Moving again

Well, this has been a stressful. tumultuous couple of months.  We moved down to Emmett in May.  Didn't find work and Tom got accepted to grad school back in Moscow.  So, he moved back to live in student housing, which doesn't allow dogs.  Duffy and I moved in with my folks, who were kind enough to let us stay.

No luck finding work in Salem, nor back in Boise, so after 3 months of crashing at the folks' house, Tom and I rented an apartment in Moscow that allows pets.

Duffy getting ready to move

Moving truck - going from Emmett to Moscow

On Whitebird grade looking at the old Whitebird grade.

Our new apartment - looks like a house and we have our own planting bed out front.

Duffy's new potty area - not far from our apartment.

 

 

Duffy looking out the window at the cows and horse next door.

Recent Travels

First, a picture of Duffy on my desk.  He kept me company while I was working this spring.

Duffy went to Boise with us to scout out a place to live.

It ended up that we chose Emmett instead of Boise to rent an apartment.  Emmett is small and friendly and close to Boise, but it's not so busy and big.  Emmett is less of a shock for us after living for six years in Moscow.

So here we are in mid-May, with Duffy checking out the job we did with the moving truck.  Thanks to my great brother, Jeff, we got all of our stuff packed into the truck.  Duffy, Jeff and I rode in the car, while Tom drove the truck.  

Missing Oskar

We took Oskar to my folks' house to spend a few months while we lived temporarily in an apartment.  Of course, when we got there, Oskar escaped at the first chance and hasn't been seen since.  I'm hoping that he shows up once I get there next week and he sees our car regularly again.

Here's a picture from late February showing Oskar venturing out into the snow.  It shows just how deep the snow was this winter.  He spent the happiest winter ever outside this year, keeping warm with wood chips in his insulated Igloo dog house.  

Duffy hasn't been traveling much

We were so busy with school that Duffy's been homebound a lot in the last few months.  He's gone on some car rides around town, as well as walking in the neighborhood or on campus, but not often enough.  And it doesn't help that it's rained almost every day of May and June, so far.  Hope the weather gets sunny soon!!

Pictured are Oskar and Duffy on a rare sunny day in late May. 

Duffy's summer day trip

Duffy actually got to go on a car trip! We all went to Sandpoint for the day to check it out. What a beautiful place. I researched what beaches allowed dogs - Dog Beach - and we loaded Duffy up for the trip. Turns out Dog Beach was closed. So, scratch that part of the plan. We finally found Lakeview Park to walk him in the shade, and at one end it had a boat ramp. We headed for the boat ramp and found a few feet of pebbly beach, but Duffy was not interested one little bit. Too many waves from the boats. Duffy really hates waves!

We ended up eating lunch at Arby's since we couldn't leave Duffy in the car alone. It was too hot and the town was too busy. Then we drove back home to Moscow.



Vanessa and Duffy near the boat ramp, Lakeview Park


Tom and Duffy



Lake Pend Oreille, from Lakeview Park

View of Schweitzer Mountain from the Coldwater Creek complex

Boise trip

Pictures from our trip to Boise in July 2008. Idaho is a pretty state and I wanted to see more of it. We stayed in a Motel 6 by the airport and it was surprisingly nice. It had been recently remodeled and had indoor corridors. We will definitely stay there again if in Boise. The capital building was closed for renovations, unfortunately, but I was able to see all the neighborhoods, BSU's campus, Julia Davis park, the Boise River and the mall. Boise's climate is so much like Hermiston, where I spent most of my childhood. I love the brown hills!


Tom in front of Lake Payette in McCall, Idaho. We stopped on our way back to Moscow.
Such a beautiful place.


People tubing on the Boise River.


View of the Boise River from a bridge.

Pictures of the snow in Moscow in June 2008. Definitely not normal.

Duffy being held up by Jeff

Duffy just loves my brother Jeff. Duffy's being held up by Jeff at our parents' house over the Christmas holiday (2007).

Knitting pics

My most recently finished project is the Ocean Lace Stole by JustOneMoreRow.com. It turned out to be a very pretty pattern, so I made the same pattern in a scarf in pinks for my mom for a gift.

Christmas Duffy

Back to knitting...

My passion for knitting comes and goes, but has endured overall for twenty years. Maybe slumps are normal for other people, too. Since I started designing projects for myself, as well as commercial designs, I find that I can produce a lot in a few months, then I need a break of 2 months to a year.

I completed a design project this week and I've started on the sleeves of another project. I dragged much of my stash out to get inspired by some of the great yarns I have. It worked! Two Noro Kureyon scarves are done - the colors are so beautiful! My current sweater project is a short-sleeved, v-neck sweater that hopefully will fit me.

Quote

"A woman is side-tracked by all her feminine roles. She's at a disadvantage from the beginning...She also lacks the conviction that she has the 'right' to achievement...* [but] we want to achieve something meaningful and to feel our involvements make us valuable thinking persons." Eva Hesse, 1975

The above quote is in my art textbook, "A World of Art" by Henry M. Sayre. I found an alternate form of the quote online.

At the * above, instead continue with this: "that her achievements are worthy. A fantastic strength is necessary and courage. I dwell on this all the time."

This quote speaks to me.

Books

Just spotted this on http://time4moretea.blogspot.com/ :

List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misrables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
*****
I didn't bother underlining, as most every book on this list is a book I want to read :-)

The Sari Shop

I just read an idea that I loved to kick start your day's blog when you are out of thoughts from http://mommytomjm.blogspot.com/ where you pick up the closest book and quote the 5th sentence of the third paragraph on page 123.

From "The Sari Shop" by Rupa Bajwa: However, Gokul did tell him that it was important to respect both your instrument of work, if you were a craftsman, and your place of work.

BTW, the above quoted book is excellent, I just finished reading it this afternoon. Very compelling story about a shop assistant in India.

Another cold day

It's cold here and gray today. Instead of rain this morning, it was snowing big fat lazy flakes. They didn't stick to cover the ugly mud in my backyard - how rude of them. I've been sick all week with the flu and I still feel like crap. At least I have a long weekend to rest. Ever behind on school work...no mental energy to study or read or...

What's that rumbling?

I'm sitting here in my living room, playing around on the computer while watching a dvd (Whale Rider) and I keep hearing this rattling and rumbling sound. I finally realize it's my hamster upstairs running on her wheel. I can't get used to the old registers in this house - they are the kind that go through the floor / ceiling, so the living room can hear the guest room and vice versa. And my bedroom is connected to my kitchen by the second register.

Since this house was built in 1890 it has some quirks. The floors are not level. The previous sentence is an understatement. And the floors are uneven, so you go downhill to the dining room, slightly uphill towards the kitchen, trip on the sill going into the kitchen, and if you head on straight to the back door, you are still going uphill. If, however, you turn left and go to the fridge for some late night refreshment, you are pointed downward yet again.

The kitchen was updated in the 40's. It's got 2 different china cabinet type things that were sawn in half and mounted as base and upper cupboards. At least they have a lot of character. The sink is a neat 40's design with extra wide double bowls. Like having 4 normal sized sinks. And it is part of a larger metal cabinet with built in stuff. At some point in time, some other weird small cabinets were screwed into the walls to make them built in. But they clearly didn't come with the house in 1890.

It's been raining and warm (in the 40's) lately and the last traces of snow are having a hard time holding on. The road to Moscow is absolutely clear and the huge snow plow mound down the middle of Main street has disappeared. But the ridge of ice and snow under the eaves of my house is clinging on with all it's strength. I have not yet tripped on the pile and I can see it waiting...

Settling in

I've managed to survive a lot of change recently and I'm trying to settle in to my new house. It is weird to move to a town of under 800 people and a conservative state from the SF Bay Area. Quite a culture shock. And, since it is winter, I have to adjust to the cold, snow, and ice. No more balmy winters for me!

I find myself very unmotivated to unpack and clean. I have never moved into a place that needed so much cleaning before. This is a college area and the standards for rentals are much lower than apartments in the bay area. My mom cleaned my kitchen for me and relined all the shelves when I moved in but I still have to clean the bedrooms and the living room. Ugh. But this house is charming and big and has a fenced yard. All you dog lovers know what a bonus a yard is for a rental.