Today we do home birthday things, in addition to trying to get the chain saw running, splitting wood, and sorting out school clothes for next week. Wednesday we do school birthday things, which sadly, are much quieter and simpler than in Kindergarten. I sort of hope they’ll get a little more elaborate in future years. This year John and I go, taking a fruit snack (Logan says orange and Kiwi) at snack time, and get to sit and tell a little about Logan’s life. She’ll have a candle and card on her desk for a day or two around her birthday. That’s it. There’s also a class book which each family puts a page of pictures in — we have something like a dozen to choose from so far, and none of Logan as a newborn yet. Our albums of all those first years haven’t resurfaced since the fire, along with the albums with all the pictures of life before that time. What I have is a handful of loose pictures and what’s on the computer. So I’ll be taking a USB drive to Kinko’s or Staples and printing pictures there for the scrapbook. In theory our albums survived the fire and are simply in a box in the shop somewhere, but with each rearranging my hope dims.



Logan plans to get out early to dig potatoes today. We’ll do presents at lunch time, and then home made sushi (cucumber and avocado, avocado alone, and quail egg for Logan) for supper along with birthday cake — unless the birthday cake gets done earlier. I’m still debating the benefits of afternoon birthday cake vs evening when it’s dark and you can really enjoy the candles birthday cake. Presents at lunch time will help make going to bed easier, I hope. She also has a card from each Grandparent family to open already waiting at her place at the table. Jasmine and I wrapped presents in bright tissue Waldorf style (kindergarten used tissue and no tape, and it worked well for most things, for some I resorted to tape), and John still has a couple to go. I’ll have pictures to add or stick in another post later on today.



This post is going in both blogs — the regular one is back up and running, at least in theory.

No, it’s not all academics. In amid straight and curved lines (the precursor this month to numbers and letters), there’s outside structured play (red light green light was the game I heard about), Spanish, Handwork, Eurythmy (a kind of dance similar to Tai Chi), painting, drawing, coloring, and in the next week or two they’ll start playing Recorders. Once we order them. They also still have circle time every day, which I suspect includes singing of some sort — Mr. Wilt the teacher is reported to like singing. Since school started they’ve also baked, made clay figures, and bees wax figures on respective days.



Once Logan’s day is over we eat lunch, and then do afternoon things — swimming lessons one day, grocery shopping, play dates, and so on. Then close to 3:00, or 3:30 on Wednesdays we pick Jasmine up and hope to head home. (we’ve had extra stops some days already). During morning and afternoon drive time regularly half to three quarters of the car falls asleep. I’m fairly used to that from Logan sleeping on the drive home in past years. Xia and Jasmine haven’t adapted to the early awake early to sleep schedule yet, so I presume napping helps to make up for it.



Mango-kitten has settled in well. She has her food and litter box in the down stairs bathroom, and a second litter box in use in the upstairs bathroom. She also has toys in the down stairs bathroom, although I’m not sure how they came to be there — but she goes in and out playing with them happily. She’s free to roam the house during the day now having resolved the difference between dog beds and litter boxes. At the vet appointment for shots yesterday we found she’s gained at least a pound since we got her, and is slowly getting over her rhinitis infection. With luck once she is over it she’ll stop sounding like a pug when she grooms.



John had his 39th birthday on Wednesday, the same day the pump and well man came out to give us a (way too much money) estimate on filtering and purifying our irrigation water to help solve the problem of our well running short if we dare to do our laundry or wash very many dishes at home. For something around $1500.00 that will get set up, and we won’t run short. I made brownies for John’s birthday, and we had a good meal and presents. I took pictures especially for Wilma, but I don’t think she has this blog address.



Today, once we actually get out of the house (John fixing the screen door and the towel racks in the bathroom get priority. I cleaned the bathroom so there was space to work and significantly less cat litter on the floor. Now I just have to find out if the mop migrated to the cabin.) we’ll start again on firewood. Progress is slowly being made, but the rain season is approaching too, and the sooner the wood is in the safer we’ll be.



We’re still waiting on Kitten 2, Linx to be able to be neutered and come home. He was sick, and is now significantly recovered, so I’ll call again today and see what the SPCA knows.

In other news, now that we’re better than three years past our house fire, we’re eligible for regular house insurance again, at half the cost of the hardship last effort stuff we’ve had. And we’ll get a discount on it and our car insurance to boot.

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There will be a bunch of pictures here eventually — wordpress has claimed to upload them, shown me about half, with titles for the other half, and then switched around which ones have pictures and which have only titles. So I’m giving up on pictures for the morning since we’re heading out to do laundry, then coming back to unload it and go to Eugene for appointments, and dropping off school things, rather than trying to make it to a 7pm Eugene Waldorf School meeting — which would have me and Logan out until 9:30 or 10, aside from the night blindness problem, with an early day tomorrow. I’ll try for pictures at our pass through home break, or when we’re back from Eugene, depending on my memory and when wordpress gets its act together.

Now, this evening, WordPress has been fully cooperative in posting pictures. I don’t know what the difference is, but there they are.

I’ll try for horse pictures tomorrow or Thursday, depending whether I stay up resizing them tonight or not.

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Mango decided to take a look at what I’d said about her in an earlier post.
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Mango is now helping me by standing between the screen and keyboard as I type. And this photo loaded with the option of posting a thumbnail. I’ll go back and work on that for the other.
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This picture is from several days ago, not just now — Mango playing “cat and mouse” having discovered the mouse cursor on the screen.

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She really tried to get it — tricky little mouse! And our cursor looks like a mouse to boot, just to help Logan a few years ago who didn’t know why I was talking about a mouse on screen.
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Mango is now studying the line cursor and text that appears as I type. She appears to be feeling better with the antibiotics — exhibited by her desire to march around the bed purring when we wanted to sleep last night. She spent the night in the bathroom because of that, and her determination that the litter box really may not be the best toilet for her personal use. We’re doing early kitten training for her — keeping her confined when no one can watch her, putting her in the litter box on the puppy schedule (after waking, after eating, after playing, any other time it seems reasonable, saying good kitty a lot if she uses it), and making sure the litter box smells like a place to go by baiting it with mistakes and not cleaning it so often. The litter boxes are big, so there’s space for that, although I’m sad that she’ll have to spend her days confined while we’re at school for a while.

We have another day of firewood, beanbag sewing, food preserving and more than we can possibly fit in today. Same as yesterday, but without the horse riding lessons. More pictures to come day by day as I can keep up. School schedule starts weds, school starts Thurs. Oh joy.

We came home and medicated the kitten, regrouped, and headed out to pick pears again. That took three hours, I think. It was long and hot and generally fun. John has a swollen under-eye from being hit with a pear that fell when he picked another one — the volunteer pear was 20 feet up the tree. He and I both got stung by something that wasn’t a bee, separately. We came home with three laundry basket sized vessels of pears and a few pieces of other produce too. Everyone had something from there with lunch. John and Jasmine are currently working on a Pear Pie, and we have other pears waiting to be sliced to go on the dehydrator. And then there are the ones ripening in bags. Pears are ready to be picked at the “almost ripe” stage. They come off the tree readily, but they aren’t actually soft enough to eat. So you put them away in a closed bag with other pears, and let them ripen. We’re going to have those bags everywhere!



After eating and setting up for processing some pears and other produce, we went out to work on firewood. Jasmine worked on reducing the fir trees that the goats ate the needles off of last winter into kindling. John cleared black berries off of a pile of wood left by the former owner of the house and started splitting. He got through three or four logs before we stopped for the day. One was two feet or so tall (he’ll have to cut it in half with the chain saw now that it’s smaller), another was a yard in diameter. He had to use all three wedges in succession on that one, sometimes more than once as one fell out still leaving the others trapped. He learned that from me, although I don’t swing the sledge hammer often at all. I learned it from Daddy. We still use the sledge hammer and some wedges that came from Mom and Dad, along with a second sledge and additional wedges.



Tomorrow is the final riding lesson for August. There will be more to come, much more slowly, but we’re not scheduling yet. School starts Thursday for Logan and Thursday and Friday for Jasmine. Jasmine has registration on Wednesday, then a freshman’s day on Thursday before school with everyone there on Friday in Eugene. Logan starts First grade on Thursday with an assembly with all classes in the Great Hall (with whomever wants in attendance — I’ll be in the audience! ) Where each class officially moves up to their new grade. She plans to wear her same dress as from the last day of school, and her golden star.



Now I’m past ready to go to bed — the kitten has been medicated again, which went very smoothly until nearly the end when evidently some bit of vitamin drops attacked her and she tried to claw her way free — my hands are covered in scratches. Logan’s in the shower, there are pears on the dehydrator along with some of John’s peppers (separate racks). Xia did the dishes, for which I am eternally thankful, and we all had some of the pear pie that John and Jasmine made. John says it’s his favorite pie. I think I’ll save my sweet preference for cherries. I’m happy to be putting up the pears and saving them from rotting on the ground. If the rest of the house eats them, it’s good use.



I have pictures of kitten and wood splitting to post. I’ll try to get to that tomorrow along with some pictures of the final riding lesson. In between more wood splitting and whatever else is getting squeezed in. Sewing beanbags for little hands to use in first grade I think.

Yesterday we went out to a man’s house in Drain where there were “some pear trees” that needed to be picked. He was someone who’d been at the Laundromat who’d offered free pears if we wanted to come pick. There turned out to be more than twenty pear trees loaded with fruit and fallen pears under them. And a garden that his brother had planted and grown before leaving on an extended vacation to Alaska. So we picked fruit and vegetables for three hours, and will go back again on the weekend. Logan was delighted with being a “farm girl” (I’m not sure what she thinks she is here then!) and how much produce we were saving from spoilage. Jasmine and I were pretty pleased too. We left Xia at home recovering from something she’d done to hurt her back, but we’ll probably all go on Saturday — John to pick and drool over the trees, and Xia to keep the man company and talk if she’s not up to picking. He uses versions of an electric wheel chair to get around and is fairly obviously not in good health, but happy to have visitors and people who will make use of the produce. He says one house on the land is from the 1800′s and the trees were probably planted then. Maybe I’ll take pictures of them too.

hibernating hedgehog says


We are still cold here, although it’s warming up during the day. It was twenty six degrees F when we left home this morning, and at 3:30pm, it is now fifty seven degrees. We see unmelted snow on the side of the road as we drive home every day. Not much, but some still holding on. There is also ice on the road going in every morning, but not so much that it’s caused us any trouble driving. Yet. I view it with a skeptical eye even so. We have the front door open for a little while to air the house, then we’ll have some hot tea and build a fire for the evening, read for a while and start making a vegetable, tofu and rice pilaf to go with squash for our evening meal.



Logan is very excited about helping to cook. She doesn’t always like to eat vegetables, but she loves to help to chop them. She did all parts of the work for boiling potatoes one day last week (and did eat them), and chopped cabbage for making a vinegary German style cabbage which she then decided she didn’t like. Tonight’s vegetables include celery, Brussels sprouts, beat, collards, maybe zucchini (I can’t remember if I got one or not!), oh and broccoli. Along with rice and maybe quinoa. She’s looking forward to cooking at least. And it will give her a lot to talk about when she cuts up vegetables at Kindergarten’s soup day tomorrow too.