Mt. Hood

Mt. Hood
Originally uploaded by BreadnBadger

Sean's parents visited us for a week recently, and we did lots of sight-seeing! We made our first visit out to Mt. Hood, which had quite a bit of snow on it.

Of course, we drove out to the coast the next day and saw beaches and ate seafood. Oh, how I love Oregon!

Check out the photos I took of the trip on my Flickr site (links above).

We hope Pat and Linda will come back to visit again sometime, even though it was drier and colder than they're used to. We'll have to find some new restaurants and sights to see!

Oregon Coast

I forgot to post something about my parents visit here at the end of last month! We had a great time wandering around the city, eating great food and seeing the sites at the coast and the gorge.

I posted my pics on Flickr, if you want to check them out. I have one of the foggy beach photos as my desktop image right now, and I love it!

We were all lucky that the weather was really nice while Mom and Dad visited, even though it was a little hazy for viewing the mountains. I think there was only one day where it rained, and it was gentle. It's rained pretty heavily (for Oregon) almost every day since they left, and the temperature dropped dramatically. The first frost is coming tonight, so I'm cutting all the basil in our garden to make pesto and curry with.

The next good visiting time will probably be late spring, so if anyone would like to drop by, make your plans now! :)

Waterfalls are Pretty

Sean and I finally left the city of Portland today! It was our first Oregonian excursion since moving here, and really, our first one ever!

We'd gotten a bunch of recommendations to see the waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge, but we didn't really know where we were going. We headed out on Rt. 84 and took the exit for Historic Columbia River Hwy (or whatever it's called at that point). It was super scenic, with vista points overlooking the huge river ever couple of miles! I've never seen so many beautiful views in one short drive!

We stopped at every single overlook, scenic view, vista point and waterfall we could find. There was lots of stopping. I've gone on a lot of hikes in New England, but nothing compared to these! None of the places we stopped made us walk more than 2/3rds of a mile from our car (round trip) to see amazing views or breath-taking waterfalls. Check out my flickr photos to see pics and videos! Sorry some of them are redundant--Sean and I took the some of the same shots, and I was messing with exposures on some of them.
I'm used to waking up at the crack of dawn, driving a few hours (into another state) to a mountain, then hiking straight up through mosquito-infested stank-smelling forest to see a damp rock that the guide book claims is a "waterfall". Okay, so it was more enjoyable than that! Sometimes we actually saw running water.

There were no insects. It smelled clean. There was tons of water, lush greenery and moss, and the other folks on the trail were friendly (except for the collection of college dolts at Multnomah "Huge Tourist Attraction" Falls). We'd avoided the rain most of the day, but got a bit wet at Bridal Veil and it continued to rain at Multnomah Falls and the whole drive home. It was a great day, however, and some hot tea and dry clothes have brought me back to a peaceful place in the world. Maybe we should do this every weekend!

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.

Busy Bee

It's hot today. Really, seriously HOTT. Supposedly, it was going up to 97 degrees. I had to walk to the store to get ant traps (which is a whole other story), and I gotta say: It was nice out.

Not nice out like, "I want to sit outside and read a book all afternoon in the sun," kind of nice out, but it was much nicer than 97 degrees of humid stickiness from New England. The breeze is cool. My skin isn't clammy. It's nice out! Of course, I'm also sealed inside the house (which doesn't get a touch of sun on it because of trees and other buildings) for the day. But I haven't even broken out the fan yet! Nice. Out.

Anyway, I went out yesterday and took tons of pictures of all the blooming flowers. I've seriously never seen this many flowers before! We had a few weeks of tulip explosion, and they're pretty much completely gone now. I think I'm going to break down and pay for the Flickr upgrade so I can upload all my photos and show them all off at once. I'll let you know when I do that.

In other news, I'm finally starting a blog for my business! I reserved the Bread and Badger name at Blogger and Wordpress, since I couldn't decide which I preferred. Also, now no one else can steal my name! There is no actual content up yet, since I'm still perfecting the layouts, but I'm trying to publish my first post by the end of the day.

I think I'm going to go with the Wordpress blog since they offer a 3-column layout which I like, and some awesome customization upgrades I can pay for later. I'm still trying to make the layout bend to my will, and it's resisting heavily. Blogger is just a little too simplified for what I want. I'd like the ability for my blog to grow and expand. I'm think' big.

If anyone reading this has any experience with Wordpress, or has any advice for me, please share! Since I'm not committed to one site yet, I could always change my mind.

In other, other news, I'm doing the Alberta Art Hop tomorrow, which should be awesome! I'm so busy with craft fairs, I don't even know what to do with myself! I'm forcing myself to relax today since I haven't really taken a day off for over two weeks. The good news is that I'm expecting to make twice as much money this month as last month, which is HUGE. Especially since most of that has been wholesale orders. I'd better take a day off now, since I might not have another opportunity for two more weeks!

Spring

We're still a day away from the official first day of Spring, but here in the Pacific Northwest, I think spring starts at the beginning of January. I walked around our neighborhood the other day and took pictures of some of the flowers that are blooming, and of some of the fantastic views we have.

I have tons more pictures than I'll be able to fit in this post, so I'll just have to save some for the future.

The flowers at the top are Japanese Cherry Blossoms, or Sakura. They're all over the place here, and they come in pink and white. Their petals litter the sidewalk in some places, and I had to resist breaking off branches to bring home each time I saw one of these trees.

The scene to the left (click to enlarge) is from a nearby street. It's looking west, across the river, at the downtown area. I think the residential stuff on the hills (left and middle) are in Beaverton, but they may not be that far away. I haven't been over there yet. We have views of the city from all over the place. It's pretty hilly around here, so you'll just be driving or walking or riding your bike, and you'll just look over to the west and there will be this amazing view, poking out between houses and trees.

To the east is Mt. Hood, but we can't see it from our neighborhood. It stuck up unexpectedly when we were walking east of 82nd Ave on our last visit here, but that's too far for me to walk just for one picture. It's sort of weird to be driving past Wal-Mart and see a giant snow-covered mountain sticking up behind it.

I finally discovered what all the "rose trees" around here are! They're camellias. They totally look like roses, blooming on trees all over the friggin' place. Every single yard has one. Some places seem to have them trimmed like hedges, but none of those are blooming, so it might be something different.

Camellias bloom in the winter, and every tree seems to be in a slightly different stage of "blooming". Some only have a single flower popping out, and others have almost completely finished -- sidewalk or lawn coated in yellowing petals.

This next picture is take on one of many moss-covered walls that I passed. If you take a closer look, you'll notice that most of those little green plants are actually succulents! I don't quite know why succulents thrive out here, but they do. I couldn't even count the number of varieties on this one wall. Further down, there was a plaque on this wall that said it was made out of recycled materials.

I love the crazy hippies out here. :)