Sooner Than I Thought - Thank You Snow Day!

I'm back much sooner than I would have anticipated...thanks to the snow storm that blew through and froze the Pacific Northwest over yesterday. My drive home from work was pretty dicey - thankfully the husband met me at work so I could follow him home. There are some hills on my route home that when they are covered in ice can be scary. Although I'd anticipated a 2-hour late start today because it was announced yesterday, I was a little suprised when it turned into a full snow day. So even though I've got a bit of anxiety about missing a day and having to re-plan, but on the other hand, I needed the chance to get caught up on housework and get ready to have my mom and brother visit for Thanksgiving. The husband and the pets were also a big part of my day, I loved having the extra bit of unexpected quality time with them....Bambino had a blast playing with us and chasing his frisbee in the snow. This was the first experience with snow for the Buff Orpington hens that are new to the flock this year - they seemed pretty disturbed by the cold white stuff that was on the ground and every surface. I gave them lots of extra scratch corn - I've heard that it raises their body temperatures. It was wonderful to get a bit of time outside...even though it was cold, the sky was perfectly blue and sunny. I took a ton of pictures, I love how the snow makes everything look fresh and new...I tend to go nuts with pictures on snow days! So here's a whole lot of pictures with not a lot of post...Enjoy!

Thankful...

It's been over a month *over a month!* since I last came by here. To be honest, I haven't slowed down much in the space of that month. My life became really busy when I took on this new teaching job. The thing is, if I didn't love what I'm doing as much as I do, I don't think I'd be able to keep this up much longer. I am being challenged, stretched, pushed...I am feeling overwhelmed, excited, exhausted, refreshed, and far too many other emotions to explain here and now. I need to remember how to say "no" because lately all of my "yes" answers are adding up to very full days. But honestly, I'll take busy and happy, over the other option any day!Being in such a good place professionally, I have hope and many things I'm dreaming about for the next five, ten years and beyond. I'm doing what I've been made to do. It is clear that my fear-filled decision to leave the field of engineering nearly 8 years ago now was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I can also honestly say that losing the teaching job that I had for the first two years I spent in Washington was a blessing that allowed me to find my way to where I am now. It's ironic to think that the process to finding joy in my career required going through so much pain and uncertainty. I am thankful for the job I have, not only is it providing for our financial needs, it is also giving me the joy that comes from doing something that is worthwhile and valuable.As I think about Thanksgiving coming up so soon, my thoughts are filled with thankfulness for my family, we are closer than ever, I can hardly believe sometimes how much my relationship with my stepson has smoothed out as we've grown closer. I may be the only "parent" in history to be glad to see a child enter adolescence and the teenage years. I like being able to relate to him on a new level. I'm also grateful for the husband, the dear man who is my best friend, who has been patient with me as I've been so busy in the past few months. He knows that I'm finding my way with my career and he is happy to see me happy. He is taking steps to pursue some long-time dreams of his own...I'm proud of him for that.

That's all for now...I'm sure I'll check back in sometime in the next several weeks, probably just in time for Christmas!

Dropping In...

I'm not even going to attempt at an apology...because honestly, life has been too incredibly full of tasks and obligations and requirements and all other assorted and random "have-to's" for me to worry about not getting around to blogging. I love this blog, it provides me an outlet to express myself. But when life is the way it has been recently, having the time to express myself on a blog is beyond a luxury. An "affordable" (and more appropriate) luxury is to take sometime to sit down with my husband and tell him how things are going (as I did this morning over eggs and cinnamon rolls, thank you very much!). My new job has taken much more time and energy than I could have imagined. If I wasn't enjoying it so much, I might even be resentful. But this is one of those periods of life where the end result is going to require some sacrifice in the meantime. This is the meantime and this blog is a sacrifice [one of several]. I hope that there will be moments where I can check it, but realistically speaking, I know that there may not be too many moments that can be stolen for blogging luxury. In the meantime, I hope you are doing well this fall. The bite in the air is refreshing for me, I hope that fall leads into a winter with lots of snow (I could use the unplanned slowness of a snowday right about now!)

Cheers!

~Dara

Fall Day at the Fair

This summer, we didn't make it to either of the two small local fairs near where we live. So when some free tickets for a larger fair in Puyallup came into my hands (because I'm an educator!), the husband and I decided to take the s-son this past Saturday. We've been going higher than full-speed lately, so it was nice to get away and have a day of fun. It was also nice to be able to take a couple of hours in the morning before we left to get some chores done around the house...but that's another story. The fair was fun, though much more commercialized than the fair's that we've gone to in the last few years. It's been a while since I watched one of those live "infomercials" for shammy's or the latest and greatest set of knives. It was also fun as always to check out the hobby halls...and even though I didn't partake of any of the rides, I had a good time taking pictures while I waited for the boys to make the rounds in the carnival area. It is back to the hectic pace now, up before the crack of dawn and going busy until bedtime. But, tonight has been slower because I have been able to get more caught up in my classroom lately and it is a slow night for my online job. I can feel life slowly starting to get into a normal routine, as a matter of fact, I'm counting on it! I'm incredibly happy in my new job, so the exhaustion has been worth it.

Here I am

Wow, September 3rd already...I'm taking the morning off before heading back into my classroom. Classes start after the three-day weekend on Tuesday...wow! Outside it has felt very much like fall already, we've had some rainy days, but even when it's sunny there's a slight chill in the mornings and evenings. Slowly the leaves are starting to change color. I guess even though there has been an unusual amount of pressure and stress in our lives recently, I'm feeling like we're going to get back into a routine in the next few weeks.Right now I'm full of contradiction, anxious to start the school year and get going, but also nervous about doing a good job and relieved that there's a few days to spend resting up and getting the house in order. So for now I'm just going to share a few of my favorite pictures from the last couple of weeks.

Me and Mom, the Origianl Type-A

It's late and I've been making marinara sauce since about 10 am this morning - I'm about 13 hours in and will probably hit 14 total. But, I am almost done, just about 30 minutes more to boil down the last stockpot full of sauce to the right thickness, then it is ladeled into jars through the funnel, lids are put on, rings are screwed on and tightened and the jars go into the canning bath for about 25 minutes...this process I have repeated over and over again today. I bought three 20 lb. boxes of roma tomatoes from the couple that runs my favorite farm stand. They drive over to eastern Washington weekley to pick up produce. Last week I put in my order for the roma tomatoes and sure to their word, they had them ready for me to pick up on Wednesday morning. I gave the tomatoes a couple of days to ripen further, which made today my long day of sauce making in the kitchen. The thing about making marinara sauce is that it's lots of work all at once and then long waits. I try to use the long waits efficiently to have everything ready to go for the next round, onions chopped in the food processor, tomatoes cleaned, trimmed and ready to go through the food processer. But sometimes there's nothing really to do but wait while the sauce is boiling down. So today I've had the luxury of getting a few things done for my online job, but I've also been browsing facebook and internet news sights quite a bit. I don't normally get this much time online to just goof off, and to be honest, I'm glad. If I didn't have the tomato sauce to show for my time today, I'd feel a bit like a loser. I'm no Type-A, but I am also not really one for wasting large amounts of time, I like to be productive. I'm more a Type-B that has Type-A tendencies and I likes to surround myself with Type-A's, the husband for instance is a Type-A, as are several of the friends I've been closest to over the years. I like the influence that Type-A's have on me. The original Type-A in my life is my mom. She was queen of getting up early, even on the weekend. I remember many times as a child, waking up to the sound of the vacuum running in the hall outside my bedroom. She liked a clean house and never went to bed with dishes in the sink - something that I probably won't be able to say tonight, but now that I'm grown up, I generally feel the same way about going to bed with a clean kitchen. She would have liked for me to keep my bedroom cleaner as I was growing up, and I think it would have made her happy if I'd made my bed every morning - as a kid I did so sporadically, but this was a habit I didn't firmly form until my freshman year of college in the dorms. Luckily the bed-making habit was firmly in place before I got married, the husband is very faithful about tasks like this, for the most part he tolerates my "free-spirtedness", but it helps that I have a few standards.Well, like I said, I've had some time on my hands here and there today, so I decided to share a picture my mom sent me as an email attachment recently. She took an picture of the two of us - I don't know when it was taken, sometime probably in the last 5 years - and she photoshopped the heck out of it. That's another thing my mom likes to do, make adjustments to photos, it's kind of become her hobby. She's a good person, my mom, she's quirky and thoughtful and nice. Now it's time to get back to that marinara sauce!

Pumpkins, Zucchini and Squash

Last year I attempted to grow pumpkins, actually I attempted to grow them the year before that too, but last year I actually got a little pumpkin on a vine whereas the year before I had stunted little plants that barely started to vine let alone set fruit. So back to that one little pumpkin from last year...I think I killed it with love. I checked on it daily and even put a paper plate under it like I'd read somewhere to keep it from sitting in wet dirt and rotting. Well, that little pumpkin was discovered detached and withered looking one day. It made me sad, I didn't like to think about it and I didn't want to talk about it when the husband brought it up, he knew I was excited about it, I'd made him check it out any time he was anywhere near my garden. Fortunately, this year I've got lots of pumpkins, they are growing wonderfully. Why is this? It's got to be that they like growing in the designer soil in the raised bed. I've also given them a natural fertilizer called "Bio-Fish", twice, once when I put the starts in the ground and again right before I watered recently. My plans for those pumpkins? Pie and decoration. We may even carve a few this year - if the s-son is in the mood, he's turning 13 later this month, so it can be tough to predict what he's still into and what he's outgrown. By the way, the two little pumpkins in the picture below were vine rejects, they were detached when I found them, believe it or not, they were actually further along in their growth when I found them than my one little pathetic pumpkin from last year. I've got more squash right now than I am prepared to deal with. I'll confess that I've been taking the bigger zucchini, splitting it open and giving it to my chickens. I figure if they eat it then I eventually do benefit from growing it. The bigger zucchini doesn't taste as good to me as it does when it's small - of course it's my fault that so much has grown big because I didn't get out early enough to pick it. I do love the odd things that can sometimes happen when growing vegetables. Like these conjoined crookness squash - love them! They are currently taking up space on my coutertop because I like to look at them.Another oddity, the two zucchini's below were grown from seeds that came from the same pack.I suppose it's not a long stretch that I'd be such a geek when it comes to pumpkins and squash, I am the lady who regularly takes pictures of her chickens and their eggs. Honestly though, when I look at the gorgeous golden stripes of the crookneck squash in the picture below, I'm kind of amazed that I started the seed that grew into the vine that set the flower that was polinated by a bee and then grew into that squash. I'm okay with being a gardening geek, I can own that.