scrape, sand and prime the garage door.


We painted her whole house and trim. A rare picture of me below...someone else grabbed my camera for a change.


Pookie got a little too close to the action


We built her a new deck and railing. It will be painted later, and it's too bad I didn't get a picture of the final project (any of them for that matter) because it looked really nice.


Her neighbors had attached a hammock to her fence and broke one of the posts. Aaron took this project on, and spent about 45 minutes just trying to get this old post out of the ground.


The newly replaced fence post


The friend that put this on left these lists all over so we knew what needed to be done.


We planted up flowers to give her yard some color


We weeded all her flower beds and spread bark dust on them. Aaron went back and dusted off all the steps and rocks.

The group also deep cleaned her entire house, replaced outside light fixtures, brought food for everyone and countless little odds and ends jobs. Everyone just jumped in and it was amazing what a group that large got done in a small amount of time. Aaron and I had fun giving our time and energy to someone that really needed it.

Kathy's Flowers

I scored this day old bouquet of flowers from Kathy's house earlier this week when we went over to bottle beer. She only charges $5 for all these!!

Reunion/Liesel's Visit/da Vinci Days

Liesel flew in for the weekend, our friend that actually introduced me to Aaron. She lives in Boise and decided our class reunion was a good enough reason to come visit for the weekend. She was supposed to get in in time to go to a traditional work potluck:


But her flight was delayed and she didn't get in until almost midnight. Saturday morning we got up and made our way to Salem for the picnic portion of our high school reunion. First things first...carousel rides! This thing made me sick, but it was still fun.




Then back to the reunion, it was a really poor turn out, only about 30 people out of 480. I think more (and different) people went to the evening event, but I wanted to see Lady Smith Black Mambazo play at da Vinci Days, so we headed home. I'm glad too as the evening event looked like a bar scene.
Who is that freaking adorable baby? Tuesday was there!


This is Juli with my friend Jenna, we all fell in love with this little girl. She sampled every food on our picnic blanket and she loved all of them, including olives, hummus, red bell pepper and raw peas! She was delightful.


Then back to Corvallis for da Vinci Days. This was the largest fishing pole ever! It was one continuous huge piece of bamboo. We never did figure out where it was grown or how it was moved. It was pretty impressive.

Liesel on our bike ride to the mud pit!!


This ridiculously serious child at the mud pit. Even funnier was that he was wearing a "COLLEGE" shirt.


The most cleverly designed sculpture, but she didn't make it through the mud. She moved independent of the outside and could use her body's momentum to push the sculpture forward.


After the mud pit the sculptures float 1/2 a mile down the river. It's kind of amazing no one drowns or dies at this point. This huge heavy bus FLEW down the boat ramp and if it had gone crooked at all it would have taken out all those people on the dock. Luckily it did not.


I posted all my decent da Vinci Days photos here:

The Garden Post

Here is the main garden from the side of our house:
Corn, rhubarb, tomatoes, onions, leeks, eggplant, carrots, beets, chard, potatoes, cilantro and spinach.


It always amazes me how much joy it brings me to go outside and find something new, like this baby cucumber:

Half of one of the back plots, it doesn't get as much sun as I had hoped, these are basil plants (beans and peppermint also)

White concord grapes

We are going to have so many

Pretty purple potato flower (previously seen being visited by a hummingbird). It's nice to get a little color from my vegetable garden.

Aaron and Toby made beer last week at the Jones House. They treated us to a great BBQ, good company and a nice garden tour.

Lifting the barley out of the pot.

Aaron with the beer


And finally, Peoria Gardens has a big sale every July, so I went with my co-worker and went a little crazy on our lunch break. This was only $18 for everything!


So I made up a bunch of pots to liven up our front porch.


I still have some petunias, zinnias, and snapdragons that I need to get in the ground somewhere. Other gardening type news is that we went to another co-workers house to pick pie cherries, so we spent a fair amount of time pitting them and making them into a delicious pie.
Phew that was a lot, I don't know where all our USB cords went for the camera, I finally found 1 of the 3 that we have. Busy weekend coming up...Liesel is visiting, class reunion, da Vinci Days, work potluck and beer bottling!