garden update...

So, last night we went home after work, and made some quick dinner, ate, and headed to meet Theresa in the garden!

On the way over, one of our neighbors, Magdeline, who is an older lady (probably in her eighties), was going by on her way to the store. She doesn't get around very well anymore, so sometimes when she goes to dump her trash we'll take it for her and help her back to her apartment or whatever. Anyway, I took her over to the store to get bread, milk, and ice cream, and then brought her back to her apartment, and we had a good chat on the way. She is the sweetest lady, so friendly and nice.

Anyway, I then headed over to the garden to meet Trina and Theresa, who had marked out an area for the herbs and the tomatoes and a pathway down the middle of the garden where we're going to put stepping stones later. We commenced planting, and by about 8.30, we had everything (starts and seeds) in the ground and watered!











Did I mention that there's a beautiful lilac bush that hangs over one end of our garden area? :) Yay!

This morning before I headed to the bus, I snuck out to take a few more pictures of things:

One of our cucumber plants:


Walla Walla Sweet Onions, and two of our tomato plants:


More of our tomato plants:


The herb section:


Strawberries!


Wild Strawberries!


So, there you have it. We'll keep updating with pictures as things progress. We're so excited for yummy produce and for growing things! Hooray!

a fun surprise...

So, I mentioned a few posts back that I had something else I wanted to tell, but that I was waiting... well, the moment has come! I got to model some men's sock garters and socks for Sock Dreams! Yay! The sock garters can be seen here (the Maroon with thin blue and white stripes variety are me).

The socks I'm wearing in that picture are the ones I modeled, but the store item for the socks isn't up yet, so if you like them, keep an eye out in the near future, as they should be showing up on the site soon :)

Cheers!

gardening!

In our apartment complex, there is this small little patch of ground, probably about 15 feet by 7 or 8 feet, which the managers are allowing us to use as a garden. We planted last year as well, with our friends Jeremy and Tiffany (who have since moved to Idaho), and we had more lettuce and zucchini than we could give away to people, as well as some nice tomatoes and cucumbers, and a few snap peas. This year, we're putting a bit more prep work into it. Our friends Theresa and Linda are going to help out as well. Saturday during the day, Theresa went and pulled out some of the old dead stuff from last year, and then Sunday morning, while Linda was finishing the 7th Harry Potter book, Trina and Theresa and I went out and finished clearing out all the major weeds, dead plants and masses of grape hyacinths that had taken over the garden.

Here's the garden area Sunday morning before we started:







Here's Teagan checking out the grape hyacinths - we brought him out on a leash to hang out with us, and he had the time of his life, including getting out of his harness to go chase a bird :)



Me digging up weeds and looking slightly deranged :)



We left some hyacinths along one side of the garden area by the fence, just because they're so pretty...





After we had finished removing the weeds and the hyacinths, we made Linda take a break from Harry Potter and come have lunch with us at Laughing Planet, and then we all went to Portland Nursery, and buy some starts for the garden - we got about 7 or 8 different varieties of tomato (just one plant each), walla-walla sweet onions, cucumber, some ground cover for one corner of the garden that has a bunch of rocks in it, tarragon, italian oregano, chives, parsley, basil, wild strawberries and regular strawberries, and then seeds for a couple varieties of peas and beans, a few varieties of lettuce, spinach, two different kinds of squash, beets, and a couple varieties of sunflower (which may or may not go in the vegetable garden). We're also hoping to get cilantro and maybe another variety of beets from a friend.

Here's the garden after Theresa's dad was done tilling it!





Up towards one end of the garden is a huge patch of daisies, which kind of overgrew that end of the garden, so this year Theresa bought a little fence to put up there. We also have a peach tree that has been diseased for years, and after we planted the garden last year, it blossomed for the first time apparently in several years, but the fruit was still no good. This year there are a lot of new shoots growing from it, so who knows, maybe it will slowly get better and better. Let's hope so!

I can't wait to go home and plant some stuff tonight! We'll post pictures soon of what we plant!

Happy Monday everyone!

A Bit More Shakespeare...

We recently found this collection of Shakespeare, I don't remember where for certain... it's in fairly rough shape, but it is really beautiful.



The best part about it though, are the inscriptions written inside the front cover.



The first one: "To my dear Sister May Newland. Nov 16, 1888."
The second one: "From May Newland Smith to her daughter Blanche on her Sixteenth birthday. July 14th 93"

Their handwriting is amazing... look at it! I wish I knew the rest of its history since 1893, but to know that you have a book that someone gave their sister in 1888, who then passed it on to their daughter in 1893... it makes the book feel kind of warm and alive.

I also like that is noted as having a "Copious Glossary" :)



Published by the same publisher as the copy of Lalla Rookh, that I posted about the other day.

A Bit of Shakespeare...

I just finished reading The Tempest, so I thought I would post some pictures of a couple of Shakespeare books we have. Our copy of The Tempest is a 1920's copy of the Yale Shakespeare, and it is really simple, but nice in its simplicity. It's a small book, probably about 6"x4", with a cloth cover, and nice, thick pages. Of course, there's that great old book smell too :) I was reading it bit by big in bed in the evenings, and the play itself I found quite interesting... Shakespeare is quite funny, I have to say. A drunken butler and a jester running around the island with a disfigured slave, whom they got drunk, and who mistook them for gods. Definitely give it a read sometime :)

more Winnie the Pooh

So, to go along with the theme from yesterday, I have yet another Winnie the Pooh book to post about. I'm pretty sure I've posted about this one before, but it is wonderful enough to post twice, if you ask me. Trina surprised me with this fantastic little book one day, and it's been sitting by my computer desk/recording equipment ever since. It's a tiny little 1968 edition of Pooh Hears a Buzzing Noise and Meets Some Bees. It's such a cute story, and I love the illustrations in it. Here are some pictures:

Winnie the Pooh

We have this nice set of 1960's Winnie the Pooh books, that have wonderful pictures and are nicely made. I love Winnie the Pooh, the stories are so sweet and funny, and the pictures suit the books perfectly. Here are some pictures of them...

Winnie the Pooh:






The House at Pooh Corner:






When We Were Very Young:






Now We Are Six:

book finds

So, as we are starting to build up a decent amount of pretty and/or old books at home, I thought I would start a label called "book finds" and start posting pictures of them :) In this post, I'll be showing you a particularly beautiful book, titled Lalla Rookh. It's a story by Thomas Moore (not to be confused with Thomas More), written in 1817. This particular copy of the book is an 1880's copy, I believe, as it has an engraving on the bottom edge of the cover reading "COPYRIGHT 1884 BY T.Y. CROWELL & CO." Thomas Moore was an Irish poet, singer, songwriter, and gained considerable popularity in both Ireland and England. He apparently is considered Ireland's National Bard, and holds a position in Irish esteem similar to Robert Burns in Scotland.

Trina found this copy at Village Merchants in Portland for somewhere around $5, I think, which is quite a bargain considering the condition it's in and how amazing it is.

Ok, are you ready for the pictures yet? :) Yes? Ok.



If you follow the link to the picture in Picasa, and then zoom in on the picture (there's a little magnifying glass icon in the top right of the main image area), you can see more of the detail in the cover, which is really extraordinary. The picture doesn't really do the texture justice, it looks even more beautiful in real life.



There's something about ink applied by typewriter or old typesetting machines that just looks very comfortable or cozy somehow. I don't know if it's the type fonts they used, or the particular way the ink looks applied to the page, or what, but it is just really aesthetically pleasing. Not to mention the paper is extremely thick (it feels like about 3-4 typical pages in a standard hardback book these days), and the smell of old books...



It has some fantastic images in it as well...



And the page decorations with the little frame around the page make it look really nice as well.



You definitely should follow the links to the actual images and zoom in to see more of the details, it's worth looking at.



And here's the spine, with some more wonderful detail, like the cover has.

I'm just starting to read the book today, so I don't have much to say about the content so far, but the book itself is beautiful. Hope you've enjoyed this little show :) Cheers!

sick, but with good news :)

well, today I'm home sick and feeling pretty nasty (stuffy nose, sore throat, chest congestion, fever, etc)... however, late last night we did do something exciting, which is purchase our plane tickets to Tokyo! We have an itinerary! It seems so weird and surreal still. We're going from the middle to the end of July, to visit our dear friend Alina, who has been there now for going on two years now, and is there for one more. More on that as we get closer to the departure date. Until then, hope you all are feeling better than I am :)