My History Lessons

My cousin did this on her blog and I instantly wanted to copy the idea. I didn't do it very instantly, but I'm finally getting around to it. School starts tomorrow and in honor of the last day of summer break I'm going through my elementary school history.

Me playing Jill of Jack and Jill

Kindergarten
School: Yacolt Primary
Teacher: Mrs. Harp
Memories: I loved kindergarten and Mrs Harp was the quintessential kinder teacher. We played with cardboard brick-looking blocks and had a 'house' center that I loved to pretend to cook in. We made tons of fun art projects and on the last day of school, after all the students left and my mom and I were in Mrs. Harp's room (which was special), I lost my first tooth.

First Grade
School: Yacolt Primary
Teacher: Mrs. Miller
Memories: This year I was out in a brown portable. I don't remember much from this year except getting my hair cut with my awesome owl scissors by another student.

Second Grade
School: Yacolt Primary
Teacher: Mrs. Belt
Memories: I remember making peanut butter dough to break into little balls and use in learning my times tables. I just remember that it was so delicious and after we were done using it for math, we got to take it home with us and eat it. I remember eating most of it while waiting for my brother to be done with tae kwon do.

First day of school

Third Grade 
School: Yacolt Primary
Teacher: Mrs. Belt/Mom
Memories: I think this was the year (and maybe last year too) that I was home schooled part time and went to school part time. I also remember making a diorama of the solar system. This year my class was a 2/3 split and I remember I enjoyed helping the second graders with their work. I also remember doing almost anything I could to avoid recess. At home we did all kinds of hands-on learning, specifically during a pioneer unit. Things like making our own butter and washing clothes on a wash-board.

Working hard.

Fourth Grade
School: Homeschool in Wyoming/Yacolt Primary
Teacher: Mom/Mrs. Cushing
Memories: This year we moved to Wyoming for part of the year, and we were homeschooled. In WY we lived in this tiny little town that had a tiny little library. It was always a treat to walk down to the library and get to rent a new movie, most of which were John Wayne movies. When we moved back to Washington I was in Mrs. Cushing's class. We studied the Iditarod race and followed it very closely, I think because she was from Alaska.

Nap time, even in fifth grade.

Fifth Grade 93-94
School: Home/Immanuel Lutheran
Teacher: My mom/Mr. Barenclau & Mrs. B.
Memories: I loved being home schooled. My mom also babysat my best friend's little brother (who's mother was a teacher) and it was the best motivation ever to get my work done early. During this year  I also went to Idaho and finished the last month or so of the school year there. I had two teachers there and don't remember one of their names, just that they both started with a B. I remember feeling like going to the private school didn't matter, since in my mind, I had already done 5th grade at home with my mom. So I wasn't too worried about learning. In turns out that my teachers somehow thought that I was living with my cousins because my parents didn't want me and my poor motivation was because of that! We never did figure out where they got that impression.

Sixth Grade 94-95
School: Longview Christian
Teacher: Mrs. Schmunk
Memories: This was my favorite year of school. I made friends that I still have today and learned several life lessons. I loved my teacher and her love for teaching inspired me. She was the first person that ever insisted on calling me Jillian. I always liked my full name but my family and friends had only ever called me Jill. Mrs. Schmunk liked Jillian too, and I loved that she used it. It was in sixth grade that I realized I liked being the teacher's pet, and I liked being a good student. This year set the stage for the rest of my academic career.

Down Time

The funniest thing about this summer has been how busy I felt. The first part was busy with moving and then unpacking. After that it was busy with getting used to cleaning this big house and training for the big hike. I also started a new job and suddenly we found ourselves up to our eyeballs in weeds (I had no idea how much time we'd spend weeding!).

I don't know where the time went, but I can tell you where the time didn't go... here! I feel like I have barely spent any time at my computer. Not that this is a bad thing, but it's just very different than how I thought my summer would go.

All-in-all, it was a fantastic summer, and I'm so, so, so, SO grateful for the month plus that I had off. I can guarantee that we wouldn't be as unpacked as we are if that hadn't been the case. I also got to spend some great time with our neighbors and really felt like I could stay on top of things around the house. Most importantly, it was also a complete and total blessing to feel like a real wife again.

The down side to staying on top of things around the house and being a real wife was that I felt like I needed to justify and account for every minute of each day. It was an unexpected outcome of not working. I thought I'd nonchalantly get some housework done and then spend the rest of the time getting and staying caught up on my hobbies. Instead, I found that I felt really guilty if I took any time for myself.

When I started working in July, even though it was only 4-5 hours/day at first (turned into closer to full time by the end), I felt like I could justify sitting down for an hour before getting started on the dishes and dinner. I would usually spend this time reading my book study book or getting caught up on photo editing, but felt really guilty if I spent idle time on the computer.

It was an interesting lesson about myself. Someday I'll stay home with kids and this summer has made me realize that I'll have to be very purposeful in carving out some time for myself. Otherwise, between my own guilt and the needs of kids.. I'll shift my workaholic tendencies and never take a moment for my sanity.

So.. How did I do on my summer goals? Here's my summer progress report:

1. Learn Spanish - Super fail. This required too much sitting in front of the computer. Oh well!
2. Read Through the Bible in 90 Days - Almost met! I was scheduled to finish on August 31, but currently I'm a bit behind.
3. Organize - Met! I feel like I had time, and took the time, to get us settled and organized.
4. Training - Met!
5. Be a Better Wife - sounds conceited but: Met!
6. Daily Photography Challenge - Met! See the photos here and here
7. Knitting - Continue, little progress made.
8. Wake Up - {Mostly} Met!
9. Blog! - {Mostly} Met! Even though it doesn't feel like it, when I look back there are several posts about summer. I'd hoped to do more creative or thoughtful blogging, rather than just the life updates though.
10. TBD - Met! This turned out to be: Enjoy!

And enjoy I did! What a great summer.

So, What's It Like?

To be married to me?

This summer I met with a group of women to go through the book What's It Like to be Married to Me?: and Other Dangerous Questions. It was an encouraging experience. This book provided a nice outline to discuss marriage and to challenge ourselves to become better wives.

Although it wasn't quite as dangerous as I expected, reading and discussing this book with friends was a blessing. The topics, or dangerous questions, were thought provoking and helped us to think about our marriages from a different perspective. It is also very helpful that the author provides a study guide in the back of the book. My only criticism would be that some of her stories/examples are a little extreme and harder to relate to for the average wife. Other than those few exceptions, Linda Dillow does a great job in tying together scripture, personal experience, literature and examples from other women. While it was no dangerous sledgehammer to the forehead, it served as an encouraging reminder of what's important in life and in my marriage.

I thought I'd give you the dangerous questions (i.e., chapters) and some of my insights from them (where appropriate), both to share with you and to remind myself later! I had intended to do this as I went through the book, but instead it's all going in one (long) post.. sorry!

Intro: By Design, Not Default
Talks about why you married, what you expect out of marriage and what your examples of marriage were from your childhood and young adulthood. This chapter also discusses, most importantly, why should we look into ourselves and how we could change instead of looking at our husband's weaknesses (not that we ever do that.. right?). I needed this chapter to snap me out of selfishness. As I was starting this book I thought, why am I always reading marriage books and improving myself as a wife and Blake isn't reading husband books... An obvious example of why I needed to do this book study!

1. What is really important to me?
What do my choices say, what are my priorities? I found that the answers to these questions really depended on the season of life we're in. When I'm not working, I can easily make Blake a priority, however, when there are demands like two jobs or someday little kids, it's not as easy - but just as important - to make sure my marriage and husband are a priority. Jesus said it best in Matt. 22:37-39 : Love God first and your neighbor as yourself.. well, who is your closest neighbor? Your husband!

This chapter challenged us to write a purpose statement for our marriage, and also gave some great examples of what God did in women's lives who chose to put their marriage at the top of their list.

So as the book suggested I chose to adapt a scripture for my marriage purpose statement:
1 Corinthians 13:1-7 *I had to write my own for the exercise, but also love The Message version)
If I'm well read and well spoken in every area, but don't love Blake, then my words would only be white noise.
If I was as spiritually adept as Paul, and understood all of God's plans and ways, if I had faith that could move mountains, but didn't love Blake, I would be nothing.
If I worked night and day for the poor, the fatherless and the widows, if I rose at dawn and worked til all hours of the night, but if I didn't love my husband more, then I would have gained nothing. 

I will be patient with and kind to Blake
I will not be jealous of him or boastful to him or proud or rude to him .
I will not demand my own way.
I will not be irritable, and will not keep a record of when I am wronged by him. 
I will not rejoice in the injustice he experiences but will rejoice whenever the truth wins out. 

I will never give up on our marriage, I will never lose faith in God's design for our love, I will always be hopeful for the best in our lives and I will endure through every circumstance life brings us.

Enchantment Lakes

We made it! This was the longest and steepest hike we've done together as friends. We also had the pleasure of staying three nights, which is an improvement over our usual one-nighters.

The trail description of this 6.5-8 mile 'slog' says that it is for average backpackers. I'd say we are average backpackers because this hike wasn't easy, but it was totally within our ability. It took us about 8 hours to make it the almost 8 miles to a campsite at Upper Snow Lake. We gained roughly 4100 ft in elevation in the first 6.5 miles.

It was hard, it was long, and it was worth it. I wondered how gorgeous it could really be, everyone that's been up there says that it's the most beautiful place in Washington's forests... but I've seen some pretty beautiful lakes and mountains before. Those people might be right. It was undeniably breathtaking. I'm confident that my pictures don't do it justice. My wide angle lens wasn't even wide enough and I found myself wishing we'd gotten up earlier so that the light was better. I guess we'll have to go back someday!

I just have too many pictures and cannot narrow it down to a reasonable blog post amount of shots, so I decided to incorporate a slide show with captions. I will share a couple of my favorites, for those that don't have the time or patience for the slideshow ;). You can also open the slide show in a new window by clicking HERE..

At the trailhead.

Upper Snow Lake

Lower Snow Lake

Mountain Goats along our way

At Lake Viviane

Lake Viviane

Perfection Lake

At Perfection Lake

The slide show more or less tells the story, if you have the captions on (click the speech bubble so that it is green). For the die hards, and for my memory down the road, I'll give the full report after the jump below.







Enchantment Lakes via Snow Lakes Trail.

This trail is HOT, and the first 1.2 miles provide a nice view of the parking lot and cell service. A strange way to begin a hike. As we trekked up, and up, and up we ran into people coming out that seemed a little dazed. They call the hike out 'the Snow Lakes hot slow slog' and I guess it gets to people's heads. As they passed us we heard two girls discussing their rap lyrics,
"What rhymes with Enchantments?"
"Male Enhancements!"
We made a pact right then and there that no matter how tired we were: no rapping.

Like I said at the beginning, we're just average backpackers. To many people this trail is no big deal, they'd eat it for breakfast. It took us about seven hours with more breaks than I can count to make it...

Training

In preparation for our multi-day hike I did some training. I started training with weighted backpacks on the treadmill with full incline, and that was a great start. Then we moved and didn't have access to our old fitness center. So my weighted backpack and I moved outdoors. The hill behind our house (named as a mountain, but really it's a hill) provided the perfect training ground.

It looks so benign from here.

But halfway up, all dust, no water and 90+ degrees is a killer.

Literally.
This is how I felt the first time I tried to 'walk' up this 'hill'. 

I tried again and this time started much earlier (much cooler), brought water and made it up and down in an hour. It was the perfect little training ground. The next day I went up the longer way, which I found out wasn't as steep, but was a little prettier.

A little flower along the way

There's a lot of dirt and sagebrush, but only a little bit of pretty.

The view from the top

The best type of weight? The flexible brown rice kind :)

In the end, my training paid off. I not only felt stronger and faster, but Blake noticed the difference too. While we were on our eight mile hike, I was able to keep up with the group and even hold on a conversation for the first four miles. After that.. I was back to square one. In my training, I only did about four miles. So although my muscles did great for as long as they had been trained, after that I was just about as slow and certainly just a sore as I always was. I still consider it a win though, it's great to know that I could make a difference with some hard work and it was great to be able to keep up for at least half the hike.

More to come on the hike.. soon.

And This Year Makes Three

Three fantastic years with my favorite person. This year was a milestone of normalcy. This is the first anniversary we've celebrated that wasn't spent on or preparing for a vacation. We both had to remind ourselves that our anniversary was coming up that week. Blake worked until 8:30 and for a while we considered just eating leftovers and loading our packs for the big hike we had coming up that weekend.  In the end we decided on a late dinner at a nice restaurant.

Last year I could still remember what I was thinking two years before on our big day, but this year it was a little fuzzier. It's not that we'll ever forget our wedding day, but it is funny how the moments between now and then fill my memory more than those of that day. I'm continuously amazed at how blessed our life together has been.

After dinner

That weekend we made it over to my parent's house to take our traditional anniversary photo. I don't remember if I shared this before, so I'll give you the series. Our goal is to take one every year in the same spot :) (Can you tell which year we upgraded our camera).

Three years

Two Years
(This one was taken after being up over 24 hours and spending 17 of those hours on an airplane from Australia)

One Year

The Big Day
© Heather Dillon Photography

July Photo Challenge Part 2

Sorry for the cliche, but can you believe how fast July went! Here are the rest of the pictures for the July photo challenge. I'm happy to say I made it through the month, even if I sometimes got behind on posting pictures. Since this post is mostly pictures, and many of them, I'm putting in a jump, click below to see the rest of the photo challenge pictures.

Garden Update

The garden is thriving! Even in spite of the massive earwig infestation we've been enduring. I discovered a non-toxic way to kill them on-contact, I'll share it at the end. I took these pictures a few days ago and already things have changed.

We've been harvesting more summer squash and zucchini than we can consume, but our neighbors are taking some off our hands now and then. Yesterday Blake and I ate four squash between lunch and dinner, fresh off the grill both times. Tonight, we made stuffed zucchini out of that big one you see in the picture below. It was delicious.

Right now the pile on the counter is a little smaller, but we pull off more each day.

We ate those two tomatoes above, these, and some of their friends with dinner tonight

Our one little pea, the plant is only about 8" tall so we're pleasantly surprised
that it could produce anything yet. Today we found two more!? 

This little cucumber got a little bigger, and we ate it with those
tomatoes in a little Greek salad. 

Clockwise starting with the cabbage, onions, celery, okra, eggplant and Thai chilies. 

More eggplant, cucumber, strange bean plant with red flowers, tiny peas and pole beans.
These were all late planters or replants thanks to the rabbits.

Three varieties of peppers and our mess of tomatoes.

Our goofy cauliflower and broccoli, out of five plants only one looks normal, beets, carrots and artichoke. 

Butternut squash!! This plant is HUGE and there are tiny to medium little squash all over it. 

Acorn squash!! Same situation as the butternut, we are going to be up to our eyeballs.

The massive bramble of squash plants and the corn.. oh man.

Yams and potatoes! Not 100% sure what to do with these but hopefully we'll find something in that dirt later.

We also have some adorable little watermelons and cantaloupe developing overnight. Yesterday we found a melon the size of an eyeball (the rest are about marble size) and today it was the size of a chicken egg!! I didn't get pictures of it, but man they are cute :). I think we'll have an easier time sharing the plethora of melon than we will with the squash.

We are mostly flying by the seat of our pants with this garden, but we're learning a lot about what to do next year. We're also getting some nice sun burns tans and have discovered that weeding is a compulsion more than a chore or passion.

: :

Non-toxic Earwig Spray: 1 Tablespoon of non-toxic dish soap - I use Method brand - and 50 oz of water. I put it in a hand held pump sprayer just for that purpose. Blake and I go out at night with our head lamps and catch the little devils in the act. They are on everything! We just spray them and within 6-10 seconds they stop moving. After several nights in a row of spraying them while they're out and about, we've noticed a significant reduction in their numbers. They did some serious damage to a row of our corn, but the other plants seem to be bouncing back. So far, the soap doesn't seem to hurt any of the plants. While I was testing out the ratio of soap to water, we had a few pretty sudsy batches, and we rinsed those plants down with water just in case.

Old School Wine Tasting

What a crazy experience this was! It took everything I thought I knew about wine (granted, that isn't too much) and turned it upside down! 

Blackwood Canyon Winery does what they call, Old School Tasting (by appointment only). They make Burgundian style wine, which is different than our traditional American or 'New World' wines. These wines are processed and fermented in a totally different way and for SO much longer. We tasted 19 year old wine from a barrel that would still need to sit in there for another ten years! The other notable 'old world' difference in this style of wine was that it could, and should, be left open for months on end. In (what I now know as) American wine, you can't leave a bottle open for more than a few days. Burgundian wine is what you see in decanters, sitting on someone's table in an old movie. It not only lasts months but gets better the longer its open. 

I have to say that I enjoyed some late harvest syrah and some of the other red wines we tasted, but I can't say that I enjoyed many of the Burgundian style of white wines. We started tasting whites and at first I wasn't sure these people knew what they were doing.. except who was I to say! 

Once we got into the reds, I could see the wine behind the acid and started to really enjoy the wine when it came to tasting the ports and what would become ports. 

It was truly the most unique wine tasting tour we've ever taken, and hands down the most extensive tasting we've ever done. We got a nice tasting at the counter with food pairings and then we toured and tasted wine out of the barrels that were sitting outside (!!) among the grape vines.

Truly an experience that felt like stepping back in time and far from the usual pretentious wine tasting trip!