sahhh-weet potatoes!!

hi all!

wanted to get out the update on the sweet potatoes. isaiah harvested them from the field several weeks ago.

here they are with all of the tops, the greenery, cut off and pushed to the side

green plastic pulled away

so because i helped get them out of the ground, i didnt take any other pictures of the process. but, as isaiah forked those ‘taters, i dug them out by hand. there were many small one, medium one and a few big ones. but the worst was that it never seemed to fail that the most beautiful, large sweet potatoes were munched in half by Mr. Gopher.

that asshole.

but here is a half box of the sell-able taters

small box, big box. we kept some very small roots, i thought that we could deep fry those suckers whole!

market day! after curing the potatoes in the house (it had to be warm), isaiah got them ready for the market. it was a special one-time-only sale. no other vendor at the market sells sweet taters so we were pretty sure that he would sell out!

ed from Earthly Edibles graciously let isaiah sell at his stand. because isaiah used ed’s land, water, and stand. they split the profits

that basket went fast. he put the best ones out first and moved down from there.

look at that corn display. so beautiful

many transactions completed! he indeed did sell out of the potatoes before the market even closed. he talked with people all day about growing the potatoes. it was a great learning experience and he will most likely plant them again next season.

thanks for viewing lovelies….

a couple months later…

hey ya’ll! what have you been up to? this is what we have been up to. actually this is a very small, small snapshot of what we have been up to. these pictures are most likely from the last month, so that means…September, i think!

we have had a very busy summer. every weekend was jammed packed with fun. isaiah has been farming like crazy, i have been working at my job (that is not so great) and i have been teaching at Humboldt State since the end of August.

let’s start with some pictures…

we ate tomatoes. beautiful, heirloom tomatoes. food was bountiful this summer.

isaiah grew many things in the yard including sungold tomatoes, basil, chard, kale, tomatillos, tomatoes, cilantro, peppers, parsley, lahhddiiddie da. some things did not do that well, and it is truly hard to tend to the yard when there are so many things to choose from on the farm.

i made crafts. i am a sewing machine right now! i dont really know what i am doing, but for the first time, i am not really that worried about making a mistake. i took a sewing class in the spring, as some of you may remember, so now i am goin’ for it. i love making clothes. i have never been that stoked on wearing clothes with logos, now, i can wear a one of kind.

you guys remember this little turd? yes, this is foster and he is now ours. he lives here. he is not going anywhere. and he is a terror.

he has wedged himself in quite nicely. fatty and foster have a special kind of relationship. 1) they are always hungry and will eat your face off if you let them 2) they both cannot wait to get outside after they are done eating 3) fatty puts up with him for some strange, only-cats-get-it reason

but who foster really loves, and by loves i mean drives crazy, is VILAS!! he jumps on her head, bats at her tail, pushes her out of the way to eat her food…all the good stuff. here he is above, dominating her.

here he is. foster. the eating, drinking, playing, biting, in your face- machine.

korbel. isaiah is growing sweet potatoes here as an experiment to see if sweet potatoes will grow in Humboldt County

here they are, coming up through the plastic that warms the soil.

ed’s onions. isaiah is growing his tater experiment on ed’s land- earthly edibles farm.

we have since dug up the sweet potatoes, but those pics are still on the cam. i will get to those later. the yield was OK, he learned a lot, but the GOPHERS, those bastards, did a lot of damage. it was heart breaking to dig up a bunch of big, fat beautiful potatoes…digging…digging…pulling…and then…HALF completely gone in a gophers belly!

we also went to our favorite September activity- Taste of Willow Creek. Saturday night was the delicious local foods dinner at the beautiful Trinity River Farms. That night, we camped out in our tent at Mike’s (Willow Creek Farm) and in the morning, headed down to the river for a swim. Sunday is the wine and food tasting day. You buy a passport and travel to all these different farms to taste wine and see the grounds. So great!

on our way down the flower path to the dinner. the food is all local, beautiful, and oh-so tasty.

seating is family style, dinner is served that was too. all courses come on large platters and you pass them around your table!

i took about a gillion pictures at the dinner, so i wont bore you with that! i could take pictures of food forever. this is trinity river, the view from the dinner area.

oohhhh, and this is what it looks like at night. the farm is just magic. the sky in Willow Creek is always clear and the air is warm. really, magic. come and join us next year, you will not be disappointed.

so after visiting all of the farms the next day, we headed to our last stop, back to Willow Creek Farms. Farmer Mike was giving hay rides, so of course, we hopped on. Here he is with his helper.

these cuties and i were forming bridges on the day and crawling under. a great way to end the weekend and we soon headed home after some more swimming and dinner!

ok, that’s it for now. more news later on isaiah’s new job and adventures…

hey ya’ll, she’s movin’ up!

so i did it, i did it! i got a new camera. i take a lot of picture, i mean, A LOT. and i am super type-A so i organize them by year and month and event, and so on. sometimes i wish that i was a professional organizer, but that is another blog.

so i got a new camera, a Cannon Rebel XS. it is beautiful and takes amazing picutures…and… i don’t really know how to use it yet. i think that it is pretty much a disgrace to own such an amazing piece of machinery and not know how to use it, so i am working on it.  here are some pics that happened to turn out amazing, i think

strawberries from our yard that were there when we moved it. they are very prolific, we are very lucky!

dahlia

poppies from jayme

my love, always so photogenic.

enjoy friends

Foster: New and Improved

the doc kept him at the vet for a while yesterday and upon arrival, confirmed my worst fear that i would have to continue to flush out the wound on his hiney. bleck!! isaiah was with me this time, i recruited back up. but in truth, it has been WAAAYYY better than i thought it was going to be. NOTHING could be worse than what i saw yesterday morning, so all downhill from here.

we are supposed to keep watching to see that he keeps eating. he eats ravenously, so as long as that continues, we are in the clear. he has no parasites and it seems that his respiratory cold is getting better, but we are supposed to watch that too. this amazing vet (which has STILL ONLY charged me $50!!) is going out of town tomorrow for two weeks. so we are on our own.

this morning when i opened the bathroom door, he JUMPED out of his bed. he JUMPED down the stairs and ran around, yip yip yip. he likes to be in between our feet, bat at the broom and climb the arm of the couch to be as close to us as possible.

thanks for the feedback everyone! i really appreciate it. here are some flowers for you.

good thing he swerved…

cori and i were doing the usual, walking down in the bottoms (farmland) on a very nice, clear summer evening. as we approached a familiar farm and farmhouse, i noticed that there was something on the road- it was orangish. now, i would have thought that it was just trash, farm debris, etc., but that type of think is typically not an orange mound.

i kinda forgot about it for a sec as cori and i pursued our usual conversation topics- today was “soul mates”.  then i noticed a car quickly approaching. i was REAAALLLY hoping that the car did not run over the “garbage”. as i said, i suspected otherwise.

the car was heading straight for it, but at the last minute, it swerved very purposefully. suspicion confirmed. it had to be an animal. i watched the car stop, slam into reverse and back up to see the thing on the road. the female passenger rolled down her window, then turned to her male counterpart. they both got out of the car and walked around to the object.

i stopped dead in my tracks, now no more that 30 feet away. i just knew that it was  cat and for some reason, my legs stopped working at the thought of seeing a half alive, mostly dead little beast in the road. i could NOT see this! i could not save it, i could do nothing, i had no control. so i just stopped. cori kept walking to check it out. she doesn’t have animals so i think that she could be a bit more disconnected. i overheard the gal from the car say, “will you please just pick it up?” as the man was shooing it off of the road with his boot. i said, “NO!” and cori turned to me, as she arrived at the beastie and said, “it’s alright”. so i continued forward.

what we found was a sad sight. enter, Foster.

this little orange beast was barley mobile. it was trying to make it off of the road with the man’s bootheel at its back. it was matted with mud, covered with its poo and other barnyard poo, had mere fur covering its bones, oozed goo from eyes/nose/mouth and was wobbly and lethargic. i don’t know what happened, i don’t know what came over me, i shoved my hands in my sleeves and bent down and picked the thing up. now all eyes were on me. the young car couple had a crying baby in the back seat, i looked at them and looked at cori and said, “i got it from here, thanks for stopping” car people.

put the thing in my shirt and kept on walking.

what the HECK am i going to do with the is sick, barely alive, kitten?!

isaiah will kill me, fatty will kill me, vilas will kill me.

i didnt really know what to do with it. although i love cats (which is TOTALLY weird if you knew me 5 years ago), i dont really know about caring for them other than leaving out food and having isaiah change the litter. that’s about it. i didnt really want to touch it because who know what the heck was on it??

i isolated it to the bathroom, gloved up, and dove into full time cat care provider mode. i gave the thing a sponge bath, focusing on cleaning his (?) face and paws. there were areas on him that i just had to avoid. weird white cluster/clumps on his fur (oh god! what could that be?) and a lot of mess in the nether region. he immediately drank water and almost ate my finger off when i hydrated some dry cat food and gave it to him. i thought things were going well.

stop reading if your don’t want to be scarred for life

i called around to some care shelters the next morning and talked to a very chatty lady that said that she could not take him because he was sick, but would neuter him for almost nothing when he was healthy. i described the ailments of the beast and she said…that those white clusters were most likely fly eggs (aka. maggots. AHHAHHHHALKHFLKHGHA!!!!!, my EARS!!! never say that again!!! NEVER NEVER. let’s just go with fly eggs, OK?!) and they were eating him right now. i put down the phone, stared out the window for a couple of minutes, called the vet and told them that i would be there in 20 minutes. and did just that.

the doctor was awesome. i told him my story. he said that he would like to keep the kitten to clean it (thank you lord of the vets), give it a shot to clear its chest congestion, gave me antibiotics to clear the eyes- and charged me for a single visit! whew! i came back in an hour to this.

he was clean and he purrs like crazy and meows like crazy! i kept the other cats out of the house while i made dinner and Foster followed me all around the kitchen. he is very happy and has even started to play a little, like a kitten should.

he did great again last night. eating, drinking, sleeping like a champ. his eyes are clearing up. the vet wanted to see him again this morning to check him and give him another dose of some potion or another.

stop reading if you care about your sanity

i was about to go for a run at the marsh and checked on Foster to say hey what’s up…and he was NOT that good. still in good spirits, still purring, still eating…but the nether region was WHACK!! some bloody action and when i peered down there, i was horrified! pulsing mass. jutting out. that is all i can say about that. (ok, i am about to pass out)

“ok, little cutie, you’re going to be fine (gag gag), let’s just get you to the vet ASAP (about to pass out, breathe, ok) “. meow meow. “you are doin’ so great little friend, let’s get in the carrier”. where are my keys? i cannot get him there fast enough. the radio is on. the tea kettle is on. can’t find the keys. fatty is trying to get in. why am i wearing  my slippers out to the car? don’t care.

the vet, all calm and collected, lifts the beast up, ass end first. “huh”, he says. “i’d like to keep him to clean this out”. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!  “gotta get rid of this fly strike”. yes friends, the flies now want to live inside the little beastie. WHAT have i got MYSELF into, SERIOUSLY?!

so that’s it. the baby is now at the vet and they are working their magic and hopefully they will tell me to “give the cat two of these and call me in the morning” and NOT “you will have to redress the wound ever couple hours”. please  no.

if he makes it, IF, there has already been quite a bit of attention surrounding this cute orange fellow. it seems to be a common fact that orange, male cats are just about the best cats that have ever lived. so i am hopeful that getting him adopted will be no problemo.

as for now, we have Foster, and we will see what happens.

PS. Kate, we are REALLY trying not to become crazy cat ladies. i swear!!

we want the large, of course!

so we went out to one of our favorite mexican resaurants the other night, Carmela’s mexican food. we were excited because we were almost in time for happy hour and cheap margaritas. i was gearing up to work my magic and see if we could still get the deal at 6:10p when the official party ended at 6:00p.

well the server was totally awesome and she said no problem. “do you want the large or the regular?”, she asked. well the large, of course. “some people complain that the large is too big and they whine that they can’t finish and i just don’t understand that because we are basically giving it to them for free”, she continued. oh yeah, i felt her pain. i mean, who can’t finish a full sized margarita? i have never seen a marg that i couldn’t best.

well, we were wrong.

double fistin’ this single drink. i did not get much farther than this.

isaiah tried the stare-down-that-marg method and i think that he succeeded. his hollow leg, the place that he stores all of his food and drink, helped too.

Carmela’s margarita, you have bested us. but i will try again.

7:15 Stop! it you liar.

i lied. there was more. so i think i should put them in.

knitting with jayme sitting next to me. actually, that neckerchief thing is for her.

lora and em’s

cori treating us right at Renata’s Creperie.

nums.

it’s a house. it’s where we live. no, i am not painting, that is a cat hair repellant sheet.

cena.

adios.

7:15 stop! OK, I will.

yes, this is the last 715 stop! i kinda made it five months but i miss so many days, more like ignored my 715p alarm, that i realized that it was time to throw in the towel. so here is the last installment. this is what i learned.

1) in the summer, when the days last long, 715p is a very boring time. it is before anything cool happens. you are most likey brushing your teeth or eating chips and waiting to hang out with your friends.

2) lives are pretty interesting. but you never really get it on film. so it is better to just hang out with people in person, maybe this is why i miss people all of the time.

3) i hate my camera. so i bought a new, beautiful one. and you will see the results of this purchase very soon.

4) blogs are the new diary, and since i wrote in a diary religiously as a kid (OK, i stopped like 4 years ago), i would like to write in a blog more often. actual stuff, that i am thinking.

isa must have been feeling sick. which emergenC to choose?

making dinner. salty sunflower seeds are so much better than the raw ones isaiah buys. belck!

lucas from madison came to visit. and it was 715p

i was talking with Clevie and needed a way to represent. the Tribe will do.

what  a loser way to end it. but the cool part is that the screen shows me posting a blog. so it’s very circular really.

love.

Ode to Thunder and Lightning

Dear Thunder and Lightning,

I have missed you so. Whenever I think of the you, I miss the midwest and the best part of the midwest summer-thunder and lightning.

Last summer, you Lightning visited a large part of California. You started many brush fires and you made trips to the river an overall drag as the smoke choked out most of the lovely days and irritated our eyes. Thunder was not as prevalent and neither was Rain. Had rain showed up, maybe we would not have lost so many conifers. But what do I know?

What i do know is that Thunder and Lightning are here right now! Outside of my window and Rain has come too. I can smell the wet asphalt, one of my favorite smells. And it looks like night although only 5:30p. This is rare for the coastal range and i am loving every clap.

Thanks for stopping by you dreamy little weather pattern.

7:15 Stop! Some March and April

the 7:15 stop project has gone awry, but it has become pretty fun because when i go to post the pictures, they are a surprise to me too. some nights i have my camera, some nights i don’t, my cell phone camera broke so i can’t even use that when i forget to take the camera with me.  the pictures are random and i have no idea what night is what, maybe it’s better this way.

isaiah and laundry

isaiah and tiffany chatting

practicing modern in the living room

isaiah and mexican food. he looks awesome.

dinner party?

knitting and america’s biggest loser?

using the gift certificate i won to Wildflower Cafe.

first 7:15 at shower time.

cori talking about costa rica before dinner time.

7:15 at shower time again, twice in two months, whoaaa.

isaiah thinking about dinner.

lora and isaiah talking about something serious.

answering an email.

bicycle abs

new Arcata Theater

refinishing a toybox that i have had since i was in third grade! i am ridiculously attached to things.

goin’ somewhere with the lover man

dinner and sex and the city

yummy salad

on my way somewhere, i guess i needed my knitting book.

making cookies!

cori and dinner!

more computer. why can i not get that damn wireless router to work!

isaiah and cereal and one of the most hilarious pictures of him. ever.