Today was a quiet day, cleaning house and doing laundry. The girls and their families will be coming tomorrow, probably will get here just in time for Phyl's Memorial Service which will be at 4 pm at Menno.

I broke the antenna connection on my computer, so will try sending this with my iPhone .

From Chilly to HOT!

It was chilly in Maple Valley this morning -- enough so that I got my jacket out of my suitcase after we had dropped Leslie off at work! We didn't get to bed very early last night. We just had too many things to talk about and see. Forry drooled over Bill's shop and his kilns for glass work. They're going to have fun figuring out how much they can take with them when they finally get the house sold and go on the road!

I ended up sleeping most of the way home, it's been a lot of busy days. My back seems to be settling down a bit. It still hurts when I stand for a while or when I do much walking. But at least, the rest of the time it's staying relatively quiescent.

We stopped in Moses Lake and had a short visit with Vic. No one was home when we stopped, but Pam drove up right behind us and Vic shortly thereafter and then Sarah. A cold can of pop with them tasted pretty good as it was just plain HOT! We stopped at Safeway for a few groceries, then came on home to a very warm Auntie Violet.

Seafood and Beads!

Can't do much better then that! We had dinner at Anthony's Home Port in Kirkland with some friends and are now over at their house drooling over Bill's handmade, hand blown beads. Leslie was kind enough to give me a baggie to take some "samples." We got to Anthony's early enough to have their four course Sunset Dinner: shrimp cocktails; salad or clam chowder; Dungeness Crab salad (Leslie had salmon/shrimp and Bill had prawns) and creme brulee or Irish Cream chocolate mousse.

It's been an eventful weekend we spent celebrating MM's 50th birthday. Scott and I had spent a good share of the day cutting up steak, pineapple, peppers, onions, tomatoes, zucchini and mushrooms and threading them on skewers for the shish kabobs.

MM's sister Dawn and her family arrived just in time for the belly dancer. There were about thirty plus people there, about half of the them kids. Everyone brought a side dish, so we had lots of great food. (The belly dancer was an auction prize at the kid's school.)

We weren't too ambitious Monday morning, but eventually MM, Dawn and I went to the Mall with the three grandaughters. The initial premise was that Dawn was going to take MM shopping for an outfit for her birthday, but we all ended up getting something. I gave each of the girls a $20 bill, Dawn gave them a cell phone and we turned them loose. They had a ball, checking in every once in a while to have Mom check out a potential purchase.

Later the guys joined us with the grandsons and we took turns in groups going to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (taking turns staying home with the youngest kids). It made for a pretty late evening, but I think we all had a good time!

During the night I got a bright idea and emailed Bill and Leslie to see if we could meet for lunch with them on our way home. We ended up deciding to meet them for dinner and then staying overnight at their place tonight.

Cooler in Western Washington

The thermometer (it's in the shade) at Auntie Violet read 107 degrees when we left her about one this afternoon! It was 90 degrees on the reader board at the top of Snoqualamie Pass and only a bit above 70 when we arrived at daughter Mary Mae's in Mount Vernon about 8 this evening. Much, much nicer!

We'd have been here an hour sooner, but the traffic through Everett was moving between 0 and 20 miles an hour most of the way. They've added a whole other lane to the freeway during the time MM and Scott have lived here and it hasn't seemed to make any difference at all -- it's always extremely slow from north of Seattle until you get past Everett.

Lunch at Manito Park

We spent the night in Spokane last night as I had an appointment with the podiatrist this morning and didn't want to turn around a drive back up again.

It's a bit cooler in Eastern Washington today, only in the mid-nineties. Auntie Violet was still very warm when we got home this afternoon, though!

Forry had picked up a fishwich at Burger King (I had a Starbuck's caramel frappachino) and we decided to go up to Manito Park to eat lunch at the duck pond. After the intense three digit heat we've had the last week, it was quite pleasant in the shade.

The water in the pond is definitely green! There are signs all over -- even painted on the sidewalk -- asking people to please not feed the ducks. But, everytime we stop by there's always a family or group of kids with bags of stale bread.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Magnetic Resonance Imaging is NOT my favorite thing! I had an MRI two years ago that the doctor wanted to repeat to see how much change there had been in my back. They certainly haven't improved the experience, in fact, I think the machines have gotten louder! The tech said I wasn't imagining it, the more powerful the machines are, the noisier... It was a l-o-n-g 25 minutes this afternoon.

It will take at least two days for the MRI to be read by the radiologist, then I guess the surgeon will call to discuss what happens next.

Today our oldest daughter turned 50! I'm really not sure how that happened -- it hasn't been that long since MM was just a baby with the biggest blue eyes! We will head over to Mount Vernon sometime on Friday for the big party her husband has organized for Saturday afternoon (something about belly dancers?).

We talked with both of the girls and Sean today. Lots of bittersweet stories about Phyllis, lots of fun memories about our Flying Farmer days, and stories of time spent working for Vic.

Rest in Peace

My beloved friend Phyllis passed tonight. We went into Moses Lake this afternoon and were blessed to be with Phyl and her family this evening. She's had a fifteen month courageous battle with brain cancer. It is good to think about her being in heaven -- chatting up a storm.

It's Still HOT!

It was still 85 degrees at 8:30 this evening! We don't turn the air conditioning on when we're gone, so it was VERY HOT in Auntie Violet when we got back from Spokane this afternoon. I immediately put my swimsuit on and went over to Diane's pool. She had been playing in the pool this afternoon with her grands, but was happy to get in again and do some exercising with me. I was glad that I had brought home more than half of the portobello sandwich that I had at lunch at Isabella's, so I didn't have to cook tonight. Forry had a large reuben sandwich for lunch, so he was content to nibble on chips and guacamole.

The doctor took some more x-rays of my back this morning. It looks like the vertebrae that are causing the stenosis have shifted over another 1/8th inch or so from the x-rays taken earlier. He wants me to get another MRI to see what the changes are there from the one two years ago...


Here's some more of what's blooming in the coulee:






They are camomile daisies -- I understand they are what is dried and used to make camomile tea...

In Farrier Coulee...

The home place of Tree Heart Ranch Ltd. is located in Farrier Coulee which runs through the middle of the farm. We don't know if the man who bred and raised horses up by the big springs was named Farrier or if that was his occupation. There are still remnants of the stone corrals where he kept horses. Forry says that he turned his domestic stallion loose with the wild horses, then caught and trained the ensuing colts. All of the many springs that used to line the coulee are long gone, victims of the dropping water table due to the deep wells used for irrigation. When we were first married, we got our domestic water from a now-defunct spring across the coulee that was piped into a cistern in the house yard.


When Forry was a boy, he found lots of arrowheads along the creek (which has long since been dry except for spring run-off) and his older brother talked about finding an area where it looked like the Indians had chipped rock for arrowheads.



There are about four hundred acres of unfarmable land in the coulee. We used to raise about twenty head of cattle here. Along with the farmland that is in the Conservation Reserve Program, Forry spends a great deal of his time in the spring spraying out the noxious weeds in the coulee.

It's been interesting to see all the varities of wild flowers that bloom in the coulee. There are lots of yarrow plants that bloom in amongst the sagebrush: