I'm blogging

In case you haven't noticed, I've been avoiding blogging for 2 weeks. I haven't felt very funny.

Oh so about the house - we made an offer contingent upon selling our house, which he countered. He was unwilling to even consider a contingency so we said nevermind. We are keeping our eye on it, it is still on the market at the same price, so if the price is lowered we may take that as a sign that he is becoming a little more desperate and may make another contingent offer. We're just not really wanting to put our house on the market without knowing if we will get this one or not. It's definitely on the back burner.

Two weekends ago (the weekend before Memorial Day), we went camping. Wednesday and Thursday night Momlie and I went to Stub Stewart, a state park about 30 minutes away. Geoff took us up there around lunchtime on Wednesday, unhitched us, and left. We got the camper all set up before he was even back at work! And it was PERFECTLY level, which can sometimes be a little tricky. We stayed in a loop we haven't stayed in before and walked around and scoped things out. There was a group of about 20 college-age kids building a wood shed (since it's the new loop they didn't have the shed where they sell the wood yet) - they were making a lot of beeping with an electronic level. In the 3 or so hours they were there, they put exactly 2 posts in the ground. 20 of them! Momlie put up our new set of party lights from the Easter Bunny while I started a fire, and then we had a fantastic dinner of crab legs, salmon, and asparagus - all of which we cooked over the fire! It was a very still calm evening, gorgeous weather, so we decided to rebel and leave the awning out. Geoff is VERY VERY VERY particular about the awning, he hates it being out if there is any wind and certainly never overnight. Around 2:30 in the morning I woke up - all of the windows were open and the blinds in my bedroom were banging against the window because of wind. I closed the window and then thought "oh no. the awning." So I tossed and turned for a while, trying to ignore it and hoping the wind would stop. I could faintly hear the blinds in the living area banging, and I was debating what to do. I peeked out the window and saw the neighbors still had their awning out, which made me feel slightly better. I thought "should I go close the awning? should I do it myself? should I wake up Momlie?" After 15 or 20 minutes I heard noise outside, so I peeked out - oh yes, 3 AM and the neighbors are outside pulling in their awning. UGH!!! Then I hear Momlie in the living area - I thought she heard the neighbors and was peeking out to see what was going on, but she said she was closing the windows so the blind banging would stop. I mentioned the awning and we decided we better go close it. So out we went to roll up the awning. It's a VERY good thing the blinds woke us up, because it got very windy after that - the whole trailer was shaking. Yikes. But the rest of the evening was still. The next morning, Geoff sent a text to ask how we were - we said "good, except for the awning incident". He said "ha, ha, ha, very funny!". If only he knew. :) We told him later, of course. We had cereal for brekkie and ham sammies for lunch, and then Geoff picked us up after work for softball. For dinner that night we had chicken caesar salads. Friday morning we checked to see if we had TV - we wanted to watch the weather because it was supposed to be like 95 and sunny all weekend! Crazy. We caught the Hillstrand Brothers from Deadliest Catch on a Portland morning show, that was interesting. All in HD... man we rough it when we camp! We just enjoyed ourselves and knitted (her not me), chatted, Sudokued (me not her), read, etc. Oh, and I worked on the first step of a sign I wanted to make for a camper - like a welcome sign! The "first step" consisted of spray painting a board silver. We also "installed stuff" - a MagLight holder and a paper towel that Geoff still hadn't done since September. We gave up on him and did it ourselves. ;-) Around 2 we started packing up - we wanted to be ALL ready to go for when Geoff picked us up. We got done pretty early, so we just sat all ready to go other than having the electricity still plugged in so we could have the AC on. That was the first time we had used it and it worked great! He swooped in around 3:30 and took us to Cape Disappointment State Park in Washington. It was great! Well - Friday when we got there it was humid and hot and buggy and nasty. ICK. We turned on the AC in the camper (roughing it again). It really worked great!! It was nice especially to get the humidity out of the air. Momlie went down to the beach (which was less than a 5 minute walk from our site) and Geoff and I started dinner - I made roasted potatoes, and he cooked the rest of the asparagus and steak. Plus we had some leftover crab leg. After dinner since it was so icky out (we were kinda back in the forest so it was just super buggy) we went inside and hung out in there. Saturday morning we woke up and made breakfast... and I decided to work on my sign more! Geoff was like "make sure you use a pencil to write what you want to say first to make sure you have enough room!" I said no. :) Geoff and Momlie were quite surprised - they figured being an engineer that I would want it to be exact. I said maybe I just wanted to have a creative outlet, but secretly I was just lazy. Lucky for me (I also attribute it to many many years of yearbook and scrapbooking and therefore having a good eye for how many pixels things are and spacing and stuff like that), the first word (Welcome) came out GREAT. I wrote Welcome all across the top of the sign. Then I didn't know where to go from there... I still wasn't sure what I wanted to say. What I DID know was that my brush was too big to write much more. Momlie wanted to go to the Fred Meyer (grocery store that also has Target-like items - it's like a Super Walmart but waaay nicer. They carry a lot of the same clothing brands as Kohl's, and they are owned by Kroger so all of their generic stuff is Kroger brand. It's a great store), so she said she'd get me a brush there. Also, we had to move! When I made the reservation, they didn't have any spots available for the whole weekend, so we had one spot Friday and one Saturday. So we moved and then she took the car to go to Fred Meyer. I LOVE having a towable rather than a motorhome because it's nice to have the car seperate. When she returned, I made the rest of my sign. I also drilled holes in the sign that are totally uneven (the eye didn't work so well on that part, I just called it "rustic") to hold it up. And it's SO CUTE. Geoff has the pictures on his camera so once he downloads them I will post for you all to enjoy. I'm so proud. Geoff and I tried to find a geocache - but (a) I didn't have on the right shoes and (b) we think the path was messed up by severe storms we had here in December, so we didn't find it. We used our dutch oven for the first time and cooked spaghetti - yum. Then we went and watched the sunset over the beach (this site was even closer to the beach). It was blissful - and a PERFECT temperature all day. Sunday we woke up, had breakfast, packed up, and went home. A sad day. But overall, a fantastic camping trip!!

For Memorial Day weekend, Geoff drove me and Momlie on our annual wine tasting adventure as always. We hit our favorite place first and then went to all new places - nothing that fabulous, in fact all rather disappointing. I don't think we'll be back to any of them, but our goal is to go to all of the wineries in the Willamette valley (there are A LOT) so we have to try new ones at least some of the time! Sunday we helped Gary and Momlie a little with cleaning out their garage, and then Gary and Geoff watched the Nascar race. Monday Geoff and I stayed in bed all day watching the Deadliest Catch marathon - okay I'm lying. I tried to - I lasted until about 3. I thought that was pretty good! But by then I had to get up and do stuff, so I just took care of a few things around the house. And that's about it. More tomorrow maybe when I don't have this much to blog about. It's always hard to make it over the big hump and then it comes a little easier.