Goody Gumdrop

The New House

It's not ours but we are taking care of it for Georgeann.  It's lovely and we are snug as little bugs in a rug here.  Actually, more like bugs in a bigger, roomier rug.  But now that it's gotten colder in the mornings, it feels cosy.  We are all enjoying the house.  I took a few pictures in the back yard in September.

Get a load of this tree house!  Boy heaven.

 

I'm not looking forward to raking up those leaves.  There's no grass back here.  Lots of shrubbery and it is pretty shaded except for midday.  I think we are going to put in a flagstone patio before it all turns into a muddy dog pit.  Georgeann is amenable to us doing things.  She said we could paint if we wanted.  After unpacking, I don't want to do anything.  It's been nice just to BE here this month without feeling the urgency of organizing things or trying to find something critical in a box somewhere.

Here's the back of the house.

 

 
Lola likes it here.  The rats like the open sides of the big compost bin, and after touching maggots on the side of the swinging compost bin, I'm not sure I can handle that.

Georgeann has all sorts of cool rocks and things in the back yard. She had a lot of potted plants in the back and some happily thriving tomato plants in the front.  I think it's time to yank them.  I'm sick of tomatoes.  The acorn squash is getting powdery mildew and we already ate the one big daddy it grew.

 

What is this spriraled plant?  Do I need to bring it in for the winter?  There is also what I think is an amyrillis bulb.  Do I need to bring that one in too?

 

I can't wait to see what kind of bulbs come up.  Patches of muscari have already sprouted.  Tomorrow I think I'll do a round of fall cleanup and weed pulling here, and hopefully have some time to putter in the sewing room.  It'll be another beautiful sunny day!  Today was perfect.

 

Time to Dress Up

 

Goodbyes

They're hard when you have a sentimental heart. 

 

The good thing about this one is that it is very long and drawn out.  Slow.  And it's exhausting to work all week and then work all weekend on cleaning out and cleaning up.  This weekend I spent 2 days working on the yard.  It was not a summer focused on yard work, so some areas were pretty out of control.  Two yard debris cans and three bags later, it's a little bit tidier.  As tidy as it is going to get with apples falling every two seconds and a few leaves getting a head start too.

The boys have spent a lot of time over there playing.  They've been amazingly patient (plied by happy meals).  Armed with their entire gun collection and a few army guys they have disappeared upstairs for 2 days in a row (which they also did the weekend before). Oh, and the two weekends before that as well. I would say they do not normally play so harmoniously together at home so I think the spareness of empty rooms is good for their imaginations.

I hope someone new wants to live in this home.

 

I thought the big empty living room would be a great place for a shot of Liesl.  Doug says I'm playing favorites now, and he's right.  Tigre's been tossed aside like yesterday's news.

 

But then the boys decided it was target practice time.

 

Who suffers?  The doll, that's who.

 

It's not really goodbye time yet though.  I expect it'll take a little while.  By the time it is time, I will be very, very ready.

Hanna Ranch

Due to the wonders of facebook Doug has gotten in touch with some of his high school friends recently.  His friend Regina married a cattle rancher named Judd and they live on a ranch west of Yreka.  On our road trip down south we stopped to stay for a couple of days.  Regina's best friend from high school, Susan, and her husband Rick were also visiting from Bakersfield, so it was like a little reunion for them. 

I was pretty excited about this.  How fun!

Plus - I was pretty sure this was going to be the most exciting Blythe scene yet.  Doug told me he'd be humiliated and his friends would laugh at me if I broke out the dolls.  Well.  I debated about covert Blything and decided I'd just have to take my chances.  This was important!  I spent all of the non-working hours of the two days leading up to our departure ensconced in the basement "doing laundry" aka sewing WESTERN OUTFITS. You cannot visit a ranch without appropriate clothing. (Or sleeping bags!)  And I have a whole stock of western fabrics on hand from sewing Isaac's cowboy quilt top.  Doug packed and I sewed. He cursed.  I swore it would only take just one more hour! I tried the puchicollective collared shirt pattern.  Something went wrong and I ended up with extra fabric, but I paid no mind and just tacked it down on the inside.  But you know...three dolls...you need three outfits!  One kinda Daisy Duke, one kinda prairie girl skirt, and one traditional bandana shirt and blue plaid themed.

It all worked out swimmingly.  It was so relaxing.  And pretty.  And fun to visit and watch the kids.

There were horses.

I was able to expose my ropers to some bona fide animal excrement (besides Lola's) for the first time.

And the Blythes were happy.

 

But do you know who was the happiest of all?  Dylan!  The girl found Blythe Love. 

 

I wish she'd seen this cowgirl hat.

It is right up her alley!  The hat's not mine (sadly).  And in case you were wondering, Build a Bear cowboy hats fit big Blythe heads.  Who knew!  I know what's on MY Christmas list now.

I can't wait to visit Hanna Ranch again. Thanks Regina and Judd!

Home

I love going home, to my parents house, even though 'home' is a house I've never lived in.  It still feels like home because it has my parents and their things and is in the same hometown that I've claimed as mine, even though I only ever lived there for 5 years. I've now lived in Portland for 12 years, and this should be home more than that.  This is a different kind of home. 

Mom and Dad's home is one you want to visit and just don't want to leave.  It's very relaxing.  It probably helps that my mom takes morning wake-up duty with the boys and lets us sleep in.  And somehow it's cool and quiet enough to actually do that.  And we are always tired from staying up too late out by the pool.  And eating midnight snacks out of the big huge walk-in pantry.  You could survive a world war hunkered down in that place.  On our first night there Ebin thought he had landed at 7-11.  He excitedly pulled up a stool and proclaimed 'I'm going to have a SNACK!!'

It's like a lovely bed and breakfast with Grandma and Grandpa.  We just left and I want to go back again!

This very, very happy Sago palm grows about a foot a year.

This staghorn fern is a family legacy.  Maybe someday my Dad will give me one of its babies.  I think I'd have to live in a place with the appropriate climate.
 

My 7th grade pottery project:

(The russian urinal fountain)

   

Don't be fooling yourself that I am the only doll person in the family!  Nope, this is an inherited trait.  My mom has a collection of (adorable) Betsy McCall dolls currently stored in a bathroom cupboard.  I was in sitting in the bathroom with Isaac and looking at a few of the dolls.  He asked me 'Are you supposed to be doing that??" and then looked really surprised when I said 'No!'  And there is your blog confession for the day.  Mom is just lucky Betsy is smaller than Blythe!
 

 I know they'll move someday.  But I don't want them to!  Ever.

The High Desert Museum

I've been wanting to blog about this, so I'll have to make it a quick one before another 3 weeks pass.  I am doing a noise analysis project for a new road over in Bend and had to go do the noise monitoring for a couple of days a few weeks ago.  I stayed for 2 nights and Doug brought the boys over to join me for the 2nd night.  We love Bend.  It has really changed immensely since we first visited it in, oh....1997!  We did a spring break drive up to snowboard Bachelor.  This completely colored our decision to move to Portland due to the belief that Mt. Hood must be as epic as Mt. Bachelor with the added bonus of being only 60something miles away (no need for a hotel!).  The belief was completely off-base, so Bend remains an awesome destination for us that we do not visit often enough.  It's about 3 hours away and is a high desert town.  It's dry and has a lot more pine trees and sun than Portland.

On Saturday we swam in the hotel pool (or hot tub - me) and then headed to the High Desert Museum (after checking out a tiny store of Japanese things in downtown). 

The museum was a great combination of indoor and outdoor exhibits.  It was also the perfect day for visiting.  It was a beautiful 85 degree day.  Bend can get pretty hot in the summertime.

The replica homestead was my favorite part.  I was pretty entranced by anything prairie-related as a child, and I think I still am.  The ladies in costume were very entertaining in their characters and put the kids to work scrubbing the porch.  The younger of the two challenged Doug and I to do a hoop rolling race to the barn and back.  When I won she informed him he'd been beaten at a boy's game, no less!  The pick up sticks were for girls. 

Ebin had a few high points during the day.  He fell of the bench hitting his head on concrete during the Birds of Prey show which had signs all over the doors saying QUIET because the birds get startled.  Well, I hope they survived the trauma of the screaming.  He then tried to duck under the ropes to climb the old firetruck after I told him he couldn't.  He looked at it with a sparkle in his eye, looked at me with a sideways glance and a smirk, and then went for it.  Having put the kibosh on that he decided to jet out of the gift store with a kaleidoscope.  I started chasing him (as a guy says 'Well it looks like he recovered from the bump on the head!') and then realized, oh, he is REALLY running and I had to start sprinting through the museum entrance hall with my loud-slapping flip-flops.  Ahem.  Three year olds.  He got to ride back to Portland with Doug :)

In addition to the amazing outdoor exhibits, the museum also had very impressive indoor collections.  There was a large Native American exhibit about the Columbia Plateau tribes that goes right up through modern times and a great one called 'Sin in the Sagebrush' about the gambling halls and brothels of the wild west.  All in all it was a great family day - fun for all of us!

Experiments in Painting

I used to love to paint.  I am super rusty now.  I bought some acrylic paints and did some experimenting when Ebin was a baby and realized I needed some far larger blocks of time to be able to really get into it again.  Those blocks of time don't happen when you have a baby, and aren't happening now either!  But I wanted to make a banner for my Etsy store so I thought I might try to paint something. 

The best part was that the kids got into this little project with me!

I've been making some Blythe clothes and I have two quilts to sell.  I ordered sewing labels for the quilts but they're really too big for the Blythe clothes.  Someday maybe I'll order a smaller version.  The labels have a little hedgehog and say Goody Gumdrop.  I was thinking my banner should be a scene of forest-y things so I did some sketching of hedgehogs and the like.  (Ok here is the very funny part.  I should have actually *looked* at Etsy to scope out the banner size before launching into this project.  I was thinking 'oh...picture at the top.'  Ahem.)

So we sketched some words and some hedgehogs.  Isaac's hedgehog's are way cuter than mine!  Then I pulled out my watercolors from COLLEGE and they were still great.  I haven't touched them in at least 12 years or more.  Ebin painted with me. 

So it turns out the Etsy banner is a very long and skinny 100 x 750 pixel graphic.  Whoops!  Which is ok because the only part of the painting that I like is the hedgie.  I wish there was a way to crop him out and show him completely but you can see what I came up with here:

http://www.goodygumdrop.etsy.com/

Or maybe I should use one of Isaac's hedgehogs - they are great!!

I'm hoping to get my stuff listed in August.  We are going camping this weekend and then leaving next Thursday for a 10 day road trip to California.  When we get back I'll be able to take pictures and add my listings!  I can't wait.     

Also - on an unrelated note - Angry Chicken posted that her mom (Grammie) has started a quilting service with her long-arm quilting machine called Tillie Studio.  I have Isaac's quilt top all folded up and waiting, with a plan to have someone else do the quilting.  Now I know who!  (And they live in Portland, so how convenient.)

Stock Options

So I went a little Blythe crazy.  I got my second bonus this year and having spent the first bonus and my birthday money on bills, this one was mine to blow (bills be damned).  Hello Harvest has been my number one wish, but on a whim I bid on a Feel the Sky and won.  She was new in the box for a reasonable price.  New Hello Harvests are listed for ~$400.  And I like my dollies new, with stock.

BUT lo and behold a few days later someone posted this picture online:

(Photo by Liz in Texas aka Rizusan on TIB)

THE girl.  With all her stock.  For a reasonable price. Her face has been spray matted and you can see it is gloriously unshiny for better photo-taking.  So I bought her too.

She was coming from Texas and the other from Hong Kong, so I was pretty sure I'd get HH first.  Tigre took an entire month to arrive from Bangkok.  But no, they arrived on the same day!  I wasn't home though to sign for FTS, so I picked her up at the PO the next day.

HH arrived at the end of an extremely horrible day, so I was happy to have a diversion from my life crisis.

 Isaac was excited too.  He loves blything with me.

 

Liz couldn't locate her stockings so she sent an adorable hat.  I haven't picked a name yet, but I think it should be Austrian.  Giselle?  Gertie?  Liesel?  Her hair is so very fabulous and long.  I'm not going to change any of her eye chips either.  They're all pretty.

She's perfect!

I told Isaac I wasn't sure I was going to keep Feel the Sky.  I wasn't sure about her skin tone and how it would look with her bright yellow hair.  It looks pretty pasty on her Takara photo.  I was pretty excited to pick her up at the PO.

 

I unwrapped the package and kept her in her box all day while I worked.  She just looked so perfect and the box is all part of her charm. Royal Air Blythe! Ebin was home and asked several times to get that dolly out.  When we picked up Isaac he wanted to know if she could be his Blythe. 

'Well what would you name her?' 

'Blythe!'

I explained these are collectible dolls and they're really too expensive to be kid toys.  But he kept asking.  And he launched right into deboxing her when we got home.  She's pretty amazing.  Better than I expected.  Her lips are candy pink and her skin is just a-ok.  Her hair is suffering from 3 years in a box.  Not quite curling at the ends....not quite frizzy.

Doug got home late and Ebin passed out early, so Isaac and I had a nice little Blythe time doing a photo shoot of each girl in their stock.  (Despite it being too dark for a shoot, really.)

Check out this brilliant blue eye shadow:

She's a rather retro glamorous stewardess.

 

 

 

 

   

I could really use one of those big light umbrellas.  Or photoshop.  Not that I'd have time to edit photos.  I shouldn't even be taking the time to blog right now.  It's SOOC or not at all for me.

We lost Tigre's 3rd earring for the 3rd time.  I think it might really be lost, but I have previously believed that and it has turned up.  I should listen to GlamPetals and put it in with saran-wrap (if I ever find it again).  I'm pretty sure it is lost somewhere on this horrid carpet.

 

Isaac kept asking and Feel the Sky is now his Blythe.  Her name is Stewart-ess.  But I call her Lady Gaga.  Project number one:  acquiring some stars and stripes fabrics.

Also very old timey

There's a carousel at Jantzen Beach that we like to visit on rainy Sundays when you have nothing else to do.  The 1921 CW Parker Carousel is the largest running wooden carousel in the country.  It has 72 hand-carved wooden horses and started out it's life in Santa Monica.  It's a real work of art and is now housed in the saddest excuse for a mall that has ever existed.  Nevertheless it is worth a visit!  We hadn't been in a while because Isaac has never been a lover of moving things and the last time we went he repeated 'All done!  All done!' as soon as it started moving.  He was probably 2.  The diameter of the carousel is so big the outside horses travel about 10 miles per hour.  It makes me pretty dizzy. 

 

 
 

Happy 4th of July! 

Where you can drink some nasty water with curative powers

I absolutely love things that are old timey and quaint.  Especially those things of the 1880s-1930s variety.  Old photos.  Old houses.  I like to think how much easier things are for us now (in some ways).  It's hard to imagine what people actually ate on a day to day basis back in 1920.  We are so used to year-round variety in foodstuffs.

Anyway - we love to rent the Forest Service cabins through reservations.gov.  Most were built as part of CCC efforts, but a few are even older.  They usually served as the Ranger's home base for watching an area of the forest.  None have electricity and all of them have propane stoves and lights.  The glow of propane lights is so lovely and disconcerting at the same time. 

Each of the cabins has their own special perks though: location, fire pit, deluxe stove, water spigot nearby, trails, dining room, front porch.  The worst one was the Box Canyon Guard Station.  It was nothing more than a shelter, really.

This one was ace.

 









 









This was the 'footbridge' that Theresa and I were looking for using the map on our Mother's Day Hike.  The only other trail option was straight up Soda Peak.  We went up and up a ways but didn't make it to the lake.  We would have gotten back after dinner time.  I haven't hiked in so long!  Years. It felt so great.