Art at the airport (Dallas Love Field)

Last Friday, I was supposed to fly to Dallas to see Charlie, Sam, and little London. 

I was foiled by high winds in Denver. 

After being dropped at the Beaverton MAX station by a friend and riding the light rail for an hour to the airport, I was told that they could not get me to Dallas that day. 

Bah, humbug.

So I sat around at the airport for a couple of hours, using their free, crappy wi-fi, rode MAX back to Beaverton, caught a bus that was just leaving to Tigard, and met Bethany at the transit station.

Just how I wanted to spend my Friday.

Jeff and I arose at 4 a.m. the next morning and I was on my way. 

I flew on Southwest, which is my second-favourite airline. 

Jet Blue might lose it's first place if it doesn't add some more destinations.

We flew into Dallas Love Field Airport. Southwest has a field day making puns on the name. I tried to do the crossword puzzle in Spirit magazine onboard, and could not figure out the catch. Turns out that many of the clues were answered with the word "love", only backwards. 

Here are some interesting facts about Love Field.

It is owned by Southwest and, so far, Southwest is the only airline flying in and out. It is also their corporate headquarters.

Love Field was originally an Army airfield, built in 1917 to train pilots for World War I.

It is named after First Lieutenant Moss L. Love, who died in a plane crash in 1913. He was the tenth fatality in Army aviation.

The airport was bought by the city of Dallas in 1927 for civilian use.

JFK flew into Love Field on his fateful last trip.

There has been a lot of rivalry between Dallas/Fort Worth and Love Field, but Love Field takes the prize, in my opinion. It is a lovely little airport with some fantastic art.

The first one I saw was this, suspended from the roof.

This mural caught my eye as I passed the security area. I covers one large wall and is a tile mosaic. These photos are extreme close-ups.

A door leading outside takes one to this sculpture, which made me feel sad.
The bronze depiction of a pilot's helmet, gloves, coat and goggles, placed on a chair with the monogram MLL (for Moss L. Love) is titled "Back in a Moment". The chair sits under the artist's trademark crepe myrtle trees.

I had a little time to wander on my return trip, and I found a room that told the story of all of the art works at the airport, including smaller versions of the actual art.

These are taken from a small section of the hanging sculpture.

A painting of the tile mosaic.
I love it.

I enjoy art wherever I find it.

Unless it like the piece of orange fabric on a that I saw at the local Cultural Center today, with a price tag of $35,000.

Apparently, it was serious.

I don't know. See what you think. Makoto Fujimura.

His most expensive piece was $150,000.

I don't understand.

Orts

The snow, oh, the snow. It came in on Thursday night and by Friday night it had pretty much shut everything down. We in western Oregon are not equipped with things like snow shovels and snow ploughs, so we hunker down and live on hot chocolate and Netflix, which isn't completely a bad thing.
Except for the twenty pounds of red fingerling potatoes that I naively left in the shed, half of which froze and had to be eaten promptly. Can I just say that frozen/thawed/raw potatoes are not a nice thing. They ooze potato juice over everything, so that even when they are cooked deliciously, all you can think about is the black ooze.

But there was this:

And everything was delightfully white and pristine for about three days until the weather warmed.

A couple of weeks earlier, we were out at the Ranch and things were very frozen.
We never get tired of this view.

And a couple of weeks before that, we took Thomy and Jeff to see one of Josh's basketball games. Jeff was happily clicking away with his camera.

This is one of my favourite shots of McKenzie.

We laugh every time we look at this one, Josh looks so graceful. I always knew he would be a good dancer, if only his dad would consider the idea of dance lessons.

And how are the bathroom renovations going? 

Why, thank you for asking.

It should all be finished tomorrow, barring painting around the shower. 

We are very glad that we hired out the shower installation, as the new one was slightly smaller than the old one, necessitating a slight building up of the walls behind it. 

It occurred to me yesterday that I am grateful that we have two bathrooms. Not sure what we would have done without a toilet and shower for two weeks. 

First world problems.

As for me, I am flying out tomorrow, Texas bound. Hopefully, Jeff will have the taxes done by the time I get home next week!
Ha! I get Texas, he gets taxes!
Get it?
Stay tuned for grandbaby photos.

The bitter and the sweet

Life has been erratic. 

Let's just say that between the snowstorm, the bathroom renovation, both of us coming down with the norovirus, and me breaking out in hives that may or may not be a residual after-effect of the virus, last night I was hankering after something sweet and delicious and not too taxing to prepare.

Luckily, I had spent some time earlier in the day cooking up a couple of dozen uncooked Tortilla Land tortillas, and I had a can of caramel apple pie filling in the pantry and a carton of Philly extra-protein honey-flavoured cream cheese in the fridge.

Ten minutes later, I was popping these babies into the oven.

Drizzled with melted butter and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, and it's a pretty good approximation of Applebee's long-defunct apple chimi-cheesecakes, one of the few restaurant desserts of which I bemoan the loss.

Here are a couple of links to slightly different versions of the tasty dessert. This was the one I used, although I didn't add sugar to the cream cheese, which was already slightly sweet. I used half the butter and didn't frost them and they were plenty rich.
This one looks good too, being fried and put together rather differently.

And now I am wishing we hadn't eaten the last of them tonight.

Nostalgic...

I love the grandchildren at whatever age they are today, but I sometimes get nostalgic for the days when the older ones were younger and still thought that a walk around the block with Nana was exciting.

I found these photos on a blog draft that, for some reason, I never finished. 

The hat and coat are from my emergency outerwear stash, so it must have been chilly.

Back in the days when video games were not the entertainment of choice.

I love this little imp.

It's official!

Look what arrived in the mail today.

Jeff's master's diploma, three years and many life changes and grueling hours of study in the making.

And guess how he is celebrating.

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Yes, my friends, we are in the middle of a bathroom remodel.

Let's paint the walls, she said, in an intemperate fit of home improvement madness.

The linoleum is kind of old, so is the baseboard, she said, after reflecting upon the scene in front of her eyes.

And if we do that, we should probably replace the shower, because we've been talking about it for years. And we can finally get rid of the shower doors!

And so a $50 paint job became something much, much bigger.

It's just as well that the sink is in our bedroom.

We are not big DIY people, in case you didn't know this about us, so a friend will be doing most of the installation. After getting his quote on the job, I decided we should save some money and do the rip-out work ourselves, so Jeff got all manly with a borrowed Sawzall and ripped out the shower, the debris of which you see above. I was quite proud of him, for not breaking anything that shouldn't be broken, and for not being grumpy while he was doing it. The old shower was held to the studs with many nails, so it was a painstaking task.

We have both been working on scraping the vinyl and glue from the subflooring, which is back-breaking work and I will not be sorry when it is over. 

Meanwhile, we are in the middle of the best blizzardy snow that we in the valley have seen in a few years, so the project is on hold for a few days.

Thank goodness.

And, finally, back to where we started.
The new graduate.

Summa cum laude.
Feel free to send felicitations his way.

Six Days

Papa and I got to look after the five M grandchildren for six days. Mommy and Daddy were taking a much-needed holiday, gallivanting around Georgia and Florida and just being sweethearts for a change. It was their first long break in over thirteen years of marriage. 

I am a big believer in marital getaways. I think it has been the glue that has kept Jeff and I going for almost 34 years. We have many fond memories of weekend escapes to hotels at the coast and mountain resorts, in downtown Portland and Seattle and southern Oregon, as we reconnected and learned to play together again.

We didn't have any kind of honeymoon when we got married, just the weekend in our apartment and then Jeff was back at work on Monday. Two kids and three years later, we still hadn't gotten any kind of romantic holiday. When my mum came to visit, we decided to take advantage of it and Jeff booked a m/hotel for one night. I think it was in Long Beach. It was only a few miles away from our apartment, but it felt gloriously exciting to be spending twenty-four hours on our own.

I'm sure we must have gone out to dinner, and then to the motel. Not having had much experience with hotels in our low-budget life, we didn't know what to expect. 

Jeff had found one with hot tubs in the rooms.

Skip forward to sleep-time. 

We turned out the lights and lay awake in the glow of streetlights and neon. 

And pretty soon it started.

The skittering.

Lights!

There were cockroaches all over the floor, no doubt lured by the dampness of the hot tub.

Shortest night away from the kids EVER!

Mum was pretty surprised to see us at the door at 2 o'clock in the morning.

The kids arrived at 5:50 on Friday morning. We put them all to bed and they slept till about nine.

Jeff had the crazy idea to take them out to the Ranch, so we spent the morning packing the car and getting ready. 

And Madelyn opened her birthday present from Jenny because it was too big to take with us.

The trip out there was blessedly uneventful, and the kids were happy to be there.

Picture credit to Jeff.

Kenzie and Madelyn claimed the guest bedroom.

Kenzie knows how to make a room her own!

We ate dinner and everyone was very busy, climbing the stairs, doing puzzles, playing games.

First thing Saturday morning, I overheard Jeff saying, "It's 27 degrees outside, why are you wearing shorts?"

I came out to see Daniel, standing outside in his shorts, proving that he was warm enough.

He lasted for three minutes, which he thought was admirable!

Jeff took all of the kids across the street to the park while I made lunch.

Food is a big deal with this lot. They are hungry all of the time. We ate much toast, macaroni cheese, and pizza. 

It was cold and Natalie couldn't find her coat, so she wore Papa's hat and my jacket.

After lunch, we drove to Lake Billy Chinook.

The glee engendered by stone-skipping never diminishes.

Papa was the King of stone-skippers.

Madelyn has a funny little strut when she walks, swinging her arms and looking like she means business.

The lake is gorgeous and the kids had a blast. They wanted to stay longer but we had gotten a late start and still had places to go.

We had to make a quick stop at Freddie's in Redmond, as Jeff had forgotten to bring dress shoes for church, and then we stopped at a park in the dry canyon.

Daniel was the only one brave enough to climb the rock.

It got cold quickly when the sun went down, so we headed home for dinner.

Sometimes, Miss M gets grumpy.

Always hungry.

Lucky I stopped in at Grocery Outlet.

It took me over a day, but I finally talked Josh into trying a pig-in-a-blanket.

Hot dog, wrapped in gluten-free pizza dough.

He loved it and ate several more over the weekend.

Daniel wanted to have a party, so we did.

Some of us did the limbo.

Madelyn wanted in on the act so she started walking around with her chest stuck out. It was hilarious.

We had wheelbarrow races.

And danced to Alabama.

These kids have Song of the South memorized, thanks to Papa.

We all relaxed a bit on Sunday morning.

Except me, probably.

Too busy feeding everybody.

Joshie, showing off the naturally coloured and flavoured candy I found for him.

It was Madelyn's birthday, so she opened her presents after church and Natalie planned a party. 

I was tired of making food, so she had a birthday Three Musketeers instead of cake.

And she didn't mind a bit!

We played SkipBo and ate candy while Papa hid in the bedroom. After a while, he came out and livened up the game by being silly, and everybody ended up laughing hysterically. I told him to go away so that we could finish the game, but he didn't listen.

Here's Madelyn, eating pumpkin spice bread toast (her new favourite) for breakfast and wearing a new birthday outfit.

We went home on Monday afternoon. 

We didn't have a party on Monday night.

But we did on Tuesday night, New Year's Eve.

We played SkipBo again.

And I talked Josh into trying a g/f version of s'mores.

Gluten/dairy-free pastry with chocolate chips and marshmallows.
He liked it.
You want to see another picture, don't you?

We stayed up till eleven and then the kids went to bed.

Some of them were very grumpy the next day.

I took them to the park in the afternoon to wear off some energy, while Papa and Madelyn napped. 

Bethany and Chris came home on Wednesday night. 

I wish I had thought to get my camera ready to capture Madelyn's expression when she saw them. It was one of pure, ecstatic joy.

And now our house is strangely quiet again.