L'aventure américaine

Last summer, we were preparing to get married.  I thought that this summer would be calmer.  I'm not sure if it is or not, but I do know that Randal and I have managed to fill our weekends completely with friends and fun and work and play.  So, I'll sum up. Early July: Randal finds a kitten in the plants outside of his building.  He brings kitten inside.  He intelligently leaves for a week so that I have to watch the kitten and become attached to the kitten.  So, we keep the kitten.  He lives in the building and his name is Building Cat or Jigsaw or Jiggy Sawdust.  He likes 1) wet cat food, 2) climbing up your leg, 3) dogs. Building Cat and Juneau.  So stinking cute. Mid-July: Our friend Adam turns 30.  We help him celebrate by going on a sailboat in the Upper Klamath Lake.  Randal helps sail the boat.  The captain of the boat calls him Black Shirt.  The captain of the boat is fond of me be...

 Such a long time ago!  But these pictures shouldn't be missed. I quickly flew home for the 4th of July because my impressive brother was presenting an impressive poster at an impressive conference in Baltimore and decided to round out his impressive trip with a visit to Indiana. Computational linguistics + wellness = best sibling duo ever. We had so much fun.  We watched home videos that would have been painful to anyone else.  Dad and I harvested some wheat, then winnowed and threshed it.  Charles and I ground it.  Mom made bread.  And we all enjoyed it. For the 4th, the Dickens, Lupovs, and half the Longs joined us for a good, old-fashioned Shank 4th of July.  And we laughed and swam and watched fireworks and sang songs around the campfire and reminded ourselves again of the wonderfulness of family. It was a brief trip, but an utterly fantastic one.  Wiffle ball.  Awesome. ...

Our dear friends, the Wissels, came to Klamath Falls.  (You can see their description of the trip with more photos here .)  Kristi and Andrew plan on moving west next summer and are trying to figure out where there new home might be.  Randal and I wanted to do our damnedest to get them here.   And we did.  Oh, we did.  Parties with fun friends.  Kinetic Sculpture Races.  Hikes on the hill.   Geothermally brewed beer. Delicious meals.  Crater Lake.  Camping.  So. Much. Fun. Backyard lunch! Our album cover. Unfortunately, it didn't work.  I don't think that they're moving here.  Instead, they'll move to Reno or somewhere in Nevada.  Which is completely understandable.  And preferable to their current Indianapolis home and will provide countless meet-in-the-middle camping trips and a great location to park our car when we fly out of Reno.  Although, I would l...

After we returned from Indiana, we relaxed with our dogs and told them how much we missed them.  Well, I told them how much I missed them and Randal watched quietly and then hugged his cat.  (And no, we didn't get another dog; we were petsitting for Stephanie while she was out of town.) It was a very busy week upon our return, but we enjoyed our first weekend at home by working on our garden.  Randal built some great raised beds and our plants mainly survived while we were gone.  The weeds have since come on strong and some birds ate all our lettuce, but I'm still proud.  We're picking our snow peas and enjoying them and I'm able to season my pasta sauce with home grown herbs.  One of our raised beds. Randal cuts down some branches, trying to get some extra sunlight to our tomatoes.  The backyard garden.  We have eaten 6 strawberries from our plants and lost several tomato plants to weeds and some alley hunters. Randal finishe...