A picture and a thousand words
Susan's project and family blog
We’ve been loving our CSA bag this year – it’s been quite a success, although we’ve completely, consistently lost the battle in keeping up with the plums and cucumbers. We still have a few more weeks, which is awesome, but we were gone Wednesday through Sunday last week. So, I picked up the bag today and washed not only this week’s fruit but last week’s as well.
Aside from all of the birthday-celebrating and canal-viewing, the major purpose of the trip was to attend Kevin’s cousin’s wedding. Chris is about half a year older than Kevin and there are all sorts of childhood cousin stories (sliding down the stairs head-first at their grandparents house, etc), plus Chris and Brandy red-eyed out all the way from California to come to our wedding, so I was so happy to get to fly out to celebrate with them. Kevin was asked to be an usher and walk his grandmother down the aisle. 🙂 The church was so pretty (lots of stained glass and a pretty organ), and the wedding party was lovely – girls in dark blue, most of the guys in Marines uniforms, and bright autumn colors for the flowers. Chris and Brandy both looked so happy. We didn’t bring cameras to the church, so I don’t have any photos, unfortunately.
The reception was a few hours later, and closer to the hotel. Chris’ parents made wine, with labels that had the same photo and color theme as the save-the-dates. None of my photos came out, but I was so impressed. The cake was lovely, and they cut it with a Marines sword – wow.
It took people a little while after dinner to get excited about dancing, but once they started it was hard to tear people away. Here’s a partial family portrait – bunny ears courtesy of Kevin’s uncle Dan.
The room layout was quite clever – space for lots of tables and the a bar in the middle of the room (which you can see in the background ) that divided the entry from the dance floor. It was a pretty chilly night, but there were several french doors that led to patios, which would be lovely in the summer.
A great photo of Kevin’s parents:
Chris and Brandy did an amazing job of getting around the room to talk to everyone. I was so impressed. We meant to at our wedding and completely misjudged the time and only did a third of the room. Oops. Also in the category of things they did masterfully, their first dance:
So happy. 🙂 (In the photos of ours, I do think that you can see the clock ticking in my head – is 20 seconds enough first-dancing??) It’s so interesting to attend a wedding with still relatively recent experience in the whole thing – so many choices and it’s fun to see what other people decide to do. I’d only been to three weddings before ours (one when I was 6, one when I was eight, and one a month after we got engaged, so I think that total unfamiliarity was probably a large factor for me in our planning process. I was not necessarily the most opinionated bride out there, flowers and invitations aside (and I was frequently sort of horrified by the constant wedding buzz and all of the expectations around being a bride). And yet, I do love seeing other people’s weddings especially now that ours is past, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoy remembering “our way” of doing things. It’s such fun. I loved our wedding, our vows, and all of the people who came to celebrate it with us. Yay for such memorable occasions, and the family and friends that make them matter. 🙂
Once we’d booked tickets for the wedding and I was mapping routes from the airport to the hotel, I was startled to find that the route passed a national park (?!). Huh. (Looking at this map, you can see why I think of them as a Western phenomenon).
I don’t think that Kevin and I have too many stated joint life goals, but visiting all of the national parks is one of them. So what a fun surprise to get one for free on this trip!! The more I read, the more excited I got about it. The park is essentially a wilderness area that surrounds the Cuyahoga River, which is gorgeous in of itself but particularly interesting as the river was diverted in the 1820s and 30s to create the Erie canal. (Upon further research, it’s not the Erie canal of fame and the kid’s song, which was built in New York, but the Ohio & Erie canal. Same concept and still cool.)
We only had a few hours so we went to the Brandywine Falls. It’s apparently a “bridal veil” falls – appropriate since there was a (huge) wedding party taking photos when we arrived.
Fun to see all of their dresses and flowers. 🙂 The walk around the falls was very national parks, with wooden trails to different scenic areas. Here’s Kevin’s family with the falls:
And Neen with some of the neat, neat rocks that lined the trail:
The path led up next to and then over the top of the falls. It’s such a pretty, relatively tiny creek compared to all of that water. The leaves were still almost all green – I imagine that they will be flaming and gorgeous in a few weeks. We’d see a branch here and there that was scarlet or yellow in the sun, but the real color was still a ways out. There was an inn on the opposite back — looks like a pretty gorgeous place to come spend a weekend. I would have loved more time to explore.
Kevin zoomed back to the rehearsal, and the rest of us drove north through the park to the Canal Visitor Center (sadly, closed, though we got to see one of the locks and there were lots of educational signs). The crickets when we got out were something else. Each step would send about twenty leaping to safety. I’ve never seen anything like them – crazy Ohio Cuyahoga Valley crickets. 🙂
Some stats: The Cleveland to Akron canal rose 395 feet over 309 miles and 44 locks. It was completed in 1832. The lock we saw could raise a boat nine feet. Apparently, Akron had 21 locks over two miles, and it took boats 6 hours to get through them. It took 80-90 hours to cross the entire state.
My overwhelming impression of the whole thing was how tiny it was. The lock we were standing at looked about 12’ in width. The fact that something like that could alter the entire economy of a region is mind bending. And you picture the animals pulling the barges across the state in from the great lakes, and it’s a very powerful image. But then, you think how long it would take to dig those trenches by hand (can you imagine?) over so many miles, and the project seems huge. And, on top of all of that, it was only a few decades before the railroads put the canals out of business and you realize how fast our country was changing. I thought the whole thing was terribly interesting.
We left on Wednesday evening for a trip to Ohio to celebrate Kevin’s cousin’s wedding. The timing was pretty awesome, because we also got to be there for Kevin’s Dad’s 50th birthday. Given that we generally have to celebrate all of the family milestones at a distance, it was a treat to get to be there for the real day (though I suspect we’ve set a high travel bar for Kevin’s mom’s 50th next fall…).
We red-eyed to the tiny (10 gate) Canton Akron Airport on Wednesday, via O’Hare. The early part of the trip was interesting, since we found an entirely new wing of the SeaTac airport – I didn’t realize that we still had any unexplored corners of it, by this point. It was sort of surreal to uncover new territory. Our O’Hare connecting flight kept being pushed back by 40 min for assorted reasons (no plane, no crew x2, and then some sort of mechanical failure), so it was about three hours after scheduled departure that we finally took off. I finally bought a neck pillow in the Seattle airport, which turned out to be one of the best purchases ever, and stole a pillow from United (I would have felt more guilt if they didn’t charge $15 to check a single suitcase), and so I think I managed almost 6 hours of sleep between the flights and the airport floor in Chicago. Not terrible, as these things go, though landing in the middle of the country at 2:45 am PST/4:45 am “real” time is still one of those out-of-body experiences to me.
We beat Kevin’s parents to the hotel by about 20 minutes – time for one and a half showers. We were planning to get there about 3-4 hours early and nap. Oops. At least we made it, and happily our luggage arrived as expected. We went out to a seafood and steak place for Kevin’s Dad’s birthday – delicious. It ended up being quite the group, with Kevin’s grandmother, Marge and Norm (the groom’s parents), and Kevin’s cousins Jackie and Joanna, plus her boyfriend Dana. Kevin Sr. and Neen at the restaurant:
Debbie and Marge:
A few cocktails in, everyone had a great time with Kevin’s camera. 🙂 (We may have had to delete some of these gems to make room for the photos for the rest of the trip…)
And wishing on the fiftieth birthday candle… (note reading glasses on head 🙂 )
Our cleaner shrimp molted – always a good thing because it means he’s healthy, eating and growing (as far as I know, shrimp are like lobsters and keep growing throughout life and molting once their exoskeletons get too small). Our old shrimp used to molt right after producing eggs, which happened quasi-monthly. However, it always gives me a rush of grief, because I’m walking by the tank and see what looks like a dead shrimp (Oh, no!!) and it takes a moment for my brain to sort out that the other one’s still there and acting like his normal, alive self.
We leave the shed skeleton in the tank, and it always seems to disappear in a day or so. But in the meantime, it’s such a broken, fascinating thing to look at.
Life, in all its forms, is amazing.
My tomato plants are starting to look rather autumnal.
The good news is that two more of the fruits are starting to turn orange (bringing our edible count up to 3!!). The bummer is that it’s rainy, cold, and we’re losing our light. Here are the dripping cherry tomatoes.
It sounds, from reading the gardening sites, like I’m not the only Pacific Northwest tomato grower who’s been thwarted this year. Plenty of people are recommending bringing green fruit indoors so that it can ripen on the counter. I’m trying to give it a few more days, but the nights are starting to get into the 40s, so we’ll see how long I can hold out.
Kevin got a photo of our Stellar Jay on the front path.
He’s quite a character, bathing in our gutters and flitting about the yard.
Kevin just got a new lens – neat! The dudes look great with it. Here’s Click nestling into the leather (he seems to be attempting to host in it – much luck to him? The leather is not enthusiastic. ) :
Plus the clowns being cute:
We’re all worried about the tang. All of a sudden he’s showing signs of headline lateral erosion – a symptom of stress/poor nutrition/water quality/etc. He’s looked a bit symptomatic since we got him early last spring, but for the most part he’s been eating well and nothing seemed to phase him. Now, he’s not eating the Nori and his scales and fins are starting to look very ragged. We’re worried. We just ordered Selcon (a vitamin to soak his food in) so hopefully that will fix things soon. Here’s the tang – you can see the HLE at his temple, and stretching up in an arc from his eye to his tail.
No good. Feel better soon, little dude!!
I was so flattered when Kevin said that he wanted curtians like I’d made for my office, just “not with the lace.” Yay! Totally!
We went to Joanns so that Kevin could choose a color, and bought plain white cotton and blue ribbon for the edges. Turns out that ribbon was completely the wrong thing (too stiff, yet won’t hold a pressed edge). Oops.
I found bias tape in almost the same color as Kevin’s ribbon choice at $1.99 for 3 yards and decided to spring for two packages. The ribbon can now get relegated to gift-wrapping. A success!! Here they are open to the view of the rhodedendron and all of the little birds:
And closed for privacy:
Not bad for essentially a 25 minute, $12 project. 🙂
My brother lives in NYC, and he and his roommate occasionally take a chess set down to the local bar and play. Aside from thinking they were cool to do that, this news made me think many things – that game boxes are hard to carry, that spilled beer would warp one of those cardboard game boards, and that I’d been seeing lots of “checkerboard” sort of quilting patterns recently. So I took some of the remnant cotton print fabric from the Olympic Mountains quilt, and made him a chess bag.
It’s machine washable and dryable. It has a zipper and a lined pouch to hold all of the pieces.
And there are two handles, which can slide into fabric slots to fold the bag in half and make it smaller/easier to carry.
I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out. The bag, lying flat, is about 14½” square. Dave got it last week, and actually seemed quite pleased about this little bit of unsolicited crafting. And at least even if it only gets used occasionally, it’s tiny to store. 🙂
Mostly for my reference, since I’m sure I’ll find occasion to make this again:
To make a zippered chess bag:
Materials:
Steps: