Hi Mom, It's Me

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Garden Closeups

These are pictures I took before I left on vacation.

The lettuce is eaten, the birds are already out of the nest and the flowers have dropped their petals. That's the nice thing about photography - it holds a moment forever.

pansy

robins
They are now eating my strawberries.

iris

columbine

Catty

bee

columbine

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Washington Adventure Begins

I went to a wedding in Washington state with my parents. We rented a house on Whidbey Island.

Goodbye Minnesota!

I was so tired. Our flight left at 6:20am and we got up at 4am to get ready, catch the shuttle from the hotel and get to the airport early. I think tired was the theme to the vacation - I'm not good with time changes, even small ones like 2 hours. You should have seen what the time change did to me when we went to New Zealand. Really messed up.

First view of the island.

It was a rainy day. We had 2 sunny days and 5 rainy days.

We took a ferry.

When we arrived on the island it was sunny! For a while.

We drove around a bit, because we were too early and couldn't check into our house. There was someone cleaning it.

View of Penn Cove.

Our house for the week. This was when the tide was out. When the tide came in it was almost up to the grass.

This heron fished every evening near the house. There were also seals that would show up in the evening and one night there was something large that surfaced not too far from the beach. It was attached to a buoy. The buoy bounced around for a while, then went farther and farther from shore and finally disappeared.

View from the deck. I took a lot of pictures from the deck. The sky changed so much, it amazed me. The sky doesn't change that much here, or rather I can't see very much of it - too many houses in the way.

Sun set on the first night. It never looked this way again.

New Obsession : Geocaching!

So my new obsession is geocaching.

I tried it out while I was on vacation and I loved it!

If you don't know what geocaching is check out http://www.geocaching.com/.

Basically, you have a GPS with coordinates and you follow the coordinates to ground zero (GZ) where you search for a cache. The cache can look like anything from less than 1" x1" (found 2 of those so far) to really, really big. It just has to be waterproof. When you find a cache there is a log inside that you sign and if you feel like it you can trade swag (little prizes).

We saw so many beautiful things on vacation that, without geocaching, we never would have seen.

It was the best vacation ever!

So I came back home and I had to show all my friends how much fun it is.
Last week-end we hit a few caches. Everyone loved it, but only one person is as obsessed as I am. My garden buddy Alexa! Or Leche - the name she likes to sign in cache log books.
She is really awesome, scary good at finding caches. Sometimes I wanted to give up, but she would give me a lecture on not giving up and then proceed to find the cache.
So cute!

Alexa and another friend. Their first find!

The whole gang and an ammo can.

Me with a geocoin I found in Washington. I dropped it into this cache for someone else to pick up and move along.

See that navy blue person between the two fallen trees?

That would be me with my hood up.

I was afraid, for good reason, of army worms falling into my hair.

I found that cache.........30 feet away and up at the top of the hill. LOL!

Some pictures I took while we were hunting in a state park on Sunday.

We never found the final cache of the multi we were searching for. The cords put us in the middle of the lake. I think I entered them wrong. Sure hope so! We will be back to find it.