Four Laff's Journeying Together

Birds on the Columbia River

2009-08-08T00:27:00.003-05:00

Newts in the forest.

2009-07-15T17:23:00.002-05:00

Rockin' Robin...tweet, tweet, tweetly, tweet.

2009-03-23T19:24:00.003-05:00

There is a time for everything...

2009-03-17T17:53:00.006-05:00

Sunday there was a memorial service for a man who taught me a tremendous amount about grace.

God blessed us with you Ron Stump.

You are missed.

Hawk

2009-01-04T12:04:00.003-06:00

Recent visitor we had in the backyard. Notice his talons!

Have you ever seen a cold hummingbird?

2008-12-23T16:11:00.003-06:00

No newts were harmed in the writing of this blog.

2008-12-08T18:33:00.008-06:00

But they very well may have been traumatized. Here are some pictures of our trip to the Oregon coast this past August. Ellie and Gracie are happily newting, I am happily fly-fishing and Holly is happily reading a book about Lewis & Clark by a peaceful river. (River ID is The Sixes) It was pretty much heaven for all of us. BTW: Ellie is holding Chloe...doesn't she just look like a Chloe? Ellie thought so.

Try not to be overwhelmed by the size of the trout I caught...I was going for the small ones that day! Yes, believe it or not there is a trout in my hands...slightly bigger than a newt.

2008-07-20T21:01:00.003-05:00

Been reading some Wendell Berry lately and living life. I REALLY LIKE Wendell Berry.

What's new: The garden is growing and so are the kids. One group is being harvested and consumed for life-giving energy. The other group consumes me! :-)

Blueberry picking Saturday morning. 42lbs. Smoothie supply for the year. Love those anti-oxidants!! I hear they clean the pipes.

The Dark Knight on Friday...good but I'm not nearly into it as others seem to be.

Last weekend - WALL-E...same director as Finding Nemo...just as good if not better. I would watch WALL-E again over Dark Knight.

This morning was a family bike ride to Longbottom Coffee for breakfast and then home to do a little soil prep, planting and seeding in the garden. Trimmed the grapevine...1st time since I put it in last spring. Potential for grapes next year.

Have been riding my new road bike...love it

Swallow-tail butteflies are out and about in our yard. See picture for what they look like.

Fruit is a miracle.

I wonder

2008-05-22T16:46:00.002-05:00

A tufted titmouse
Flittering into branches
Flys away to soon

I Think I'll Fly Away!

2008-04-08T11:20:00.001-05:00

All Owls Think A Lot.

2008-04-03T23:22:00.000-05:00

I wonder what he is thinking about?

2008-04-03T14:55:00.002-05:00

It's been too long.

2008-03-24T16:05:00.004-05:00

My buddy over at "Watcha Dugan" did a blog update and I realized the Four Laffs are just way overdue. To the right, you will see a picture of a new hat I got. (That's not me wearing it though.) What do you think? I really like it and I can't wait to try it out next time I go salmon fishing. Speaking of which I have gone 3 times now for Spring Salmon this year and I'm still "Ofer". I want to get the stink off soon.

Eagles do more than land.

2007-12-30T14:01:00.000-06:00

Went back to the wetlands mentioned in my previous blog to see if the eagles were still there. Also it was a great test of the spotting scope I got my wife for Christmas as we like to go birding. So there was one eagle in a cottonwood and shortly after I focused him in, he flew out of the tree and did six or seven swoops over the wetlands. I figured he was getting a fish. Turns out he got a young goose! He flew it over to a tall pole and proceeded to rip it apart and eat it. He ate it quite vigorously I might add. He was there on that perch eating for at east 1/2 hour and we all got a good look through the spotting scope. Nature

Got me thinking about the eagle as our national bird and how appropriate or inappropriate that is. The eagle is a ferocious raptor/hunter that really shows no mercy on it's prey. Yes, I understand this is the way of the animal kingdom. But I wonder, is that the quality we want to identify with in the animal kingdom? Seems so....rightly or wrongly. I have read that Ben Franklin felt the eagle was a poor choice for a national animal/symbol due to it's qualities of eating carrion and/or other behaivor. I see his point. Apparently he wanted the wild turkey as our national bird. I have heard that the eagle in our seal (above) was turned to the olive branch after WWII to signify peace. Hmmmm...

Eagle has landed.

2007-12-02T17:15:00.000-06:00

Lot of cool things about the "neck of the woods" I live in. (Where did that phrase come from and why isn't there a country song that somehow uses it as the main line of the song?) One of the cool things is bald eagles. Seems they migrate from Canada or some such cold place this time of the year. Makes sense. Well it turns out they hang out at Fernhill Wetlands about 5-ish or so miles from our house. So packed up the kids and headed over there this morning. It was raining REALLY HARD with lots of wind...we got soaked. But yes we saw a Bald Eagle perched in a tree, a snowy egret, a great blue heron and lots of geese. How did I know they were there? Because Grant McOmie on KATU.com told me:

http://www.katu.com/home/video/12021456.html

In previewing some other blogs today I found a new term: "Shopocalypse" Sort of like Apocalypse but a lot more scary! Seems there is a YouTube video on it with a Reverend Billy who is trying to save the world from it....good luck Reverend Billy, let me know where I can send my love gift too. Oh it turns out Rev Billy has his own site...of course. http://www.revbilly.com/

FYI: It's my understanding that both Google and MSN (Microsoft on-line site) are building data centers near the Columbia river up here in "my neck of the woods" and that each of these data centers will house 1 million servers! (Building there for lower cost electricity.) Hmmm....I wonder if Reverend Billy has any thoughts on that.....

Blogging

2007-11-26T14:42:00.001-06:00

I'm not a bloger, but I play one on TV.

Gardening & Camping

2007-07-25T18:51:00.000-05:00

The adjustment back to Oregon is pretty easy this time of the year. We have gone camping twice with good friends and our garden is growing great. (For the most part) Have completely harvested our lettuces and planted some new ones today. We have cherry tomatos ripening, bananna peppers, zuchinni, cukes, onions and other all growing nicely.

I caught my first salmon...in the ocean no less. It was a coho. See the picture. Also put in some garden pictures.

We had a movie night at the house for the neighborhood kids. Projected a movie onto the garage wall with laptop and served lemonade with popcorn. Good stuff. The hood we are in has a lot of kids who seem to make play their career. Good for them! Gracie and Ellie are loving it.

We Moved Back To Oregon

2007-06-17T23:01:00.000-05:00

Finally figured out my Blogspot password! It's been almost a year since we posted. Guess we were overdue. Here is a pictue of our house. Our address is 580 NE Amanda Pl, Hillsboro,OR 97124. More later, just wanted to get the blog going again.

Finally- a BLOG that says something!

2006-07-08T10:19:00.000-05:00

Hello Friends!
Well, its the weekend after JULY 4TH, and YES, we are just finally updating our BLOGSPACE really i feel like for the first time! UGH! i am adding some photos here of our backyard and our home and the girls. :-) ENJOY! FIRST- before i go on any further, i want to say we LOVE YOU ALL and MISS EVERYONE!

Its been a very busy couple of weeks since the last time i updated you as you can imagine! (me busy? :-)) because i think in too many tangents, i have to seperate my stuff into segments of coherenceso here goes!

1) How is the WEATHER you ask? well..its hot some days (but NOT Phoenix not!), wonderfully breezy other parts of the days, thunderstorms & lightning with torential downpour every now and then, cool mornings/evenings, and sometimes humid if its going to rain. never knew there was such a variety of weather patterns for the summer! all in all, the weather/heat has not been at all difficult for us to adapt to. I grew up in Houston and it was WAY more humid there to be sure. A good bottle of water everywhere you go is a good idea to be sure. :-) (good for your health)

2) House/MoveIn Update:
Well, we have made SOME progress in our move-in efforts-- we have floors installed in our family room, dining room and hallway which has allowed us to setup some things there, but our carpet has been delayed now until july 21st, so we are still not able to unpack any of the boxes for the girls rooms or our bedrooms, which means we are just going to start working on painting them! :-) we DID finally get a functioning LAUNDRY ROOM-Priase the Lord! i can stop going the laundrymat to do loads of laundry finally! we have also almost finished painting the girls (a skyblue with schoolroom so we'll start unpacking boxes for that room as well. I've also started painting the girls bathroom a nice Wisteria purple and pale yellow- they like it!

we also completely reorganized the rest of the boxes in our garage so we could find the rest of what we had in there for now and unpacked some more stuff while we were doing it.
Alot of little things around the house like caulking, putting in a new spice rack or towel bar,etc got done this past long july 4th weekend- it was an incredibly productive weekend!. The ONLY thing i couldnt find for JULY 4TH was my homemade ice-cream freezer motor-bummer! well, we'll keep unpacking stuff! :-)

3) Visitors from the NORTHWEST! :-)
We sure enjoyed having Bruce & Donna and their family visit! we all went to lunch with the Reynolds too to the BEST DELI place called Jason's Deli and had a great lunch there and fun visit. sure glad to see them! :-) THAT GOES FOR ANY OF YOU'LL - COME SEE US ANYTIME! We will soon have a queen futon in our school room for guests & Gracies room will have a full sized bed with a trundle under it for guests to use as well. (probably in a month or so)

4) Enjoying our Backyard Finally!:(see photos)
In lieu of 4th of July and because Home Depot (who gets alot of our bucks these days!) was having a 40% sale on most of their outdoor Gazebos, we decided to purchase an outdoor Gazebo to have some more covered seating space in our yard. Mike put it up mostly by himself! Then, we finally put up an indoor/outdoor ceiling fan on our patio that really moves the air around and has lighting,etc. its GREAT for the mornings when its a bit humid and mike often takes his laptop and phone out there for work so he is really enjoying that. We are finally figuring out the BIRDS of TEXAS here a little bit! When we first got here, i immediatly unpacked all my bird feeders (i had several from Oregon as we were avid bird fans in Oregon- had around 25 different varieties that visited our bird feeders in Oregon) and went and bought some great seed from the one birdshop here (Wild Birds Unlimited) and set them out and waited... then, here they came-- the MUNCHERS! those White-Winged Doves! at first, I was in awe! 15-20 of them at once chowing at my feeders, hanging around for the day- they were huge! wow! i had never seen this in Oregon. then, after my feeders were EMPTIED IN ONE DAY, the awe was gone. :-) I was like where's the shotgun? (kidding) how do i get them out of here? they are eating me out of house and home! they literally camped out at my feeders and in my trees all day.. i saw many other varieties of birds, but mostly the doves ate it all! so i went back to my old favorite bird shop and found a solution that helped keep the doves out of my tube feeders for good! and now- WALLAH- ive seen the beautiful red cardinals feeding their mates as a courtship gesture now, watched finches drink out of my hummingbird feeders even (i think i need to get some birdbaths out here next!) , and seen so many birds! ITS AWESOME MAN! we sit out here many mornings now and just listen to all the birds that sing to us nonstop and visit the feeders and grounds below- its really a treat! - a bit of heaven for me as i love watching the birds. Ive already seen birds here ive not seen in Oregon before since its warmer here and we got varieties we wouldnt see otherwise in Oregon- its really neat! Other than birds, we also have a lizard or two! a squirrel or two as well, but our texas state Mockingbirds dont like to let those guys down much. (and they definitely dont look as well fed as my squirrels back in OR did!) Mike has put together our much loved courtyard swing and will join the bird sanctuary area soon. once we find the fountain motors, we'll put those out here too.. as i type this blog, im watching a Jay and a mocking bird fight over a peanut- its great fun!

the ONLY thing that's not quite so fun about the backyard is the mowing! God has a sense of humor to be sure! i always wanted a larger sized yard and now that ive gotten a larger one, i got the mowing to go along with it! :-) its no 30 min job, that's for sure. but its a GREAT calorie burner! the nextdoor neighbor lady and I usually end up doing ours at the same time too saying= why arent our husbands out here doing this? :-)

i am GREATLY BLESSED with this home and PROPERTY & LOCATION and I THANK GOD DAILY for the BLESSING OF IT!

5) 4th of July RAINED OUT?! :-) who would of 'thunk it' here in Texas? :-)
oK, We're up to 4th of July! well, we'd worked HARD that whole 4 day weekend- i mean busted it! i had stayed up a couple of nights until 3am- do you believe that!? :-) you know me! once i get going sometimes on a project or two, i just cant stop! i was painting or unpacking or organzing something and i wanted to just GET IT DONE! :-) anyway... we had invited Kyle and Marta & Marta's Family over to celebrate the 4th with us that day, so we busily prepared the house and outside for the celebration- our 1st official one here! and OUTSIDE one too! meanwhile, in our cul-de-sac (where the girls have made many friends) there was a party planned and fireworks,etc for about the same time as ours, so the socializing was about to happen! THEN- WHAM! HERE COMES THE DOWNPOUR OF RAIN! and im not kidding it DUMPED 3INCHES of rain in a couple of hours and so the outdoor stuff pretty much didnt happen. well, we had a great steak dinner with DEBBIE SALAD! (yes Debbie, we introduced it to the Texas folks here officially and they loved it!)and visited here for awhile. The kids went outside and threw some of those poppers- Darby even did some Poppers too! Then we drove out to the fireworks display area but they had already cancelled it due to the rain- do you believe it! they wouldve never cancelled fireworks in Oregon due to rain! :-) we laughed about that. Anyway, we ended the evening over at Kyle and Martas watching a movie and sharing some good laughs with them- it was a good 4th! but FUNNY to have RAIN here in Texas-wouldnt have expected that!

6) Plans to come to Oregon in EARLY SEPT. finalized FINALLY! :
Yes, after Ive finally been able to get our FREQUENT FLYER miles to work for us for once! usually, i cant find seats on the right flights for the right cities and they often seem like worthless miles sometimes, but this time it worked out great! we are really looking forward to our trip to Brookings and then we will be in Portland for 4 days after that. email us for specifics, those of you in OR and hopefully we can get together with you all and visit while we are there!
Girls will probably start schooling officially after we return (kids here in Texas are already in school as of Aug.18th)

WELL... THATS ALL FOLKS FOR NOW... im sure you are plum tuckered out after reading all of this! :-)

hope to be back in contact soon.

2006-06-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

Well yesterday was a monumental day in our journey to become Texans. We installed our Texas license plates! Little different than Oregon. The registration sticker goes in the front window. It has our plate number on it...I suppose that is to discourage people from stealing plates. Also have to register yearly here vs every two years in Oregon.
Enough about license plates. Sunday was a great Father's day. We had lunch with the Reynold's family who we know from Oregon. Later in the evening I went to Cabela's outlet store in Buda, TX. Went with Kyle and Jarret. Cabela's was pretty amazing. We were only in the store about an hour and a half as they closed at 7PM...But what an incredible store! I bought a fly rod/reel set up and a float tube. The central Texas bass, trout and catfish are no longer safe! Stackofhay has new fishing equipment. (I don't think I will be catching many catfish with the flyrod but the float tube has the abilty to attach a second pole, so I can switch over to catfishing if the bass/trout aren't cooperating) I'm wondering if a catfish will be able to pull my araund the lake in the float tube...we shall see. Mike
Link to Cabela's in Buda
Link to Catfish

Starting Our 1st BLOG!

2006-06-16T14:18:00.000-05:00

Hello There EVERYONE!

This is our first attempt at starting a BLOG SPACE to keep in touch with friends and family spread across the USA and the world too! :-) I haven't been able to keep up with sending emails to everyone letting them know how we are doing and what life in Texas has been like for us this past week since we arrived! So, this is our solution! We plan on posting photos of this beautiful 'vacation home' God has blessed us with VERY SOON, the area here, the girls,etc. -- SO STAY POSTED! i hope you'll enjoy this form of communication.

WE LOVE YOU ALL.

Mike, Holly, Gracie and Ellie (turned Texan, or going back to being Texan in one case!)