a busy couple weeks

so it's been a fun week or so. brian went to alaska for a week and while he was gone the grubes left for a week so i got to take care of pender (the cat) and the garden all on my own for a while.

for my birthday, brian and i went out to the red house, which is my favorite restaurant in our little neighborhood. he gave me two lovely neclaces and three gorgeous flower arrangements for the house. i would put pictures of them up, but it's been really hot here and they're getting all wilty.



our cucumbers are doing quite well, in fact, too well. i've been taking them to work to give them away and we still have about 15 in the fridge.




here's an example of one day's harvest. we get about this many in a week lately.





the tomatoes got a trim from brian when he got home because they were so heavy that they were collapsing their cages and spilling out over the sidewalk.



here's a shot of the whole garden as of yesterday. it's gotten quite lush! we've already harvested all the radishes, lettuce, broccoli, and many herbs.



in other news, the time has come to say good bye to the altima. it needs more repairs than we are prepared to make, so we're looking into other options. we're trying to figure out what we can afford, financing, and other things to make a good choice, but at this point we are looking at possibly a used subaru forester. very seattle, don't you think??

sorry kel, i'm a liar

i didn't get the pics up as promised, my internet was broken. here's what's been going on in the van houten household.

we've been learning to cook over open fires on our many camping trips. these were particularly delicious. we enjoyed them in a particularly private creekside location a few weeks. it was just the two of us.

we set up the shelter and enjoyed peaceful book time in our side-by-side camp recliners.

except when the posessed dear came into our campsite.

the true seattlites forgot their percolator. note the tube sock. we really don't recommend it, especially if you use fabric softener.

brian is really proud of how we've mastered camp bacon. this fire was at the bumping lake campground when we camped with rudy and anne and their two dogs.


we really need to start taking pictures of us together. here's brian looking cute, but we don't have any together ones.


for our anniversary weekend we stayed at the woodland cabin again, which brought back many great honeymoon memories and reminders of how exciting it was to be finally married. we had a great time hiking and relaxing and enjoying each other's company.

we went on a hike at mt. rainier, which turned out to be much shorter than planned because there was much more snow than we anticipated. brian got in a high altitude run, though. that's him in the white shirt on the patch of non-snow.

he returned from the run invigorated and we slid back down the mountain on our butts with glee. actually, it was really cold and that icy snow is kind of sharp and grainy. it was still fun.

on the ecening of the 4th we went up to the penthouse in brian's old apartment because they were putting on a huge fireworks show for our anniversary.

i'd consider going back to renting for this view.