I love the smell the fresh cut grass..

...and the look of a freshly mowed lawn. Today the weather was finally nice enough to mow. I didn't post a picture of our yard because it doesn't look too pretty. The grass was about a week past needing to be cut and it got rained on earlier in the day. Thus mowing left it not looking so good but at least it got mowed. It will look better next time.

Mowing got me excited and exhausted all at the same time. Excited about Spring and all the yard work that comes with this time of year. I LOVE working in my yard and get great satisfaction from making it look good but it is a LOT of work. That is where the exhausted part comes into play. It is absolutely exhausting keeping up with it all. But it is a good kind of exhaustion.

New paint in living room

Back at the beginning of the winter, when it first started into the rainy season, we had an issue with the roof which resulted in water leaking through the roof and into the living room. I ended up having to peel paint off of some the areas in order to get the water to drain. So I needed to repaint.
I had been contemplating repainting the beam in the living room anyway after seeing what my sister-in-law did in her living room. She used three different colors to highlight the architecture in the room. I loved the way it looked. When I originally painted that living room I didn't know what to do w/ the beam...I guess I thought I needed to make it blend in (it was painted the darker of the 2 colors on the walls) but after seeing my sister-in-laws living room I got a different idea about it. I think that the "Coffee Bean" color looks great!

72-hour kit

Jack & I..well, mostly Jack...has been trying to get our 72 hour kits in order. I decided my contribution could be homemade firestarters. I have been wanting to make these for a long time. They are super easy & cheap to make. All it takes is cardboard egg carton (I used the carton from my Costco eggs...you get three w/ each bulk package), dryer lint, and candle wax. It cost me less then $6 to make about 50 of these big ones that are pictured. I also made mini firestarters from the part of the carton the sticks up. I tested out a mini one in the fireplace...it burned for about 5 minutes. I thought the mini ones would be great to put in a backpack for a hike. Here in Oregon we are forever hearing about people getting lost in the woods unprepared. Not the Blazer's....we would have fire!!!

Eagles

My sister lives in a pretty rural area up near the Canadian border. It is absolutely beautiful up there. The weather was really nice while I was there. The most amazing thing is the wild life. They have a big pond across the street from their new house that always has big flocks of birds hanging out. They also have bald eagles everywhere. We saw tons of them during the 2 days that I was there. Some were right in the trees in their yard but most were in the trees across the street. It was cool to see how big they were even from far away you could tell that they were huge. We even saw one in a field eating on something that it had caught. In this picture you can just barely see 2 eagles perched in the top trees across the street from Kelly's house.

These two are of the same eagle in a tree right in Kelly's yard. It was really neat to see one so close in the wild.

Weekend Trip

I took a quick trip w/o Jack up to my sisters house for my nephews missionary farewell. He is going to Monterrey Mexico. He gave a GREAT talk on the history of missionary work in sacrament meeting on Sunday. We are so proud that he has chosen and is worthy to serve a mission. Up there the whole week and didn't get hardly any pictures...not a single one of any of the nephews. I posted a few below...

Mackenzie, Kyla, & Kelly

Kyla & Mackenzie

Snow..then rain..now wind.

It has been a crazy Winter for us so far. The latest is the wind. The wind coming through the Columbia River Gorge for the last 24 hours has been brutal. There was a 70 mile per hour gust reported in our area last night. Tiffany was here visiting and we came home from the mall last night to the main road to the house closed (found out later a tree had fallen across the road) and a completely blacked out neighborhood. Thank goodness Tiffany was with me. It would have been scary to be in dark all night by myself. We had no power off and on until 10 o'clock this morning.

These trees are in the park just 1/2 a block from our house. We also lost several other trees through out the neighborhood.

This house is around the corner from ours. As you can see the tree from one propertey fell across the fence into the other property. You can't see if very well but there is a shed underneath the fallen tree.

We are lucky so far the trees around us have held strong and we haven't lost any shingles off of our roof

Whose in charge here?

This was the scene from the sun porch yesterday morning. It cracked me up that Dora has one whole half of the loveseat all to herself and both dogs have crammed themselves into the other half. I always tell people the Dora is "the Queen". I guess this proves that she is.