Portland

Avery in her princess dress

                                               

Henry, Josie, and Avery at lunch

                                             

Avery and Nain

                                                   

Avery is an excellent golfer

                                                

Bubbles

                                            

Lots of bubbles

                                        

Nolan really wanted to play in the bubble solution

                                      

Another lunch photo

                                                       

Avery the ballerina

                                                
 It has been a beautiful week in Portland. Avery loves the princess dress I bought on sale at Princess Paradise in Ft Collins.  She loves to dress up and pretend.

Thanks to Julie (who gave me the bubble wands) we had a great time at the Gorsegner's BBQ blowing really big bubbles.

Megan, Avery and I had a great time playing miniature golf. Avery was very persistent and was determined to get the ball in the hole using her club (not her hand). 

AND--Megan has spent hours with me on my new laptop making sure it is set up correctly and that I understand most of it.

Loreto Bay , Mexico

Blue skies
Blue water
Flowers of every color and shape

Orange birds
White seagulls
Dark sandy beaches

A quite place with workers here and there
slowly building houses that were to be finished long ago

Time marches slowly in Mexico

Cool mornings and evenings
Bring beautiful sunrises and sunsets

Hot afternoons bring reading and naps
Siesta time!

Book Club

I recently joined a book club and think I am going to enjoy it because I will be reading books I  would not have ordinarily chosen. The book I just finished is The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz. The story takes place in 1941 and starts out in Moscow where the Polish author has been arrested and is being coerced into signing a confession. As I started the first chapter I realized that he was going to be tortured and I cannot read (or watch) about that subject.  I  knew I could not read the book and put it down for two weeks.  As I thought about it and after  reading  the reviews on the back cover I decided to try again but to skip the first chapter because after he signs the confession he and hundreds of other prisoners are marched thousands of miles across Russia into Siberia to a labor camp. That I can read.

"The Long Walk is a book that I absolutely could not put down and one that I will never forget." --Stephen Ambrose. I could not put it down either. 

To paraphrase a review: 'In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp and marched thousands of miles by foot--out of Siberia and through Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, Tibet and over the Himalayas to British India.'

Check it out!

Writer's Block

Collin reading to Dylan. (Dylan has a fat lip from riding his trike off the porch)

Barkley is beautiful when the wind in blowing.

                                                                            

On an early morning walk. The full moon was beautiful but I love the Do Not Enter sign in front of the school.

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Avery and Dylan in Cheyenne

The sunrise on my early morning walk. (The house in the background was just being built)

                                                                                   

Avery concentrating on the ap on Mommy's I phone

                                    

Daffodils

Sunday
I don't seem to have much to say but do have some pictures.

Megan and Avery's visit was the week we had some cold weather. It seems as though when they come in the spring it is cold. But we had a good time anyway. We went to Cheyenne to visit Aunt Denise, Uncle Collin and cousin Dylan. We went to a great park that is only a few blocks from where they live and visited an outdoor  science park for children. One afternoon when Avery was napping Megan showed me how to put pictures on facebook and answered some other questions I had concerning the computer.

On the nice days I have been outside trying to get a jump on the weeds--I really think it is a lost cause but will never give up.  On the cloudy, cold or rainy days I have been 1) going through old photos 2) cleaning (that is a never ending process here), 3) reading old magazines so that I can recycle them, 4) substituting, and           5) reading books.

I went to Eaton Grove today and bought some pansies, strawberry plants, and a tomato plant.  I planted the strawberries but will wait until it is warmer at night to put out the rest. The sprinkler guys came this morning and turned on the sprinkler system--I needed it on before I leave for Portland.

Monday
It took a call to Megan to figure out how to put pictures on this blog--things do not stay the same on this site and that always throws me for a loop. I am still not sure how to get the pictures on in the order I want them. They are in a very random order--the 2 morning walk pictures should have been together.  I always walk the dog around 6 in the morning and these were taken when it was still dark at that time. I took my camera because the moon was so beautiful (it was more beautiful the day before as there was a ring around it) and then was happy to see a great sunrise.

Spring with a hint of summer

Denver broke a record with a high of 82 degrees yesterday and it was just as warm here in Eaton. It was a balmy day with light clouds which prevented the day from feeling too hot. I felt like I got a lot accomplished.

I made my healthy muffins (thanks to Katherine for that great recipe) and took them to my yoga instructor who had just lost her husband to bone marrow cancer. He was an engineer who worked for 47 years without a sick day.  They truly believed that he would survive this cancer and she was not prepared for his death.  He was a skier, a bicyclist and a lover of life with a great wit. (I learned all this at the funeral) She is now bombarded with a mound of paperwork and is in a fight with the bank. She is going to start yoga classes next week.

I have been wanting to clean the oven for quite awhile and it was the perfect day. I opened up all the windows and doors, put the ceiling fan on, and spent most of the 3 hours the oven was self cleaning outside. I scrubbed the oven racks in one of my old wash tubs--they are very handy--I bought them at a garage sale a long time ago.  I swept the garage. Conrad, a former student now in the 8th grade who lives down the street, came down with his edger and aerator and asked if I wanted my lawn aerated--another good job done. I also put the hammock out and sat in it for a few minutes. It was an absolutely gorgeous day!

I am reading two books-one fiction the other nonfiction. Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson,the author of Three Cups of Tea, has written another 'can't put it down' book.  I have heard him speak two times now and each time have been blown away by his life story. With our military in Afghanistan, this book gives the reader a better picture of the culture and needs of the people than any news story. The forward is by  Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns). Please read this book--you know how when you read a good book and you want everyone to read it too--and no one does?--this book I am begging for at least one person who reads this blog to get the book from the library and read it.( I bought the book because I had a 40% off coupon). There are even color photos in the book! Can't get any better than that.

The fiction book is Islands by Anne Siddons and is a book for reading on the beach..  In fact there is a beach in the book and is about women in the south. Just an easy, lazy day, read.

Monday I babysat Dylan and we walked over to a great park that is only a few blocks from their house. He loves to play in the sand on the shore and watch the ducks. He also is great at coloring. It is very hard for me to get a picture of him looking at the camera and smiling. One problem is the camera which takes the picture one or two seconds after I hit the button--so frustrating!  He is very easy to entertain and I love the walk over to the park so we have a great time together.

LIFE

I watched the first episode of a great program called 'Life' on Animal Planet, Discovery and TLC. Three years in the making, the videos are amazing. The episodes include: The Challenges of Life, Reptiles and Amphibians, Mammals, and Fish. Check it out.

As for my life, I spent most of the day in the back yard setting up my new composter. Sam's had it for sale and I have always been fascinated with how compost piles work. So now I will find out. I put it in the dog run as it needed to be in a place where it was sunny and flat. I have been saving tea bags, vegetable and fruit peelings and egg shells. I have a lot of leaves left from the fall which I put a little at a time into a large garbage can and cut them down with the weed eater (directions from the bag of compost starter). One layer of leaves, a layer of dirt and a layer of peelings--repeated 4 times-and water. Hope all this work is worth it. (And I hope it doesn't smell!)

There is snow and colder weather predicted for tomorrow. Colorado in the spring. I love it!

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

We have had two beautiful days of 50-60 degree weather but I have been trekking through the Amazon jungle searching for PH Fawcett who started out in 1925 for the lost city of Z in the kingdom of El Dorado and never returned.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book. From the back cover  "The Lost City of Z is like a wonderful nineteenth century tale of exotic danger-except that David Grann's book is also a sensitively written biographical detective story, a vest-pocket history of exploration, and a guide to the new archaeological research that is exploding our preconceptions of the Amazon and its peoples." Charles Mann

Percy Harrison Fawcett was a man obsessed with finding this lost civilization although many did not believe it even existed. Reading about the dangers in the jungle --the mosquito being one of the worst --made my skin crawl. The fact that he had survived many trips into the Amazon while many others did not, made him think this last trip would not be any different.

David Grann is a journalist who started out with the purpose of simply recording how generations of scientists and adventurers became fatally obsessed with solving the mystery of what happened to Fawcett and the two young men who were with him on this trip (one being his oldest son, Jack). Grann, who was not the type who could be considered an explorer, did a lot of research and even met Fawcett's granddaughter in Cardiff, Wales. He then went to Brazil and made his own journey into the jungle in an attempt to find out what really happened to the three men. 

I have no desire to go to the Amazon but feel like I have been there and survived.  Give it a try--and there are pictures!