Goldenrod, Moby Dick, and Grandfather's Whiskers

It really feels like autumn is on it's way now that the nights are cool, and the goldenrod is putting on a brilliant show.  Enjoying the wildflowers is the advantage of being so busy readying the house that we failed to keep the vegetation tamed.  All those weeds that have been bothering us when we tried to access the corn crib have transformed themselves into flowers!  

I wish you could hear them.  The bees are buzzing and the crickets are chirping.  I was getting sensory overload when I invaded the stands of yellow to peek in on the big silver bowl buried in the blooms.  

When looked at with the right attitude, the jumble of brambles and tall grasses becomes a wondrous floral arrangement.   A giant arrangement with the perfect barn-wood backdrop!  All spontaneous and free of charge.  

With my trusty pruning shears,  I was able to snip a path free of briers, and give the natural arrangement a more intentional and friendly appearance.  

The view from inside the corn crib is a spectacular sea of yellow.  It's nearly blindingly bright in the setting sunlight.  

In the right light, even our new, but old,  trailer, which has a rustic patina, looks neat against the background of barns and goldenrod meadows.  

Do you remember the spinach garden we worked so hard to plant this spring?  Well, this is what happens if you plant a garden and then do zero maintenance.  That tall vegetation behind Puck is the garden!  It's as tall as me, and absolutely alive with wild plants, insects, moles, mice, voles, snakes, birds, and even deer.  Taming this jungle is going to be a challenge.  I love a challenge.

There she blows!- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!  Er... I mean, there's the propane tank.  I struggle to see beauty in the propane tank, but this is the first year we've allowed the goldenrod to thrive around it.  

The side with the goldenrod looks much more lovely. 

And the honeybees don't seem to mind the propane tank at all.  

Look who popped up by the root cellar.  I've never seen a flower like this before.  It looks alien with it's dangling pods and long stamens.  

A friend of mine recognized it immediately as rose Cleome.  It's also called spider flower, grandfathers whiskers, or spider legs.   

With four strange petals and lots of dangling stamens, I can see why it brings spiders to mind.  Although I've never seen pretty pink spiders before.  I hope to save some seeds from this plant and grow more of these.  I like plants that don't require much work, and this plant grew here all by its self.

Hello, New Kitchen

Even though the new kitchen is still waiting to have the cabinets painted and hung, the counter top built, the wall behind the stove tiled, and the outlet covers and vent fan installed (whew!), I think it's really cool. When the refrigerator and stove were first installed, I was worried that it would be too cramped, but so far, we are really enjoying working in this space.  Not that I've created food more complicated than reheating leftover pizza and making coffee yet, but chopping up a watermelon in the light from the kitchen window was so much fun it inspired a photo shoot.  

The window in the kitchen faces east, so it gets direct sunlight in the morning which makes cooking breakfast very nice.  But even the evening light was strong enough that the glass of water behind the watermelon was almost white with light.  Washing dishes in this light makes it very easy to see if the dishes are clean.  Which is actually kind of annoying.  I'm going to have to up my game now that I can see so well!  

The small rolling cabinet with the butcher block top, which Byron and Shanna gave us when it didn't fit in their new kitchen, is still in a trial location in the center of the kitchen.  I like having easy access to a work surface from all the work stations, but it's almost too tight for Brandon to work around it comfortably.  My parents have one just like it, so it feels very homey to me.  I may have to put Brandon on a diet so he fits in the kitchen better.  

Unpacking is taking me much longer than packing, surprisingly.  So far in the kitchen, I've unpacked a single blue vase.  It looked so nice on top of the refrigerator, with the turquoise cabinets, that I had to stop and take it's picture!  Whew, time for a snack break, for sure.  But look how many shelves I have in the pantry!  They are already almost full, and I haven't even started unpacking the kitchen boxes.  Yikes.  

Corgi butt looks cute with the new stove, though.  

I tried, but there is no good way to frame a watermelon picture and block the view of the mountain of boxes in the dinning room.  

Where is it all going to go?!

Keep your fingers crossed that we have killed all the mice that were residing in the house.  We were dedicated to setting mouse traps for weeks before we moved in, and eventually got to the point where the traps stayed set, and there we no more mouse murders.  But before they moved on to that giant block of cheese in the sky, they left us a little present in the silverware drawer...

The beginnings of a mouse nest, made with snake skins!  It's bad enough to have a mouse nest in the kitchen, but a mouse nest made of the shed skin of a snake is over the top, even for me.  It's neat though, to see what material they will use.  I found a huge mouse nest in a guitar case in the outbuilding at our old house, and it was made with pillow stuffing and chicken feathers.  It made me miss Mrs. Hall, since it was all black and white feather bits in the nest.  For some reason, the snake skins don't make me miss Carlos.  

Yesterday, I was trying out the various seating areas in the living room with the furniture arranged as we do, while listening to the Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zero's Pandora station and I mentioned to Brandon that the living room has a very mellow vibe.  He said his students wouldn't say it was mellow, they would say it was"chill".  Our living room is chill.  

Moving is an Experience

We moved to the farm!  Well, most of us have moved.  My silly chicken, June, is staying at our old house with Jamie until we get the coop situation resolved, but the rest of us have officially taken up residence at the farm.  

With help from family and friends, we moved most of our possessions in two trips in a single day.  Now I just have to unpack all of those boxes!

When we awoke after our first night in the little farm house, we looked out the bedroom window to see three deer in the front yard.  I wasn't a good enough photographer to capture all three as they moseyed in the mist, but that dark spot in the center of the photo is one of the deer.  The mornings at the farm have been lovely.  The recent cool weather at night creates a blanket of light mist along the ground in the mornings, and makes the fall flowers seem magical.  

Packing and moving all of our things was an experience, for sure.  We've lived in the same place for nearly thirteen years, and we didn't have so much stuff when we arrived there.  This is the first time I've ever packed an entire houseful of my possessions.  In order to get it all done in time I had to refrain from sorting through every picture I found stuffed in drawers, but I couldn't resist sharing this picture I found of Brandon from before we were married.  I remember taking this picture through the windshield of his old black car while he cleaned the window at a gas station.  I haven't seen his chin in nearly eighteen years!

When I showed Max the picture I found of his younger, and beefier self, he suggested I rub it on his forehead to see if it helps his eyebrow hair grow back!  

I wonder why I stopped sporting the side ponytail?  I might have to take it back up!

Saying Good-bye to My Kitchen

Tonight, I begin packing.  Maybe by making that proclamation, I will actually do it!  Brandon has begun, and I've dragged in a stack of boxes from the mountain of boxes I've been collecting, but I haven't actually put anything in a box.  We're beginning the move in three days.  Should I be nervous?  

Instead of doing something productive with the disaster that is my house, I'm feeling nostalgic for my spaces.  I've got beach camping gear sprinkled in every room, empty boxes poised for packing, loaded boxes ready to be moved, and dirty laundry toppling out of the hampers, but before I tackle the job ahead of me, I decided to go through all the pictures on my phone and see if I have any good ones of the inside of the house we've been living in for nearly thirteen years, before I begin to disassemble it.   Will Future Rain enjoy seeing my old refrigerator?  I think she will! Good-bye refrigerator.  I will miss the way I pile bowls on top of you so that I can't actually use the cabinets behind the stack of bowls.  

Have you ever visited someone's kitchen and admired their clutter free counter tops, beckoning like open work spaces just begging for culinary experimentation and giant trays of baked goods?  Well, that is not the condition of our kitchen counters!  

Jamie once counted over a dozen kitchen gadgets out on our counter, including two blenders, two giant juicers, and two crock pots.  

Good-bye crowded counter tops, I'll miss all the good times we had cooking together, but I'm sure my new, even more crowded, counter tops will fill the void.

I will not miss the hate cabinet.  I've hated the hate cabinet for so long, I can't imagine working in a kitchen without a little hate mixed in.  

Even looking at a picture of the inside of the hate cabinet makes me feel a little hate.  Oh, it's terrible.  It's a place piled with unbalanced and ill fitting objects where, like hateful magic, the thing I need is always behind a precariously stacked pile of plastic storage dishes (minus the lids, of course) and pots.  There are also weird pieces of kitchen gadgetry that jump out onto the floor no matter how carefully I try to sneak the thing I want out of there.  And of course, it's dark and down low, so that my back starts to ache while to wrestle with the contents and the hate starts to fill my mouth so that I can only relieve the pressure by spewing curse words.  I HATE this stupid cabinet!  So long, ass-hole!  

Now, this cabinet, I like.  So tidy, so easy to find my things.  I've always liked you, dish cabinet.  Good-bye.

But all my love goes to this cabinet.  It's packed full, so I have to approach with cation, but if I treat it gently, I find all the goodies. Chocolate bars, dried fruits, nuts, pastas, all the yummiest stuff stored right at eye level.  I will truly miss the goody cabinet, at least until I put all the goodies in a new home.  

The sink and I have become well acquainted over the years.  I have a feeling with my new sink, which has much more shallow bowls, I may occasionally miss the old sink.  

I've cooked many meals in this space, and even though it's narrow and crowded, it still the place where we find our selves hanging out and talking while we work.  It's been a comfortable place for us.  Good-bye, kitchen.

Camping at Huntington Beach

Finally, after months of thought, weeks of planning, days of packing, and over eight hours of driving, we made it to the beach!  This was the first time my nieces or Puck had ever seen the ocean, so we were all excited to be there for their first experience. 

If you've never been to Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina, I recommend it.  It's my kind of beach.  Because it's a state park, there aren't condos and houses in view, and no car sounds or big crowds.  The beach access trail nearest our camp site was a short walk over a wetland board walk...

through a stretch of pine scented forest...

and then onto the deep sand of the dunes.  

There are sea oats waving in the breeze on the vegetated dunes nearest the beach.  Then, you walk up the last dune and all of a sudden the sound of the ocean intensifies, the breeze tries to take your hat off, and the ocean is spread out in front of you.  When my nieces reached the peak of the last dune, their mouths fell open and my eldest niece said "Oh wow, it's so BIG!"  It's a spectacular ocean approach.  

It was wonderful to drop all our gear and wade into the water.  Despite my niece's previous declarations that they would not swim because of a fear of sharks, as soon as they saw those irresistible waves they were fearless.  Puck was less enthusiastic about the crashing waves and the salt flavored water, although he did enjoy long walks on the sand.  

My tongue would be hanging out too, is I got that much sand in my mouth!  I tried to explain to him that rubbing his face in the sand would not help get the sand out of his eyes. 

With just two full days for our beach adventure, we took advantage of the opportunity to play in the waves and in the sand and settled in for long stretches, which meant we brought lots of shade to protect our landlubber skin.  All that beach practice paid off, this was the most comfortable beach experience I've ever had.  

Ahhhh.... nice.  

Can you see the tiny crab Jamie has in the scoop of sand in his hands?  We thought he looked just like Mr. Krabs from Spongebob Squarepants.  

In the evening, when we didn't want to swim because sharks come out at dusk, it was the perfect time for building sand castles.  We all went back the beach after dark too, to try out our new ocean fishing tackle.  It was a wonderful to be out on the deserted beach after dark, even if we didn't catch a shark like I hoped and feared.  The stars were brilliant, and the sound of the waves must have lulled us into a good nights sleep, because we slept like champions on Saturday night.  

The next day, Grandpa surprised everyone by walking up the beach to our spot with brand new boogie boards!

I was terrible at boogie boarding, but my nieces had natural boogie boarding skills and could ride the waves all the way onto the sand.  

Uncle Brandon is a sand mer-man!

When we made our camp site reservations, there was only a single site available, even though we made the reservations well in advance.  We got rustic camp site No. 1, which turned out to be perfect for us.  Our site was in the shade of a beautiful live oak tree.  It was near enough to the car that it wasn't too hard to get an expeditions worth of gear to our camp site.  And the water fount was very close.  The bathhouse, which was a fair distance from our site, was always empty, despite the campground being full.  Most folks were in campers, which have their own bathrooms, so my worries that we would have to wait in line for a shower were for nothing.  

Brandon and I used our old big tent so we would have plenty of room, but we failed to put a tarp over it, and also didn't realize that it's not water resistant any more.  On Sunday evening it rained for a little while, while we were away from camp enjoying a nice meal at a restaurant.  Sunday night was one of those nights sleeping in a tent when we question why we like camping.  Do we even like camping?  We couldn't remember that we did when our pillows were wet and our clothes and sheets were soaking up the puddle on the floor.  And why is there sand on everything?!  Is this entire campground just one big sandy ant hill?! Where are all these ants coming from!?!  Ack.  What's wrong with a condo, anyway?  

The park has a salt marsh that is home to lots of birds and other wildlife.  These trees had nearly a hundred large white wood storks nesting in the branches.  

See that dark spot in the marsh water?  That's an alligator!  Luckily we had some children to feed to the alligators and keep them satisfied.  

On our way back to our campsite after dinner, one of the alligators was enjoying the warm rain on the side of the road, so we got to admire his patterned tail and white throat.  

And then Monday it's time to make the long trip back home.  Somehow all of our now wet things have expanded, and don't fit as well into the car as they did on the way there.  It's a good thing everything was already wet and dirty, because Puck was like a walking wet sand depository, and he decided to nestle on my pillow for the ride home!