Videos around the house

So, I finally got an iphone! One of the most exciting things about this new phone is that I can now take videos with sound. I thought I'd share some of the ones I've taken recently.


First, a tour of our backyard garden:

And the first trees we've purchased for the front yard:

We built a floor-to-ceiling scratching post for our cats (mostly Triana) our of carpet scraps:

Springtime!

I just had someone ask me what I had planned for this weekend (Easter weekend), and I realized that we don't have anything at all planned. Maybe we'll wait until Monday for our grocery shopping, so we can get a good deal on a ham or some Cadbury cream eggs.

But just because we don't have anything planned, doesn't mean we won't be having fun! Spring has sprung here, and we've been soaking up the sunlight and warm breezes. Rupert is extra talkative, since he chatters at all the birds outside at the birdbaths, and howls at any bugs found indoors (or any speck of dust that might resemble a bug). We had the windows and doors open for a few days last week, and the freshly-aired-out apartment is energizing. I even found time to powerwalk around the track today. When the back door is open, Rupert just parks himself there for the entire day. Sometimes neighborhood cats walk past the door, and he gets the full sun.

Sean's been checking on our garden every morning, and we have some little sprouts! He bought a young pea plant, and we've been watching it explore its new home with its little vines. The tiny sproutlets in the photo below are going to be broccoli.

We finally had new neighbors move into Caitlin and Joe's apartment (diagonal from ours). It's a young couple, who appear to be expecting a baby in a few months. They've been really friendly so far, and planted some little flowers of their own, next to some tulips that just exploded red a few days ago. Of course, I went out and took these photos as the sun was setting, so the colors and lighting are pretty weird, but I think you'll get the point.

Business has been sort of busier than I expected, which is great! I've had a lot of custom requests recently, so I've been doing a lot of drawing (both digitally and with pens). We had to pay about $700 for worker's comp insurance for Sean, which was unexpected. It's a real bummer to find out that we have huge bills like that very suddenly, and it's keeping us from saving any money. But we're still making money, so I'm sure it will work itself out soon.

I had a really successful craft fair last weekend, which was a bit of a relief (since I've done that event a few times last year and barely made a few dollars). I got to meet some crafty celebrities, and a few of them have set me up with projects, like Garth Johnson who is going to publish some of my photos in a craft book this November ("1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse"), and Jennifer Worick who'd like me to do some illustration for t-shirts and her blog, http://thingsiwanttopunchintheface.blogspot.com.

Despite all this excitement, I feel like I'm finally able to take some time to relax, which hasn't happened much recently. I've started knitting again, and I have a stack of books that I'm working on, instead of just listening to audio books while I work some more. I still listen to the audio books, but I'm able to take a break too. I think this is going to be a really great weekend!

Gardening Day 1

Sean's been reading up on the gardening, and decided we should have a little 4x4 raised bed in our yard for veggies. He put this together on the one non-rainy day this week! I helped a tiny bit with the frame construction, but he did all the shoveling and laying the dirt and mulch. Plus, he's doing all the research, so this is really his big project.

We also dug up the plot that I'd been using for basil last year, to get it ready for another season. It's not a very big spot, but it's the only area behind our apartment (it's really behind our neighbors apartment) that gets any sun.

We'll try to keep you up to date on the garden's progress, since there's sure to be some excitement. I'll let Sean talk more about the details, since I'm just the helper.

Oh--I found a big stand of blooming daffodils behind the hedges in the backyard! Since no one can see them, I picked a bunch that I could reach and brought them inside. They've made our kitchen very sunny!

Special Day

Not only was yesterday Valentine's Day, but it was also the one-year anniversary of our arrival in Portland! We left Massachusetts on Feb. 5th of last year, and it took us 9 days to drive across the country in our Uhaul.

We decided to celebrate by cooking a big, impromptu meal, since we're not really the restaurant reservation types. I made spinach and sausage calzones, which turned out great, thanks to our pizza stone! Sean put together a key lime pie (with regular limes, not key limes), which was also fantastic. He should make those more often! We also watched Sweeney Todd, which was really fun.

I think our first few weeks in Portland were a total blur, since I can't remember anything specific about this time last year. I remember going to by first Tea Time, and being thrilled that I could bike there (even though I was unexpectedly sweaty when I got to Lea's house). I remember being prepared for spring snow which never came. I remember flowers blooming almost immediately, and not knowing quite what to make of it.

There are already flowers poking through the ground in our garden. They look like tulips, but it seems really early for them, right? Maybe not. I thought I'd see crocuses, but I haven't seen any yet. I'm getting ready though.

It's strange to look back on the past year. So much has happened! Sean and I are in a different place than I expected, but we're also sort of in exactly the place I'd hoped for. It's a little hard to reflect on the past when you're looking ahead so brightly, but I can tell that we've had a good year here, and we made a good decision to come.

Rose Garden

We went to the Rose Garden yesterday inside Washington Park. It was a gorgeous day, but hardly any roses were blooming. I took some pictures anyway, which you can see on my Flickr page. There were a lot of other people walking around the gardens, picnicking, and lounging in little corners of the park.

One of the weirdest things about the Rose Garden to me is the way we entered. I knew we could get there if we walked west on Burnside long enough, and as we were trekking uphill past a Chico's store and a bank, I spotted a stone wall with a tiny sign marked "Rose Garden". There was a narrow stone stairway that lead up the steep ivy-covered hillside, so we went up.

It was almost a completely vertical climb up staircase after staircase, occasionally turning to follow the slope. Then we were in the woods. Completely in the woods. You'd never know that we'd just been shopping 10 minutes earlier on one of the trendiest streets in a major metropolitan area. I tell ya, this city is like no other I've ever been to!

After we'd had our fill of nature, we headed back down to 23rd Ave and found the Lompoc bar. We were just in time to see the 8th inning of the Red Sox/Orioles game! We had some pub food and some awesome beer and enjoyed the game.

Last night was the Starlight Parade, which we were intending to avoid, but we caught some glimpses of it as we were stuck in traffic on the busride home. I don't think we missed much, but the rest of the city didn't seem to think it could pass it up. They sure do love their parades here!

I hate migraines

This'll probably be a short post, since I have a killer headache right now. I'm actually trying to remember what it was that I wanted to write about, besides just having an excuse to post more pretty pictures.

I'm trying to set up Wordpress on my website, so I can host my own blog (it's going to be called "Badger Sandwich"), but I'm not techie enough to figure it out. If anyone out there knows how to set up a MySQL database, please give me some tips! It appears to be the kind of thing that's so easy, there's no reason to document how to do it. Which means that me and my Mac are stuck staring at error messages all day and being sad.

This blog, by the way, is going to be *awesome* when I get it going. It better be, with all the hassle I'm going through just to have a fully customizable commercial blog. :)

I swear there was more interesting stuff I was going to write about... Hmmm.

These flowers just above are some of my favorites on our block. I just love the color combo! There's another one (to the left) with purple flowers that are darker blossoms at the bottom, and they gradually get lighter at the top of the plant. They look prettier in person than they do in my photos, since the intense sunlight sort of changed the effect a little.

There's a dogwood tree up the street that has both pink and white flowers. I think the pink ones are coming from a separate trunk that has just wound its way into the branches of the white tree. I'm into those kinds of things.

In biz news, Sean and I had a good time at the Alberta Art Hop, even though it was about 90 degrees all day, and most people were too hot to shop. We had tequila-flavored popsicles and lots of Gatorade to get us through the day, but somehow I think we had a good time anyway. I traded with Gretchen of Salmon Street Studio for a Portland Coat of Arms t-shirt, but I'm still waiting to get my size. I can't wait! She has so many awesome designs, it was a little tough to decide! I bought an Oregon carved wood pendant from Phoebe at Crafty Wonderland last week, so I'm going to be able to fully represent my new home soon.