Lemony Webbles

fun movie-making night

I wanted to share this song with Janie and this was the only way I knew how to do it. Yes, the technological part of my brain is very limited. It's often squeezed into a corner by large thoughts about flowers and music and blueberries.

harvesting

Pontious Farm blueberries
It was early in the season when we made our annual visit there so we only got enough for a cobbler, but we had a great time feeding clover to the horses.

Cute cabbage from the garden

Georgia's potato harvest
So far, the most fun in the garden this year has been had digging for potato treasure. So satisfying and so exciting for the girls.

This is the harvest of an idea, naturally from the Idea Garden on campus. Some of their window boxes had a pink and gray color scheme that was very pleasing to me. Sometimes I get irritated with loud flower colors and sometimes I love it, but on that day I was the irritated sort so I found the gentle colors soothing. Also, I have a variegated willow (the bushy thing at the top of the picture) and was wondering what to plant near it.

we are staying here

Some of you know and some don't that we applied this summer to serve at the Baha'i World Centre in Haifa, Israel. They were looking for computer programmers and friends urged Billy to send in his resume. He did and the adventure began as we suddenly imagined ourselves mobile and international and with big changes in our future. The end of that chapter is that they said no, but that's fine. Wise gardeners prune their plants so that they will grow more fully in a different direction, so we have only to go forward and other adventures will await. It was really exciting to imagine the girls growing up multilingual and to suddenly feel totally detached from all our material possessions. I didn't care if all we had fit into a suitcase. Get rid of it all! Who needs it? Start over! The repetition in my life brings me down so much sometimes that it feels like I'm encased in a clay shell and I can hardly feel a thing. But this drastic idea of such a huge change cracked that shell and I had the feeling that I could shrug it off and just be raw and new and develop in whole new ways that I never thought I could before. That, in itself, was such a blessing and more than compensates for the endless forms and the month of waiting to hear. The waiting was hard, though, I must say. I don't wait well.

Anyways, that chapter is done, but it opened my eyes to so many more possibilities of places we could go and opportunities that are right here around me. So, I highly recommend it. Trying for something completely crazy and exciting and big. The experience is well worth it.

the little engine that got wet

As promised, the 4th of July parade adventure, in pictures. Billy was planning to ride a bike in the parade with the biking club that rides in it every year, and he wanted to do something special. First, it was all the trailers that could be attached to each other into a bike train.

Then he decided to decorate the whole thing by making it look like a real train. All the planning and the making was a lot of fun for him, from an engineering and makin stuff standpoint.

The girls got excited about it too and helped in the building.

The parade's theme was something about Abraham Lincoln, so we put a Lincoln quote up on the side of the train. I had a lot of fun with a glue gun and Teresa and Maya made a game of finding the right letters for me. I bet Lincoln's words have never been emblazoned on a train's engine using foamy letters before (perhaps for the better).

Well, then parade day came and it rained and rained, hard. Billy and the girls all wanted to ride in their train anyway and headed off to line up for the parade, with a cautious send off from Grandma Amy and Michael.

(Billy the engine and engineer)

(Maya's on her ride along)

(Georgia's somewhere under that plastic windshield in the passenger car)

(Teresa in her caboose trailer, ready to go)

Unfortunately, the parade ended up being cancelled because of the downpour, and wisely so. The train, being cardboard and all, didn't take well to water.

But Billy and the girls had their exciting adventure, so... mission accomplished. Sad, yet fulfilling. Luckily, we were all about process, not product, so nobody was too down-hearted.

Here's that foamy quote in it's entirety, perhaps readable?

P.S. Sorry it took me so long to put it up, Grandma Amy! July was a bad month for me allergy-wise, and I have been much less than productive.