Portland's International Rose Garden (July 2, 2024)

 Fox at the rose garden.

Tom with yellow roses of Texas?

Fox among one of the hundreds of varieties of roses at the garden.

Fox's foot on the Rose Festival Queens walk. Each queen has a plaque in the walk. And, yes, that was Queen Sharon back in 1964.

Rose Festival queens date back to 1908. Papa walks with the queens.

So beautiful!  Strangely, very little fragrance among the roses.

Fox, Otis, roses, and hydrangeas (July 2, 2024)

 Fox and Otis in Micah's front yard. The roses love living there.

So do the hydrangeas!

Cherry picking in Portland (July 1, 2024)

Bonus at our VRBO was the cherry tree loaded with fruit. The owner was glad we were cherry picking.

Sweet and juicy!

Yummy!

 

Portland (July 1, 2024)

 First thing, we picked Otis up from summer school and had lunch with him and LaWanda. Otis passed geometry. High five!

Infinity portal from Austin to Portland (July 1, 2024)

Fox is ready for the Austin to Portland flight at Gate Infinity. Oops! That flight is to the Matrix.

Fox's ticket to the Matrix asks her, if she wakes up from a dream, "How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?"  I say: who determines what is real? 

 

Okra blossom (June 30, 2024)

This isn't my grandparents' okra. Theirs towered above my child height. This is a dwarf okra plant. It's supposed to reach 5 feet tall, but so far, about 18 inches.

Only one of about a dozen okra seeds came up. The blossoms are so delicate and pretty!
 

The honey processing process with Fox (June 30, 2024)

Fox and I decided that scraping honeycomb from the frames is therapeutic.

The view from below. The big wads of wax won't drain through the sieve, but the honey and smaller flakes of wax will.

Using centrifugal force to spin the last of the honey off the frames.

Filtering out the wax.

An estimated 3 gallons of honey. We have some for everyone who'd like a jar. Yes, those are quart jars in the back. We'll be saving about 3 pounds of honey to make our first gallon of mead.
 

Our first honey harvest since 2020 (June 29, 2024)

We now have eight hives, as compared to two back in 2020. We've let the bees keep their honey in the intervening years, to help them survive our long, hot summers. But this year, we decided six of the hives could spare one or two frames of their 16-24 frames per hive. Why are the frames inside tightly tied trash bags? Because they are covered with bees that were determined to save their honey from us.

Papa opened the trash bags inside the closed greenhouse. No way could we open them in the house!

 Papa showed me one of the frames, covered in hundreds of bees. He shook them off before taking the frame inside.

TC aka Big Boy at home on the front porch (June 29, 2024)

So trusting that he doesn't need to be on the lookout for a loose dog or competitive cat.
 

Our first fig harvest (June 24, 2024)

Our fig tree froze to the ground during the 2021 snowpocolypse. It's come back strong!

Ripening figs start out horizontal, then go vertical when they're ready to pick.

Papa's gathering figs.

What did you just disturb my presence with?  Meow!

 Colette is interested in our first harvest.  The figs were just right! Firm and sweet.

"Spring Awakening" (June 23, 2024)

Joyce, Danny, and Al after Danny's performance in "Spring Awakening." The coming-of-age rock musical won eight Tony awards for its original Broadway production in 2006.

Danny and Joyce after the show. Danny played Georg, one of the Latin students in a late 1800s German school.

Danny and me after the show. The show reminds us that becoming your true self against the impositions of parents, teacher, and clergy is an ongoing challenge for adolescents no matter what era you come of age in.

 

Unpacking (June 18, 2024)

We met the landlord at 962 Bollinger Canyon Road, Moraga, CA 94556. The Asheville Lewises will move in on July 5. A beautiful welcome basket was on the kitchen island.

View of St. Mary's College from a balcony. The tower bells ring on the hour.

Ryder used FaceTime to show Brandy and Mya the house.

At first, I couldn't find the fridge.

Ryder couldn't back the truck in to unload it; the hitch scraped the road. He drove the truck in frontwards and ran into the same problem trying to back it out after unloaded. Luckily, he figured out how to raise the suspension by pushing the "off road" button in the cab. Must not mean "off road" like racing a 3-wheeler through the forest but "off road" like "get that dang hitch off the road."

P. Tom removing the last box from Mya's car.

Mya's thinking this could be her artist studio.

Looking down at Papa from Mya's potential artist studio.

We did it! Unloaded everything, made a Costco run, filled up the Penske at Rotten Robbie's, and returned the truck. Yea!  Now for a few hours sleep before our 5:35 a.m. flight out of SFO.
 

The i-40, US 58, and the I-5: almost there! (Monday, June 17, 2024)

The area between the border and Bakersfield--some 272 miles--was the most windy and dusty place I've ever been. The wind gusts rocked Mya's car the entire way. On the other hand, great location for hundreds of wind turbines.

Yes, that's dust on the horizon.

More wind turbines.

We took US 58 around Bakersfield to catch the I-5 north of town. Windy here too! Stacked up tumbleweeds reminded Tom of his childhood in Amarillo and being hired by a neighbor to toss a backyard full of tumbleweeds over her fence.

Our first California sunset, on the I-5 between Bakersfield and Walnut Creek, where we'll spend the night before meeting the landlord at the house in Moraga in the morning. Still following the Penske.

Tom's headlights in the side mirror. Mya's car was stacked to the ceiling with canvas art. I couldn't use the rearview mirror. It helped so much for Tom to safely allow me in and out when we changed lanes.

The pirate pitstop (Monday, June 17, 2024)

GAS UP BEFORE YOU REACH THE AZ/CA BORDER! The first gas station is 50 miles from the border, in Essex, with the next service 105 miles from the border. Given the Penske's low gas mileage, we needed to stop. Better to pay pirate prices than trudge miles through the Mojave desert with a gas can, right?

Yep, that's $194.57 for 22.7 gallons of diesel. That's $8.57 per gallon, high even for California.

Yep, even for Mya's car, regular gas was $8.56 per gallon. Too bad I don't have a photo of the clean restrooms: four port-a-potties in the back parking lot. Admittedly, they were clean.

The Essex Chevron is on the I-40 along the old Route 66 route. You can buy tourist trap stuff and overpriced snacks inside.
 

Ryder and me