The Graduate

Jeff has been working relentlessly on his Master's Degree online for the last three years. He just posted his last assignment and will be graduating Summa Cum Laude. Pretty good for a kid who was (mistakenly) put in Special Ed classes when he was young. 

He hinted requested a camera for a graduation present. Not just any camera, mind you, but one with snazzy lenses and other bells and whistles. This from the man who is pretty much banned from using my camera because any time he has possession of my camera he either (a) drops it or (b) doesn't take time to focus it when he takes a photo. 

There was a good-looking Olympus with extra lenses on the Amazon Gold Box Deal the other day, so I called him at work and told him to take a look at it. Two days later, he was a happy man. 

His first efforts have been, of course, with birds. 

The man can scope out a duck pond quicker than any other.

I will confess to a little judicious editing, but I think he's warming up nicely.

And I may or may not be outrageously jealous of the camera.

P.S. He already dropped it, but luckily it landed on his softly-slippered foot.

Saved by the grands

December has been a rough month.

Three weeks ago on a Wednesday, everything was very icy outside. We were in the middle of a cold front such as hadn't been seen in decades, so outside water pipes were vulnerable to damage. I ventured into the front yard, resplendent in my pink fuzzy robe, to check on the sprinkler system controls, which have been known to spring leaks in extremely cold weather. I chuckled to myself when I saw the neighbour lady in her robe, cleaning the ice off her car. 

When I went back into the house, I decided that the compost tub was a wee bit smelly, so I crept carefully out the back door, over the deck towards the veggie garden, and WHAM! slipped off the icy step and went sprawling on the grass. I thought maybe my leg was broken again, but after letting loose with a few choice words over my stupidity and hobbling back into the house, I decided it was probably a bad sprain. It slowed me down for a few days, in fact I am still limping, but improving steadily.

A week later, Jeff and I both came down with what we think is the flu. Days of fever and coughing and general malaise have sapped our energy and put us into survival mode. 

So, when Jeff dragged the tree out of the shed earlier this week and discovered that quite a few of the lights didn't work, we lost enthusiasm. 

And the tree sat by the front window all week, unlit and unloved and undecorated. 

Tonight, Bethany arrived with the five kids in tow for piano lessons.

Kenzie, who is her mother's daughter, immediately wanted to know if she could help decorate the tree.

And decorate she did.

Natalie gleefully helped.

And, by golly, I even started to have fun. So that tree is now covered in its usual denizens of the woodland habitat, all glowing and welcoming and happy.

I love how it looks without the camera flash, but then the people are blurry.

Now the people look better but the tree is not as magical.

I love these kids.

Three of them have December birthdays!

Natalie set up all the animals with the nativity.

I like it.

Now I think I can welcome Christmas.

Butts and buttes

I'm dipping my toes tentatively back into the blogging world. Life has changed radically in the last few weeks, but this post has been waiting for a while, so here you are. 

Jenny and the boys went out to the Ranch with me for a weekend in September. 

The dog came too, but we managed to ignore him for most of the weekend.

He didn't get to accompany us on our outing to the Newberry National Volcanic monument, just south of Bend. I had been wanting to visit the Lava River Cave for some time. It is the longest continuous lava cave in Oregon. 

When the kids were young, we visited the Ape Caves (near Mount St. Helen's in Washington) several times, so we were familiar with the concept of lava caves. It was a favourite outing back then, so I was excited to show this cave to Jenny and the boys.

What we didn't know was that the monument covers a large area, almost 90 square miles, and contains several great places to visit. As well as the lava cave, there is a visitor centre, Lava Butte, the Great Obsidian Flow, and the Lava Cast Forest. It was created in 1990 and is quite spectacular.

As I recall, the cost to enter the area was only $5 a car, and then another $5 for a lamp to take into the caves. We could have skipped renting a lamp, but half the flashlights at the house didn't work (one due to corroded batteries and one to being dropped by a person who shall remain nameless but who was the tallest person on the outing).

First, we hit the visitor's centre, which gave us a good idea of where we wanted to spend our time and educated us about the area.

We drove to the top of Lava Butte, and this is overlooking the crater at the top.

At ground level, it's hard to appreciate how many volcanic calderas and buttes dot the landscape. From the road, all you can see is forest and (sometimes) volcanic rocks. The view from the top is much more interesting.

A path follows the rim of Lava Butte. It is a nice, easy, quarter-of-a-mile stroll.

It was very cold and windy, but you get a nice 360-degree view of the surrounding countryside.

An old fire watchtower sits at the peak of the butte.

The last eruption was 7,000 years ago, and this part of the land still hasn't recovered.

We drove to the Lava River Cave, which was only a few minutes away from the visitor centre.
Here we are, at the entrance of the cave.

There are 150 steps leading down to the cave itself and a few rocky places at the beginning of the trail, but there is a rail to hang on to and the trail surface evens out as it continues.
Beware, however, of sudden potholes and drop-offs. It pays to keep your eyes on the trail.

There are several cool formations as you walk through the cave. Photos are difficult, because they are all flash driven, so most of them weren't worth showing. I particularly like this Sand Garden, which is about halfway through the cave. The floor of the cave here is covered with sand. The formation is made up of volcanic ash from Mount Mazama, which is carried by rain and melting snow from the surface through cracks in the rock and deposited, one grain at a time, on the floor of the cave. 
Talk about delayed gratification. 
Occasionally, enough water leaks into the cave to create a pool, which allows the sand to spread out across the floor. The constant dripping of water in the cave has carved out pinnacles and spires in the sand. Because these delicate sand forms take hundreds of years to create, the Forest Service has fenced off the area.
Good thing too.
Keeps the idiots out.
The photo does not do the sight anywhere near the justice it deserves.

The end of the cave narrows down, until only the bravest (or smallest) will venture forth.
We were not very brave.
Thomy got a big kick out of surprising people with his glow-in-the-dark skeleton hoodie. It became a source of pride to him to see how many people would comment on it.

And on the way home, as we passed Black Butte and some of the other calderas, we kept talking about Black Butt and roaring hysterically every time.
We are so easy to amuse.

Because it's there

As we were climbing Mount St. Helens five years ago, a ranger passed us on the way up, swinging her trekking poles jauntily and barely breathing hard. Yes, she joked, getting up is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

Prophetic words, as it turned out.

I was reminded of those words on Saturday. Jeff and I decided to hike a trail over at Smith Rock that we have been wanting to do all year. We needed to get out of the house and into nature, distract ourselves from present problems, so we headed out in the mid-morning. Our goal was Misery Ridge Trail, a four-mile moderate trail that zigzags over the rock right by the bridge over Crooked River, then swings around by the river. After looking at the map, I decided we should walk in the opposite direction than that suggested, so that I could climb up the steeper-and-no-doubt-rockier part of the trail and down the zigzag stairs. I have a phobia about walking down gravelly surfaces, you see.

So we crossed the bridge and turned left, along the River Trail that you can see across the river in this photo.

You can see the zigzag stairs that we didn't take in the top left corner of this photo, just below the sheer rock surface. This is looking to the right of the bridge.

It was a gorgeous day on Saturday, warm with a slight breeze, and a haze in the air that made long distances hard to see. There are over a thousand climbing routes in this state park, and hundreds of climbers were out taking advantage of the day, the canyon walls echoing with their shouts.

The trail along the river was easy and picturesque.

We enjoyed looking at the climbers, without any inkling of envy.
We are not that adventurous, my honey and me.
Look carefully at the photos, because some of the climbers are hard to see.

I took this photo looking back along the river behind us. When I was editing photos from the day, I couldn't resist adding some contrast and saturation to this shot. The scenery in Central Oregon is spectacular, but I do miss the colours that we enjoy further west. It looks magical, doesn't it?

I get some strange looks when I hike out here. Because it is generally hot and sunny (until winter, when it is cold and sunny) I usually wear cool, comfortable cotton, which pleases me but doesn't look like your average Columbia-garbed trail denizen. I am sure other hikers think I am some poor old lady who has no idea what she is doing.

We imagined how amazing it would be to live above such a view.

Spot the climber.

In the centre of the picture is monkey-face.

After a couple of miles, the trail forked. To the right, and uphill, was the Mesa Verde trail, so up we went. I was pretty sure this would take us over the top.

Do you see the silhouettes of the two climbers?

The view was awesome. This is looking across the river towards Crooked River Ranch. We had climbed out of the canyon at this point and were well above the other side.

We passed a sign that pointed up and said "Very difficult".

Well, we thought, we don't want to do anything very difficult, so we stayed on the trail, which was not in itself particularly easy.

We walked and walked and walked, passing Monkey Face, which had a few climbers on it.

These piles of stones were under an overhanging piece of rock. I always wonder who starts stuff like this.

After a while, I said to Jeff, this sure feels like more than four miles, and we aren't even in sight of anything that looks like a summit yet. But no one we asked as we passed them seemed to know any more than we did.

Finally, the trail headed back down to the river. It was my least favourite kind of trail, covered in loose rock and very dodgy to descend, even with my trusty trekking poles.

Then we reached a sign that said "Summit Trail", so we breathed a sigh of relief and headed up it.

It felt like several miles long, especially when it started to zigzag up the side of the mountain. Halfway up, we asked a gal who was coming up behind if she had hiked it before. She had, many times. How far is it, we asked. Oh, about eight miles, she said. Turns out, we should have taken the "very difficult" route, which would have taken us over the Misery Ridge Trail. We had inadvertently done the long loop.

Of course.

However, the views were magnificent, even with the haze.

Remember this post when I threatened to hike the zigzag some day?
We had to descend using this very road. It is called Burma Road, and I will be happy if I never walk it again.
It was steep, rocky, and hot.
The centre left of this photo shows a small section of it, and it is readily apparent in the next one, cutting straight down the side of the mountain. It is over a mile long. When we reached the bottom, there was still about a mile to go to reach the bridge. I was fairly unhappy by this time, as all of the ascending and descending had given me a good-sized blister on my little toe.

I was very glad to get back to the car, but after I stopped complaining I was glad that we accomplished the long hike.
Next time, we plan to do Misery Ridge as suggested in the hiking guides!
Wanna come too?

Grilled cheese on steroids

My mum always told me that I loved cheese as a toddler. By the time my working memory kicks in, I had eschewed cheese as a nasty piece of food. I don't remember when I started eating it again, but it may have had something to do with my discovery of pizza when I was about eighteen. From then on, melted cheese became a regular part of my culinary vocabulary, but never again have I eaten cheese in the raw.

A few years into marriage and with three children, I visited a friend who lived in Eugene. She made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. I still wasn't that much into cheese, but, to be polite, I tried it and liked it. "Cheese on toast", as I had known it growing up, meant sliced cheese on an open piece of bread and grilled in the oven, and this was how I always fixed it for Jeff and the kids. Grilled cheese in a frying pan, with two pieces of bread and buttered on the outside, somehow made it much more delightful, so it became part of my dinner repertoire. It was almost always paired with a can or two of Campbell's tomato soup, made with milk, of course. 

And there it stayed for almost thirty years. Sometimes with ham as well as cheese, and, lately, with mustard for Jeff. 

I have been trying to embrace my inner condiment child.

I am lying.

I will never eat condiments, but I am trying to be more open to the concept for Jeff's sake.

Jeff loves condiments.

I was perusing Smitten Kitchen's recipes the other day. That girl knows how to ramp up a recipe like none other. And I happened to run across this recent recipe on grilled cheese. I filed it away in my culinary memory for future reference. When I arrived at the Ranch on Thursday, I was toting a loaf of potato rosemary bread that I found with the free bread at the Senior Centre. It occurred to me that it would make a mean grilled cheese sandwich, so I tried the technique, slightly altered to fit my needs.

I used Tillamook medium cheddar and the results were spectacular. We ate them for lunch and dinner on Friday and I am still dreaming about them.

If you want to try this, go to the Smitten Kitchen link, because I am lazy and didn't take enough photos she did it first. But here is a photo of the sandwiches before being flipped.

And, the finished product.
Butter and cheese on the outside might seem like overkill, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Try it. 

You'll like it.

Let me know what you think.