Pickling

We received a lot of herbs and 2 fat cucumbers in our CSA box this month, along with tomatoes and green beans from our garden. I've been wanting to try pickling, especially the methods that don't require canning or a long wait! I tried this recipe last night: 4 Recipes for Quick Pickles: Rosemary & Sage Quick Pickles, and it was very easy! I'm not sure if they taste good (still curing in the frige), but the results were very beautiful at least!

I made pickled garlic/dill green beans, cucumbers with chives and sage, heirloom tomatoes with garlic and chives, and cucumber chips with garlic and dill.

Crater Lake and central OR

We had a lovely long weekend in central Oregon a few weeks ago. We headed out after work on a Thursday to stay at the St Francis School (a McMenamin's locale) in Bend for the first night. That was really fun - beautiful and fun McMenamin's decor, pub, soaking pool, patios, etc.
The next day, we headed to Sunriver for nice bike ride to LaPine SP. My parents and Nana arrived in the afternoon, and we all enjoyed the fun weekend in Sunriver - lots of bike rides, putt-putt, shopping, and relaxing. On Sunday, when my fam left for home, Dave and I headed to Crater lake for the afternoon. It is so breathtaking!! We stayed one more evening in Sunriver for swimming/hottubbing, birdwatching and reading. We ended the trip with a visit to the High Desert Museum in Bend where we got to see nice birds and nature displays. Very fun!
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Cycle Oregon University Weekend

Some pictures from the Cycle Oregon University Weekend, out of Western Oregon University in Monmouth, OR.

First strawberry crop of the year. This was also the first weekend of the year that the farmers markets had strawberries. Summer's almost here.

Happy Hour

Carley and I hiked Angel's Rest on Friday--here are some pics:

Fun at the dog park

It was a great evening of entertainment at the deluxe Banfield dog park. With 20+ dogs there, Wags probably had as much fun as he could handle. He loves the wading pool, greeting all of the dogs, and chasing tennis balls thrown into the pool. People are always surprised to hear that he's a 6 year old dog, since he acts like he's 2 or 3 and never stops running and playing. Good ol Wags!

Poker Faces

Had a few people over for a belated birthday party...here is the wreckage.

Poker Faces

$60 of Sod, A Whole Day of Fun!!!

Today was a beautiful sunny early spring day, perfect for a bike ride, hike, bird watching trip, or laying sod. We chose laying sod. We've been trying to deal with this an area of dead grass and moss. Phase one of the plan was to pave over a section of it with a new patio--that part is done. We decided to sod instead of seed to try and get something more stable in place more quickly than seed. On hindsight it would have been better to get a rototiller but we thought that since the area was pretty small we would be able to do it by hand. It took longer than we thought, but we were able to break up the dirt and lay the sod before dinner. I'm happy with the way it looks--now we just need to keep it watered for a couple weeks so it grows new roots. We'll also have to keep Wags from push it around. Hopefully we'll do something less physically intensive tomorrow.

We make birdhouses

Feeling a little bored and without plans on Saturday morning, we decided to at least get out to do some stuff around town. One item on my list: buy a bird house or two. February and March are the months for our little birds to make their nests (time for humans to clean the birdhouses we might have as well). Not finding any at Target or Home Depot, we decided we could make them ourselves! We bought the supplies, then headed home for some internet searching.

The birdhouse design and dimensions we went with is suppose to be the right fit for Downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, which we see regularly at our feeders. Each house took less an hour to make, and we had fun! After utilizing our supply of light yellow house paint, we mounted the two houses today, one on the side of the garage toward the back corner our yard, and another higher up on the front of our garage. I hope the birds find it in time - it would be very exciting if one of them gets used this year!

If you only ski one resort in Utah MAKE IT SNOWBASIN

Dad and I skiied Snowbasin today. I've been reading about this place for several years--in the 2002 Olympics they ran the Downhill, Super-G and Combined events at Snowbasin. We didn't ski on any of those runs, though.
We started out by taking a quick run to the gondola, where we rode up with Gary Nate, who has been the principal cameraman in some of the Warren Miller movies. We accidentally ended up at the top of some black diamond runs, which were pretty steep and had ten inches of new snow over moguls. We made it down, and eventually found some blue runs more to our liking. The terrain was as steep as some sections of A-Basin, and very open. Most ski areas have heavy forest on both sides of the runs, but Snowbasin only has sparse tree coverage, so the place feels more like an above-tree line area. Really fun.

The resort doesn't have much easy terrain--it is definitely suited for advanced intermediate like Dad and me. The ten inches of new snow made the trails soft enough to recover from sloppy turns, and kept us on our toes. Snowbasin is pretty big, and there were only a couple of trails where we saw many other people. It was a great place to spend time.

The resort reminded me of Oregon resorts--not much at the base, just a couple buildings. The buildings are really swank, though--new, with beautiful wood paneling, rugs, 

marble bathrooms. The lodge at the top of the gondola felt like a luxury hotel lobby. It was amazing...not sure how they pay for it since lift tickets are the cheapest of the four resorts we’re going to ski in Utah.

Tomorrow we are going to ski at Deer Valley, the home of huge amounts of corduroy  and one of the few places left where snow boarders are not welcome.

Here is one more picture from the crappy camera on my phone:

 

Shussing in Utah, day 1.

shussing
Dad and decided to ski at Park City as a warm up on our first day. I'd never skied there, and it had been more than a decade since Dad had spent any time there. In the morning we skied the obligatory black diamond (Glory Hole)...tough, leg burning moguls under 8 inches of fresh peruvian.  The day started fine, but I noticed pretty quickly that Dad was carrying much more speed in the flats...the wax on my skis was not good. Luckily the shop we rented from had an outpost at the resort and they swapped out the skies for me, and we were able to get down to business.  After lunch and after getting fresh skis we did laps on the King Con chair. Nice ski day...hoping tomorrow might have less precip.

We didn't take any pictures, but other people did.

Flicker in Focus

This is a picture I took earlier this month. Our flicker friend is so good looking.

Happy New Year

We had a few folks over to celebrate New Year's Eve--there was good food, Mexican Train Dominoes, Guitar Hero and cava. The party was followed by a long winter's nap.