And I would've gotten away with it too...

...if it weren't for that scaredy cat!

The new neighbors across the street apparently have two cats. One grey and one black and they both like hanging out in our yard, but especially love lounging on our new patio furniture. The other day I heard a noise at the front door around dinner time, so I went to go check it out. Turns out it was the black cat scratching at the door....it was sitting there waiting for me to open the door!! This morning I went outside to get the newspaper and what do you know, there was the black cat laying on one of the patio chairs. OMG....I ran back in the house to get the camera (I've been trying to get a picture of them in the act for a few days now), but I couldn't find it. Meanwhile Tyler went outside, I was sure the cat was going to run away. Then I remembered that I had left the camera upstairs, so I ran up the stairs and back down (surely the cat was gone by now). I turned the camera on, went back outside and the cat was still sitting there! However, as soon I raised the camera to take a picture the cat lept off the chair and rocketed back across the street. Soooo, close! The cats don't really bother me that much, I just think it's a little strange that they spend so much time at our house. I was just trying to get a picture for blogging purposes, not really for any other reason.

I brought Tyler, my new human calculator to the Farmer's market this morning. Don't ask me how he suddenly came to be a mathematician...I think it has something to do with his computer games. Anyway, I told Tyler that I had $10 to spend at the market. First we bought a watermelon for $3 and he informed me that I had $7 left. Dang! How does he know that, I thought to myself. Next we picked up a bag of caramel kettle corn for another $3 and Tyler told me I still had $4 left to spend. Wow, right again! But only $4 left and we still wanted to buy apples, corn on the cob and green beans...could we do it? We bought 4 ears of corn for $1 and Tyler started to freak out...."Mommy, are apples for 3 dollars?" Sure enough we picked 4 small apples for $2 and still had $1 left for a half pound of green beans. We even made it out of there with .25 cents to spare. Tyler was ultra proud of himself for helping keep track of the money while we shopped. Me too, where does he learn this stuff?

The big 1-0

Today we celebrated Marceau's 10th birthday. Tyler and I made a giant sign using letters and balloons that I cut with the cricut. Then we used stickers and markers to decorate the rest of the paper. We don't usually celebrate Marceau and Max's birthday, but heck, Marceau is 10 years old....I wanted to do something special. I've had her for a long time, longer than any other pet. The average lifespan of a cockatiel is 15-20 years, so hopefully they'll both be around for a long time to come.


For Marceau's birthday dinner, I made some of her favorite....cornbread muffins and spaghetti noodles. The rest of us ate a southwestern style baked spaghetti that had ground beef, tomato, onion, chili powder, bell pepper, and cheddar cheese. I served it with a salad and cornbread muffins. What, no cake? I guess we'll be eating leftover cookies for dessert.

More ducks or tomatoes?

While shopping at Costco, I bought another package of sandwich bread (which contains two loaves) thinking that we needed more at home. Well, come to find out we already had some bread in the freezer, so I really didn't need to buy any more. What to do with the extra bread, you ask? Feed the ducks, of course....that's is why Tyler and I found ourselves at the park with an armload of bread.

The amount of ducks at the pond always amazes me...I can't believe how many there are! I was asking Tyler what he thought there was more of....ducks in the pond or tomatoes growing in our garden. I can't tell, I think it's a toss up. There seems to be hundreds of both!

I love feeding the ducks, but there are always a few geese at the pond too. Sometimes, a whole flock will stay for a while. It's funny, the geese always walk straight through the crowd of ducks and will stand right in front and beg for bread. Look at the picture below (you can click on it to see it larger) those two geese at the bottom are standing right at my feet! The one on the bottom right is like, "Uhh...you got any more bread, or what?"



Yesterday, Tyler was browsing the pantry and came across my bag of mini m&m's for baking and proceeded to insist that we needed to use them up. After a little browsing on the Internet, I decided to make monster cookies. The recipe is from the Cookie Madness blog that I visit all the time. What I like best about her recipes is that they are usually for small batches (since she bakes cookies every day), which is great for a small family like ours.

The verdict....they are very tasty. The whole recipe is supposed to make 8 monster sized cookies, but I made 16 smaller cookies instead. They have almost no flour and are made mostly of peanut butter and oatmeal. Oh, and I even pulled out the magic bullet for this one (pssst....see Mom, I'm not even home a week and it's already in use). I didn't have enough quick cooking oats for the recipe, so I pulsed a handful for regular old fashioned oats to make up the difference.

Well, Look at that!

Finally, I'm back in business! Our camera was delivered to our door last Thursday, after we had already left for Chico. We had a friend come over and pick it up and hold it for us until we came back. So I finally got my hands on it this morning and have been trying it out....taking pictures of anything and everything. Indoors, Outdoors, Tyler, the birds, my garden....you name it!

Yesterday, I picked some of the vegetables from the garden that had ripened while we were away. I ended up with a huge bowl of tomatoes (almost double what is in the picture below) and a couple of giant zucchini. There are quite a few bell peppers that are ready too, but I find that they last longer if I just leave them on the plant.

The day before we left town, I sent Rick to work with a large bowl of vegetables to share with the guys. I sent tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, sweet banana peppers, zucchini, and a bell pepper. I was trying to share our bounty with someone we actually knew, instead of just random neighbors. Now Rick went back to work yesterday and tells me that nobody took the vegetables...they were still sitting there. What?!!? Why would you not take free food? I had picked it fresh from the garden that day...you can't beat that! Oh well, I guess I'll just go back to offering vegetables to random neighbors or to anyone that knocks on our door.

My garden doesn't look so bad, now does it? This is the box that has peppers (bell, jalapeno, and banana) in the front and zucchini and squash in the very back.

Here's a look at the tomatoes...it's a little deceiving from this angle. Most of the red ripe tomatoes are on the other side of the box....and believe me, there is no shortage of those!

Here are the sungolds...I love these tomatoes! They are so sweet and have such a pretty color in salads and salsa.

Guess How Many

Last night I went into the garden and picked all the ripe cherry tomatoes. We have two varieties. . . regular red cherry tomatoes and sungold tomatoes, which are a bright orange when ripe. I brought a cereal bowl with me and filled it up to the brim. Then I took it in the house and make everyone try to guess how many tomatoes were in the bowl. You want to make a guess? Oh, that's right....I can't take a picture! Rick guessed 30 tomatoes, but then Tyler wanted to guess that number so Rick had to guess 35 instead. Having picked the tomatoes, I knew the number was higher than that, so I guessed 55 tomatoes. Boy, was I wrong (and everyone else too)!! I counted 90 cherry tomatoes! Not bad, not bad at all for the little garden that could. Wait, I think that is Susan's garden. My garden is more like the garden that likes to grow a bazillion teeny tiny vegetables.

As for my pictureless blog, we ordered a new camera on Friday so hopefully things around here will be getting back to normal by the end of next week. It's a Panasonic Lumix TZ5, if anyone is a camera nerd or just wants to know. Our old camera had a bit of a hard time taking good pictures indoors, so maybe the new camera will be better in that department. I just miss being able to take pictures....being able to document the progress of my garden, taking pictures of the food I cook, of course pictures of Tyler and the family. The summer is the busiest time around here with the most events/activities going on and I hate not having a camera.

I don't want to bore you with the fat lot of nothing we did this weekend...I mean NOTHING! We basically just sat around the house for a few days. I don't know why, but I'll just use the excuse that it was too hot outside to do anything else. We are leaving for Chico on Thursday so I'd better snap out of this funk and do some fun things with Tyler for the next couple of days. We all know how he does on 10 hour plus trips...eek!

Stand Back Said the Elephant

It was really hot here today, right around 100 degrees. It's supposed to stay hot for the next couple of days too....yuck! That's why Tyler and I postponed our trip to the library today until the evening....to avoid the heat during the day. I'm so excited....I picked out an oldie but goodie for Tyler called, Stand Back Said the Elephant, I'm Going to Sneeze! Yet another book I remember from my childhood, but this one is perfect because Rick and Tyler are always joking that I sound like an elephant when I sneeze! Tyler is always telling me, "Bless you Elephant Mommy" whenever I sneeze. I also got another book about a girl who thinks that the moon is a big sugar cookie in the sky and it includes a recipe for Sugar Cookie Moons. I'm all about any children's story book that revolves around cooking or baking. Hopefully Tyler and I will get a chance to try out the recipe before the book is due back.

That reminds me that Tyler decided that he wants to be a chef this year for Halloween. We saw a pattern at Joann's that would be perfect....it includes pants, a button up chef coat (I don't think the buttons actually open, but are just for looks), and a chef's hat. Now all I have to do is find some cute fabric and start a-sewing. I'm so relived....for the longest time, Tyler has been talking about being a pumpkin for Halloween. I think pumpkin costumes are more cute on little babies, so I'm glad he changed his mind without me having to twist his arm too hard.

The house directly across the street from ours finally sold and we met our new neighbors the other night. They seem really nice and the best part is that they have a daughter right in the babysitting age range. Maybe she'll be interested in watching Tyler some time. That was the last empty house on our block, so now it really is starting to feel more like a neigborhood instead of a construction zone.

The summer activities are already starting to wind down. The last art in the park was tonight and the last two movies in the park are coming up this weekend. Yikes, it's going to be harder to keep Tyler entertained now. Maybe we'll catch the movie in the park tomorrow night or the circus is coming to town this weekend, maybe we'll go see that. But for now....I've got to get that boy to bed.....

Happy Birthday to Me

My birthday came and went yesterday, very quiet, just like any other day. Rick had to work so it was just me and Tyler for most of the day. Tyler gave me a card that he cut out of his cutting/folding workbook. The card was already premade, he just cut it out, folded it and wrote my name a million times on the inside. After Tyler gave me the birthday card, he told me that you get 3 things on your birthday....a card, toys, and cake. Now that I had a card, I only needed 2 more things......toys and a cake.

Rick had wanted to get me a frozen Cheesecake Factory cheesecake from Costco that we had seen before in their freezer section, but when we went to get one yesterday they were all gone. While we were at Costco though, we picked up a few gifts for me ..... a new gooseberry patch cookbook and a flat iron for my hair. Then we went to a different store to try to find a cake, but we didn't really find anything good. I ended up buying a box of Funfetti cake mix and baked it up myself. I frosted it with a can of leftover frosting from the fridge and decorated it with sprinkles and mini m&m's.

For dinner, it was whatever was next on my meal plan, which happened to be roasted veggie pasta. I picked 2 small zucchini, a yellow squash, and as many tomatoes as I could get from my garden. I chopped everything up along with some mushrooms from the store and roasted them in the oven with olive oil, dried basil, salt & pepper. For the pasta, I cleaned out my pantry and ended up with a sort of wacky mac. I used a combination of wagon wheel, shell, whole wheat spiral, and bow tie pasta. When the veggies came out of the oven, I poured them over the cooked pasta and topped it off with shredded Parmesan cheese.

Yesterday, Tyler woke up with a scratchy voice and withing a few hours I knew that he was getting sick. By the evening, he had the whole runny nose, sneezing thing going on too. With Tyler being sick, he wasn't into eating the dinner at all. However, he did help me sing Happy Birthday to myself and ate a piece of cake too.

After dinner we went upstairs and watched the Olympics for a few hours. It was mostly diving, swimming, and men's gymnastics.

As for my garden, it's recovering nicely after we stopped watering it for a while. Rick used wooden stakes and twine to hold the tomato cages up, while the ground dries up a little. The smaller plants are also doing better after I propped them up with rocks along their bases. As for me, it's another lesson learned in gardening 101.

Garden disaster

I told Rick that I would not be going on the trip unless we came up with a self watering system for the garden. He decided to run the irrigation pipes to each of the garden boxes and fit them with drip lines. Then once the lines were programmed into the irrigation timer, we would have a flawless system, right? Rick dug the trenches the night before we left and fitted the pipes, drip line, and set the timer just minutes before we left town. We tested the lines to make sure the water came through to the garden and then got the heck out of dodge!

I was so paranoid about my garden that I checked up on it as soon as we got home last night. It was after 9:00 and dark outside, so I took a flashlight with me. I only had one word to say...Wow!
....Wooooow!!

Rick had set the timer to water 4 times a day for 45 minutes each. Well, that was waaaaay to much!! The ground became so soft that it was no longer able to support the weight of the plants and ALL of the plants were laying on the ground. None of them were standing upright anymore. Let me try to create a visual....imagine that each tomato plant (cage and all) is a bowling pin....when I came home and saw them, I wanted to yell.....STRIKE!! The plants are laying in every direction, on top of each other.....it's just a mess. I went out this morning to try to stand the plants back up, but the ground is just too wet! Several of the zucchini that were growing had started to rot because of the ultra moist ground. The entire ground surrounding the garden is totally soaked and muddy and you start to sink when you walk in it.

My basil is doing great though.....I left it in the front yard so that it would get watered along with the grass every day. I'm headed back outside now to see how things are looking. For the smaller pepper plants, I used rocks to prop them up....but for the tomatoes, I've yet to figure out what to do.

P.S. One more thing about our trip....you know us, another trip....another ticket, right? We got a parking ticket in Seattle! We parked on the street in a zone that did not allow any parking after 3:00 p.m and we had parked there around 2:45 or something like that. When we came back an hour later, it was after 3:00 and we had been graced with a ticket. I think it was around $40.....nice, huh?

We're Back!

We got back from our trip last night...we went to Seattle for a couple of days and then drove on to Vancouver, Canada and stayed there for a few days as well. We had a good time. We picked up Jeff (an old co-worker of Rick's from L.A) and his wife Kim, in Seattle and they were with us for the duration of the trip.

Our first day in Seattle, we stopped at Pike Place Market were we had the best clam chowder I've ever tasted in my life! Yum!! Next, we did the underground tour, which I thought was really neat. The city burned to the ground in 1886 and when they rebuilt, the level of the streets were raised 10 ft so they were above sea level...but this was done after the store owners had already begun rebuilding their stores. So....the first floors of the stores were then underground and from the street, you could only see from the second floor up. In the tour we were able to go down and see some of the old bottom floors of the stores, the old sidewalks, artifacts and things like that.

The next day we went to ride the ducks.....the amphibious World War II vehicles that tour around Seattle, both on the streets and in Elliot Bay. It was nice....a mini history lesson of the city and a boat ride combined! Tyler got a duck quacker and had a blast "quacking" all throughout the ride. After riding the ducks, we hit the zoo, which is huge! It took us around 4 hours to get through it. The best part....Tyler and I got to feed the giraffes! We offered them some sort of leafy branch and they would eat off all of the leaves.

After the zoo, we started the drive to Vancouver, which is about 2 1/2 hours from Seattle. It took a while to cross the border into Canada, but overall it was a pretty simple process. We just had to show identification and go through a mini interrogation. They asked where we were from, where we were going, for how long, why, and so on. Our hotel in Vancouver was right in the middle of downtown. There was a massive amount of construction going on in the city, so it was kind of noisy and a real pain to drive through.

On our first day in Vancouver, we went to the Capilano suspension bridge. It is 230 ft above the ground and 450 ft long. It was kind of wobbly, but even Tyler made it across fine, so it wasn't that bad. They also have a treetop adventure, which is several mini suspension bridges that connect to platforms surrounding several trees. Uhh, it's kind of hard to explain...it'd be nice if I had pictures!! After that we went to Granville Island, which is a shopping district. I don't know that it is an actual island, but it is located right on the waterfront. They have a huge public market and a ton of cute little stores. They also had a really neat (and free) outdoor water park for kids.

The next day we went to Grouse Mountain, which is 4,100 ft above Vancouver. You take a tram (Skyride) to the top of the mountain and they have hiking trails, a grizzle bear habitat, lumberjack shows, helicopter tours, a bird show and things like that.

On our last day, we went visited Chinatown and Gastown for some souvenirs. We got some t-shirts and a mug in Chinatown and some maple cookies and coffee in Gastown. Rick got a small frosted glass Inukshuk and a small wooden totem pole. The winter Olympics in 2010 will be held in Vancouver, so there was a ton of olympic related souvenirs. Maybe we'll just have to go back....

Okay, kids....that's all for now. Stay tuned for episode number two, in which you'll find out about my garden and the carnage that took place while we were away.

Nothing to see here

Yesterday, we went to see a baseball game... the Yakima Bears vs the Boise Hawks. I thought it would be a nice family thing to do, but Tyler didn't even understand much of what was going on. Earlier in the day, he was talking about being the star of the game and I had to explain to him that we weren't going to go play baseball, but that we were going to watch a game. So, he acted pretty much like he does during a boring movie...he wasn't paying any attention and he was climbing all over the bleachers. I can't blame him too much though, it was over after the 3rd inning when the other team scored 7 runs. The Bears were never able to catch up after that....the final score was 13 to 5. Ouch!

We left the game early, after the eighth inning and went to catch the movie in the park. The movie was Shark Tales and none of us had seen it before. I didn't care too much for it, though. The main character was the voice of Will Smith and the movie had a real hip hop...what's up dawg, kind of vibe to it. Not really my thing, I guess.

I took a few pictures when we got to the park and I don't remember what I did with the camera after that, but I assume that I put it back in my purse. Well, when we got home I realized that we didn't have the camera with us. The bad thing is that when the movie is over, the park is sooo dark, you can't see a thing! I don't know what happened. I don't know if I left the camera in the grass, or if it fell out of my purse, fell out of the blankets when we were carrying everything back to the car, or if somebody stole it....but we don't have a camera anymore. Rick went back to the park to look for it, but didn't find it. Everybody was gone by then, except the allied arts crew that were putting away the equipment...they said nobody turned in a camera. Great!! Tomorrow we are leaving on vacation to Seattle and Canada and we don't have a camera anymore....not very cool. Needless to say, I won't be able to add pictures to my blog for a while. I don't expect to get our camera back and Rick is quite the deal seeker, so it may be a while before we'll be taking pictures again!

Mommy the Entertainer

Who knew it started so early? Tyler has started in on his, "Mommy, where are we going today?"....."Mommy, what else can we do?"......"Mommy, what can I do now?".....in other words, "I'm BORED"! So that's where my umpteenth job comes in as Mommy the Entertainer. On today's docket....more crafts and a scavenger hunt.

The other day, I read in the paper that ACE Hardware has a Kid's Club on Saturdays where kids age 3-12 can come and make a free craft. Perfect! I don't know if this is a year round thing or just for the summer, but it's just the sort of thing I try to do with Tyler. So, we went over there today and the kids were painting a wooden peg hook (I don't know what it's called, but it looks like a mini coat hanging rack). They had a bunch of different shapes to choose from like a flower, heart, sailboat, circle, and star. Tyler choose the heart shape and painted it pink and yellow...awwww, cute right? Now all we have to do is find a place to hang it up. It will probably go in his room, but I'm not quite sure what he'll hang on it.

After dinner, we went on a "nature walk" or scavenger hunt to find things on a list that I created. I made one up the other day and Tyler had so much fun that he was desperate to do it all again. I used clip art and made a little list of things we could find around our neighborhood, like a traffic light, newspaper, flag, a cat, etc. The point was not to collect items, but just to spot them and cross them off the list. Now to make my third scavenger hunt list....ughhh, what have I started!

As for tomorrow, that's still up for grabs! Rick and Tyler will probably spend most of the day working on the sprinklers in the backyard. Maybe we'll go see the Yakima Bears tomorrow evening, for a baseball game or maybe we'll go do the Movie in the Park tomorrow night, it's a cartoon after all....Shark Tales.