This & That

Sister Days--The Projects

My sisters, mother and I have gotten together for several years and we have developed some traditional things that always happen.

First off, Ollie is totally and completely pampered and treated like the King of Good Dogs that he is, and he rewards us with the happy dog run. My photographer sister took this picture of him and he just looks so darn happy to be there.

Each of us usually brings some kind of project to do and we had some really fun ones this year. We started off with my sister's beaded key chain project.

 We Mod-Podged little discs with cute paper, then covered them with this dimensional glaze. We love to Mod-Podge. We've done it for a couple of years now. They had to dry and cure for a day.

Then we picked out some beads that we liked. One of my favorites was this one...come meet my little friend. We twisted the wires around and then put them on jump rings, which we added to the key chains.

When they were all done this is what they looked like. Cute, huh??

A closer look at mine. My frog friend is hiding underneath there.

We moved on to rustic monogrammed table runners, my other sister's project. She had sewn up the fabric tubes and made a long string of pleated fabric.

We finished off the ends with the pleats and then ironed on the monograms, which she and her daughter had printed onto special transfer paper.

This is also cute, huh??

We were all interested in trying our hand at some wool applique, so I put together a quick project with that and all of us got nearly finished with it. I think mine will become a pillow of some sort for fall.

Then came the real test of my mother's patience, and that was the card making.

Over the years she has not tremendously enjoyed this part of it and I have really tried to adapt my card pieces to make it as easy as possible for her.

I'm pleased to report that we accomplished 12 cards with only a couple of swear words and I believe that one of them was mine when I failed to heed my own advice to check the inside of the card to make sure I was gluing things on the right side. Yeah....

The Snackage

This is an addendum to the food post from Sunday. One of my sisters introduced us to this:

It is evil and addictive and really good, and you can get it at Costco...just my enabling for the day. I had to go to Costco yesterday to pick up stuff for my husband's family reunion at the cabin later this week. I made a very large circuit around the snack area so I wouldn't buy 6 bags...to eat before the menfolk get home from their annual horsey pack-in trip in the Wyoming mountains.

My other sister made this and brought it. Oh laws. I am not generally a popcorn person, but both of these changed my mind...at least while it was all sitting in front of me.

Light

I have been participating in the Big Picture Classes phone photography class. It's been very interesting to see the pictures....really beautiful pictures....that people have been capturing with their phones. Most of the pictures are tweaked somehow with various photo-editing apps, but still they are pretty amazing. I rarely take my big DSLR with me hiking any more, mostly because of the dust and dirt involved, but I always have my phone in my pocket.

One of the assignments last week was to try to photograph light in some way. I started with this one I took of the sun going down behind the mountain next to the cabin. It's fire season here in Idaho and we had smoke in the air from a couple of different fires that gave this one kind of an interesting look. Yes, I've fiddled with saturation some here.

These others were taken on one of those early morning hikes my husband and I have been on recently. You can see the trail we're hiking on and the grass to either side is as tall as my shoulders.

The sun was coming up over the mountain and was just starting to shine over that same tall grass on the hillside.

Pretty morning. I had a much harder time with the "Action" prompt we were given. A lot of that is because the only member of the family who is much interested in doing something action-oriented is Ollie, and even he's thinking it's been too hot to get too excited about that.

Food, Glorious Food

For the past 4 days, I have been at the cabin with my sisters and my mother. We try to do this once a year and we each bring a project to work on. We have a sister-in-law that we'd really like to have come too, but she has family obligations....her kids are younger than ours. We'll keep hoping, though.

Anyway, we all take turns working on the food. We divide up the meals and try to bring things that are fast, easy and delicious. This year was no exception. My sisters are both great cooks. I tried to remember to take pictures of the meals, but these were all I got. Stuffed baked potatoes with salad and fresh cherries for one dinner.

And chicken salad for one of the lunches.  All awesome stuff. In addition, we had things like crepes with blueberry sauce and vanilla cream sauce, taco salad, lemon ricotta pancakes, green chili/egg breakfast casserole, and chicken manicotti.

I had a lunch and dinner assignment and I brought this and this. We always eat well on these adventures and with all of us taking turns, no one has the burden of all the cooking.

Around Here This Week

We had a small thunderstorm roll through on Monday, which was really nice for a change of pace.

We didn't get a whole lot of rain...just enough to get the driveway wet, but it took temperatures down a notch.

The rain even came down while the sun was shining.

Sleep has not been my friend lately. Yep, that's 2:51 AM, people. This is not fun. It's when I've been doing a lot of my blogging lately.

Got some bright red toes.

My sisters and I got together this week for what my Marc called Cackle Fest 2014. My brother actually associated the word "cackle" with us several years ago when we were all together for some family event. His quote was, "Let the cackling begin..." We have fun when we're together and there IS a lot of laughing involved. In fact we are still there...probably cackling.

 

Missionary Pictures

My daughter sent a few pictures with her last weekly email. She totally gets that I need to see her face and she has been really good to make that happen during her time at the Missionary Training Center where she's been for the past 3 weeks. She made her way to Missouri on Wednesday. Missionaries get to call their families from the airport so she and I chatted for a while. It was good and hard at the same time, if that makes sense.

Anyway, views from the training center. She called this an "awkward mission selfie."

She says this has been her view for the past 3 weeks.

And this one is a very traditional MTC photo. Almost every missionary gets their picture taken in front of this large world map, pointing to where in the world they're going. I'm not sure what the deal was with the lighting, but it was so yellow when I got it that this was an amazing radlab improvement.

Weekend Views

My husband took me up a new trail on a recent cabin weekend. Actually I had been up it a couple of times in the past, it's just been a long time, and it hasn't been a regular walking spot until recently. It's about a 10 minute rhino ride from the cabin.

With my daughter gone there has been no pressure to stay home on Fridays and Saturdays so she can be gone all the time with friends. My Bryce is much less social. Perhaps that has more to do with the fact that he can't drive, but I also think that like my other sons, he'd just rather be in the hills.

My view of him and his lunch.

I could hear water near the trail. In fact, there was water in the trail off and on. I find there's something very soothing to me about the sound of water. We can hear the river from the cabin, especially in the spring when the water is high.

And the early morning views can't be beat. I am an early morning hiker...like out of the house at 7, mostly because there is more shade then and I refuse to bake my brains. I need what few I have left. If I'm going to hike, it has to be early before the sun has gotten going much. When my husband and I started out in the rhino last weekend, we could see our breath. It was one very chilly ride to the trailhead. And I'm OK with that.

Wildflowers

I am constantly amazed by the collection of wildflowers I see when I'm up in the hills.

I am also amazed by how short their lifespan is. It seems like every time we go, what was there last time has faded and something new has taken its place.

And surprisingly, there are always new flowers that I've never seen before.

These aren't new to me. These are sego lilies.

On one of our recent hikes, we ran across a whole meadow full of them and I took this picture of Ollie in it. I call it "Dog Among the Sego Lilies." Because I'm really artsy like that.

Deer World

I neglected to post a happy birthday to my DDIL #3 on Sunday. My JAG boy is back in Alabama again for 2 months of JAG-specific training and she has been traveling far and wide to visit her siblings. We will get her back for some time in the near future which will be good. We have missed them.

We have seen more deer up at the cabin this summer than we have for a while.

We can tell they exist not only because of the disappearing salt lick, but we see tracks when we are hiking.

And on occasion, we will catch one or two unawares.

With the prevalence of the dang wolves in the area, they had all but disappeared, either moving on or getting eaten and it's nice to see some around for a change.

Where Have All the Slave Boys Gone?

And for those of you who grew up in a certain era, reading the title of this post will immediately get a 1960's song stuck in your head.

On the last trip to the cabin, we adjusted the tilt of the solar panel. This is more than a little tricky to do without several sons around.  My husband got on that ladder with a wrench. In the meantime, Bryce and I were standing in the back of the rhino with our arms stretched out above our heads as far as they could go, trying to hold the (REALLY heavy) panel in place while my husband adjusted the bolt that would hold it there.  In the end, our arms just weren't long enough, and we had to use old 2x4's to push up on the bottom edge of the panel to get it at the right angle. Yeah, where are the other 4 slave boys when you need them?