Mark's Little Guy

As I've said before, we've been feeding the neighborhood critters, which have lately included a couple of small raccoons - the one with the damaged hand and another 'little guy,' Mark's favorite, who literally knocks at the door looking for food and is particularly fond of dog kibble. We suspect that this, like most 'good deeds' will not go unpunished. But we can't resist the little bandits so we just hope they don't do us any damage. Optimistic, huh?

Anyway, we are trying not to get too attached. Given that one already has lost fingers to some misdeed, it seems likely that more threats will come their way. We at least aren't 'naming' them - and every time we speculate about the proper pronoun to use to refer to one or the other, Mark insists that whether it is 'him' or 'her' should only be of interest to another raccoon.

Well, evidently it WAS of interest to another raccoon. It was obvious this afternoon that Mark's 'little guy' is actually a nursing mother.

I just know a half dozen babies are thriving under our deck.

Rose Mystery

We spent a whole bunch of time and resources over the past month or so creating a rose garden in our back yard. We built a retaining wall - each bag of crushed rock and each block individually carried from the store to our truck to our yard... We schlepped dirt. We shopped for roses; we planted, smoothed, mulched and watered them. What I'm trying to say here is that it was really quite a lot of effort.

But then we had buds coming up on all 5 of the new rose bushes. We thought, last Thursday night, that the first bud should be open on Friday. I came home from work Friday afternoon and rushed out to the back yard with the camera, to take a picture. A new rose. A very big deal for us. What color will it be? Will it be fragrant? I expected it to be wonderful.

What I didn't expect it to be was Gone. But gone it was.

Someone came into our backyard and stole our first rose! Cut it off the cane with a clean diagonal cut. And the cane next to it, with other almost-ready buds, as well. No animal footprints, no stray petals or leaves that might have suggested one of our raccoons had taken a shine to Rose Lunch. Clearly a deliberate act.

The creepiness factor here is pretty high. Who would do such a thing? Who even knew there was a rose to be had in our back yard? The garden can't be seen from the street - or anywhere besides from our own house (almost.) Even though the gate to the back yard was broken (it is fixed now) it is on the side of the house, quite far from the roses. The roses can't be seen until you get pretty far into the yard itself, around the corner of the house.

Quite naturally the question of 'who did it' doesn't want ignoring. Mark is voting for our neighbor - who acted as outraged as we were when she heard about it. (He comes from a world a bit more populated with 'characters' than the one I've lived in - otherwise nice-seeming ladies who shoplift beeswax candles and call anonymously to cancel airline reservations of 'friends' with whom they are feuding - and consider this perfectly acceptable behavior.) And she did offer a perfectly implausible explanation - that deer can come into your yard, even though they never have before, and munch on a single rose, leaving behind no footprints or mess. These neighbors are, literally, the only ones who could have seen the rose garden. And we adore them. It just can't be.

In any case the mystery is probably unsolvable, but we can put it behind us (now that the gate is fixed, at least) and concentrate on the other wonderful buds that were allowed to come to bloom. Like this one, for example.

Memorial Day weekend

I love 3-day weekends! We drove over the mountain pass to Leavenworth for lunch, shopping and spectacular scenery, and also hiked the Iron Goat Trail yesterday; went street-walking in downtown Seattle and lunched at Elliott's today - and gardened and napped at home both days besides - a successful weekend so far and it's only half over. Tomorrow we have salmon to put in the smoker (from our visit, today, to Pike's Place Market and our favorite fish vendor) and more gardening - and napping - to do.

For now, I just wanted to share my butterfly picture.

Freezer Mysteries

Perhaps a little more precision is called for. A System. Better packaging. Surely a better memory and, yes, more intentional cataloguing would help. Placement could be a factor as well in preventing this situation from happening again.

(Is it a 'situation?')

I served dinner last night, as I usually do - just for Mark and I. (Although perish the thought that this might have been part of the dinner I served to a friend last week!)

I made a roast pork. (We love pork, swine flu notwithstanding.) And since Mark is one of those who believes that applesauce should go with pork, I dipped into the frozen applesauce 'stores' to thaw some of our homemade supply from last year. Most of what is left is stored on the top shelf of my freezer in little round 2-cup plastic freezer containers. When we made the applesauce we bought a whole bunch of these to hold a double serving just right for dinner-for-two. Unfortunately we didn't quite get enough of them and had to look for other containers to hold the excess, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I pulled out the 'odd' container - square instead of bowl-shaped - to put it into the microwave to thaw it out a little bit. Good color it had - applesauce freezes well. You don't get much 'apple' smell in frozen applesauce though. Has to thaw first. So, as I said, I put it in the microwave. By the time the microwave was dinging 'done' at me I was on to mashing potatoes etc. and didn't pay too much attention.

But I should have. It wasn't applesauce.

It was gravy. Not good by the spoonful. Take my word for this.

Up a tree

I didn't know raccoons could climb trees. Maybe this little guy didn't know that either. He hung around the house most of the weekend - in and out while we were working outside - and at one point decided he needed a snooze in the tree, so up he went. Maybe you can tell by the trunk size that this is quite a tall tree. And maybe if you look really close you can also tell that the left front foot of our little climber is mangled and he is missing his middle 'fingers.' How he managed to get up the tree - and back down again, head first! - is a wonder.

(Yes, I used the 'zoom' on my camera and yes, the house behind the tree looks like it is WAY closer than it actually is...)

We had a WONDERFUL Mother's Day weekend! Todd came up on Saturday afternoon and we went to the nursery for a couple of plants for the front garden to replace a pine tree/shrub that had been damaged in the winter snows. The shrub came out - roots too (and hooray for that, and the fact that the chain saw actually worked!) Then we weeded, edged the garden, laid down bark mulch, swept up the mess and stood back to admire our work. Very satisying.

We also took a hike, cooked together and generally had a wonderful visit.

All that in just beautiful sunny weather! No wonder the raccoon needed a snooze.

The Unexpected... and the expected

We found delightful surprises on our little weekend trip - unexpected sights that we would have just missed if not for a glance in one direction rather than another, or a longer walk here or there. In Newport's Old Town a sea lion was 'grooving' on the sun and breeze, on a side road out of Yachats there was a directional sign for a covered bridge - and sure enough - a covered bridge! (There are quite a few in Oregon actually, most of them near Lebanon, Oregon, not surprisingly, where a large group of Pennsylvania Mennonites settled.) At the lighthouse a glimpse of blue turned out to be a wild iris on closer inspection, a Devil's Punchbowl was 'as advertised' although we almost walked right by it because, for some reason, we thought it was on the other side of the trail. And in Cannon Beach the tide was low enough to allow us to observe a starfish 'loose his grip' at Haystack Rock.

But we DID expect to find wonderfully good crab cakes in a restaurant in Cannon Beach where we'd had them before. We've been raving about them to people ever since: "Oh you have to go here... best crab cakes we've ever had..." When the hostess showed us to our seat - with a spectacular view of Haystack Rock no less - and inquired whether we'd ever been here before we told her that yes, we had, and couldn't wait to come back for the crab cakes. She was so pleased. "I'll go tell the chef," she said, gushing about how much he'll appreciate the compliment and our remembering them. We ordered, naturally, the crab cakes... and when they came, they were terrible! I really couldn't even eat them. All the natural juices had been drained out of the crab and they were dry and chewy and gummy and had too much 'green stuff' in them so that you couldn't even taste anything else but 'green.' (I am NOT a fan of 'green.') The waiter, who had listened to the hostess exclaim to the chef, beamed at us and asked if we were enjoying them. What to do?

Now, Mark and I are the last people in the world to be 'high maintenance' at a restaurant. Having both been married to people who were, we prefer a no-fuss approach to eating out - be pleasant, have a nice time, lower the stress level. (Not that "I'll have the number 5 but with chicken instead of beef and baked instead of grilled and don't put any parsley on my plate and I want the dressing on the side..." isn't another way to go. Or to play musical chairs and refuse the first table offered and ask for another one over there, or on second thought maybe THAT one would be better, but not until half the party had already been seated. Scars we have, from the past...)

But the crab cakes were SO bad. So Mark asked the waiter if he wanted the truth, and then said, not wanting to put too fine a point on it, that we were a bit disappointed, they were maybe a little overcooked and we wondered if perhaps the recipe had changed since we'd been here last.

Appalled, the waiter gushed apologies, went to talk to the chef, came back with apologies from the chef. Then the chef himself came out to talk to us (and give us his card - which perhaps didn't make sense in the circumstances, but by then nothing did.) The waiter came back and offered us a free dessert (which we declined, just on general principals but mostly because we were mortified at having made such a scene and just wanted to leave) and then insisted that we wait a few minutes because the chef was making us some more crab cakes - "He wants to do better!"

(I'm not sure I get the notion of responding to 'I don't really like this' with 'Here, then - have some more!' but that seems to be the typical response to a complaint about any product. If you write a letter to a company telling them that their tile cleaner failed on all points to do absolutely anything about cleaning your tile and you just thought they should know in case they want to re market it as a breakfast drink or something, you will invariably get back a coupon for a free bottle of - you guessed it - their miserable tile cleaner.)

Anyway, we finally were able to slink out of the restaurant, extra box of crab cakes in tow. Cats followed us all the way back to the car.

Mark tried them later and said they were better, but just not what we'd expected.

(AKKKkkkkkkkk! No matter what I do, Blogger will not put paragraph breaks into this posting! I'm going to go nuts here...)

Pictures from our Weekend Road Trip

We took a 3-day weekend road trip down the Oregon Coast. We have some stories... and some pictures - but I'll start with some pictures.

This is, incredibly, the view out our hotel window in Yachats, OR. The weather wasn't really great for walking, but sure was fine for watching the waves crash up on the rocks, sending plumes high into the air.


More of the beautiful Oregon coast:

A real tourist attraction - SeaLion Cave - inside. (Well worth the price of admission, actually!)

The 'most photographed lighthouse on the west coast' - Heceta Head:

Looking south along the Oregon Coast from the lightkeeper's house at Heceta Head:

The lightkeeper's house - now a B&B at Heceta Head:

The bridge over Yaquina Bay, at the Yaquina Bay lighthouse in Newport.

The Yaquina Head lighthouse - where a bazillion Common Murras were fighting for just the right perch on the rocks just offshore, making quite a racket. (Yes, two lighthouses at Yaquina - 'Bay' and 'Head.')