Birthday Beach Trip

For my birthday weekend, Nick and I escaped to the coast. (Thank you Pete & Judy for letting us use your house yet again!!)

The first day was beautiful, with sunny skies and a warm ocean. Lilah had a ball. She fearlessly ran towards the water (yikes!), and loved to play with the wet squishy sand. Each trip to the beach resulted in a complete shower-off and change-of-clothes back at the beach house. I swear, the only thing worse than a wet, sandy dog is a wet, sandy toddler who wants you to carry her around....

I'm playing catch-up on this blog! Two weekends ago Nick and I made an impromtu trip to Hood River, where we ended up boating with the Davi clan. We went out on the Columbia in HR, where the water was smooth and warmer than Shasta. What an oddity, but we had an awesome day. Here is video of my 7 yr. old niece skiing. I also included video of Nick wake-boarding at Shasta (I couldn't get good footage of him this past trip) so this video will give you the idea. :)

Cheers!

-H

Book Meme

We were tagged by The Musing Mommy so I thought I'd take a crack at it. I'm sure Heather's version will/would be more filled out than mine.

Red -> Read more than once
Bold->Read once
Blue->Started but didn't finish
Purple->Saw the movie and thats good enough for me

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I read this about once a year)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (there is so much!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I guess I need to dust off the covers of some of these. I know we have copies of most of them around...
-Rell

More Girls Wkend Pictures -- from Michelle!

Let's go shopping!!

Girls Weekend!

Last week while I was talking to my close friend Michelle on the phone, we started joking about how the Roundhouse is almost the perfect half-way point between her house and mine. We started talking about how we should meet up there, and everything fell into place. Even Laura, who travels with her band most weekends during the summer, was able to join us.

We did an amazing trail ride via rental horses from Black Butte, laid by the pool, swam, got lost more than once in the woods, shopped, solved all the world's problems in serious girl-talk sessions, and drank alcohol with every meal.

It was the perfect weekend get-away.

Hey Michelle --- do you have any more pics to add?? :)










Simon says: "If I stare, maybe I will get this pancake...."

WANTED

Wanted -- One (or more) good baby-sitter to accompany the Tyrrell Jrs to the Roundhouse over Labor Day Weekend. We will be bringing our horses and need a baby-sitter just while we are out trail-riding. Does anyone want to come with us?? We will cook and could arrange a trail ride for you if you wanted.... It is a beautiful place to spend a long weekend! Please sign up ASAP if you are interested!!

Two Stories --- One buck apiece

1. So earlier this summer I was teaching a riding lesson on our cross-country course at work, which is a historic barn located in the smack-dab of suburbia. All of the sudden, a good-sized buck bolted out of some trees and came running down the gallop-track towards my group of students, who were all mounted. One horse used this as an excuse to start rearing straight up (and he is a TALL horse), and another horse promptly bolted off in the other direction bucking and farting as he went.



Once the deer saw this, he made a prompt u-turn and headed towards our outdoor arena, still at a dead run. Unfortunately, there was a jumping lesson running in that arena.



I could tell the poor buck was panicked. He whipped around towards my group, sized us up, and then ran for what he was worth towards us a second time. This time he took two of the cross-country jumps in perfect form and bolted up behind our water jump.



Luckily no one fell off and the horses were quickly put back under control. Once we all realized we were okay, we all had a good laugh. I was amazed to see such a beautiful buck in the middle of the city, and I hope the horses used him as a teaching example for how to run and jump the fences on the cross-country course!



2. On Sunday at the Roundhouse, Nick and I were enjoying some quiet time in the hammock when Simon noticed something along the back fence. We climbed out of the hammock to check it out, and it was a beautiful, but badly injured 4-point buck.



As we approached him, he got to his feet but his back legs would not function. He drug himself a few feet, then laid back down. We figured he was hit by a car on HWY 20, and bolted through the backside of the neighborhood before laying down behind our house.



Nick called Fish and Wildlife, but they told him as long as the deer was moving, they wouldn't do anything about it. I felt horrible, but there was nothing else to do.



Later that night, just as we sat down to a hamburger dinner, the Sheriff of Sisters arrived. He spoke with our next-door neighbors, hemmed-hawed around for a few minutes looking and acting thoroughly upset, then herded the buck into their backyard. Moments later two shots were heard, followed by the neighbor exclaiming, "Nice shot!" For me, this completely killed my appetite for hamburger.



Even with the compliments, when the Sheriff (who, as the sheriff of Sisters, had probably never had to fire his gun before) reappeared from the backyard we could tell he was visibly shaken. When he got back into his squad car, he backed straight into a tree, doing some damage to his bumper. Those of us on the deck of the Roundhouse started laughing, which I'm sure didn't help the situation. But it was sure funny watching a cop damage his car!!

Poor sheriff. Poor buck. But atleast both of them by now out of their misery...

The Annual Anniversary Weekend

We just got back from our second annual anniversary weekend trip over to the Roundhouse with our good friends Jessica and Jake, who celebrate their anniversary a day after Nick and I. We spent four days swimming, doing archery, playing games, walking, biking, and of course, eating way too much food.

This was also our first weekend trip without Lilah. GASP! I admit I might have been a little teary leaving her in Hood River with Nanny Tanny, and I might have also been a little teary picking her back up, but other than that it was LOVELY to have a weekend away from parenthood. While my daughter was waking up between 5:45 am and 6:30am, I slept in every day until 10 or later. In fact, after 10 1/2 grueling months of trying to be a morning person by waking up with a baby, I was depressed to learn how quickly (24 hrs) I can revert back to being a night owl.

I can officially say now that I've been in a bar fight! We went out to Sisters's new local watering hole one night. While we were playing pool a local-yocal woman (read: hag) rushed our pool table saying that this was her bar and her pool-table. Apparently she stepped out for a smoke for about 45 minutes, and we took over the table not realizing her name was written on it. She threw some things, used a few colorful descriptions regarding the table and our game, then realized none of the males in her group were going to take on Jake, who stands over 6'5. So we finished our game while her group glared at us. She later tried making ammends -- she was pretty trashed....

As always, I can't wait for next year's trip. This weekend truly felt like a vacation, bar fight and all!



Jessica 22 1/2 wks. It's a boy!








Yummy!