Well That Didn't Go According To Plan...

This past weekend was a long weekend for us (Memorial Day).  Daniel and I had tacked an extra day onto it with the hope, initially, of going to see The Foo Fighters at a big festival in Oregon with some friends.  That didn't quite go according to plan - the tickets were sold out before we could get our hands on them.

We thought we'd go camping in Oregon instead.  Four days in the spectacular Blue Mountains of Oregon would be (almost) just as good, we figured.  But then it started raining, and raining, and... raining (and yes, the farmers are as pissed off about the wet weather here as you are pissed off about the dry in Australia).  We didn't really fancy spending four days in a tent in the rain, so that didn't quite go according to plan, either.

Are you sensing a theme here?  Because I have some more for you...

On Sunday, even though it was, you guessed it, RAINING, we thought we'd go for a bit of a Sunday Drive.  We drove down through Rocky Canyon, along Robie Creek Road, up Clear Creek Road, and over to a road or two the names of which I can't quite remember.  These were all dirt roads; one of the lovely things about Boise is that 20 minutes of driving will get you out of town and into the bush. 

There were houses here and there for a while, but we eventually left them behind for scenery.  Lots and lots of lovely scenery. There were spring flowers (including wild larkspur), lovely little creeks everywhere, mountains, canyons, and not another soul to be seen. It was turning out to be quite a lovely drive, and it even stopped raining.

Then we rounded a corner and came across a snow bank.  Not too uncommon at the elevation we were at, especially given that it's been a very cool spring.  It was a pretty big snow bank, but there were some tyre tracks through it.

We paused for a bit, wondered whether we should attempt to drive through it or not, and then decided it was worth a shot.  We were in the Toyota, which has four wheel drive, so what the hell; if we got stuck we should be able to chuck it in four wheel and drive out, right?

Well... not exactly.  We got about three quarters of the way through the snow and got stuck.  Horribly stuck.  And the problem with the kind of stuck we got was that we couldn't get any traction with the four wheel drive.  Not even a little bit.  The Toyota tried and tried for us, but to no avail.

Bugger.  That didn't quite go according to plan.

Now as a general rule, people in Idaho who go out driving in the bush carry stuff with them.  Useful stuff like, oh, a shovel, a torch, blankets, matches, food; you know, your basic survival-type stuff.  It can get pretty remote, pretty quickly (probably why I like it so much). We know this, but apparently we thought these rules don't apply to Sunday Driving, because we were minus most of this stuff.  Especially the shovel, which we could have, oh, say, dug the Toyota out with.

Instead, we (by which I mostly mean Daniel) spent a few hours trying to dig the car out with Daniel's homemade bike rack thingy, which was in the vehicle.  Did I happen to mention it started raining again?  So we made our valiant attempt to dig ourselves out in the RAIN. And sleet.  And I think it might have snowed a little bit, too.

We had a winch thingy (they call them come-alongs here), but we had nothing to hook it to.  Daniel tried to anchor it in the dirt, but it was too soft.  I suppose we could have dug a trench for it... IF WE HAD A SHOVEL!

We had a mobile phone with us, but we weren't getting any reception.  It was starting to get dark. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that we were going to have to spend the night on the snow bank. 

Hmmm.

We had wet clothes, cold bodies, water, a large peppermint patty, a packet of chewing gum and some (very old, very stale) crystallised ginger.

Fortunately, we also had a blanket, a map (this comes in handy later) and a reasonable amount of petrol in the Toyota.

We turned on the car, amped up the heat, and dried out our clothes as best we could.  Did I happen to mention it stopped raining about the time we gave up on our recovery efforts?  Of course it did.

We had a pretty good idea where we were, and actually we weren't that far from Boise, just on the other side of the foothills (you'd know them as mountains) that surround the city.  We realised that there should be a mobile phone tower not too far away from us so Daniel, brave soul that he is, decided to venture forth and see if he could get some sort of reception further up the track.

It was almost dark when he headed out.  I waited with the car, and kept my fingers crossed.  I realised that there are cougars in them there mountains, so when Daniel didn't immediately come back I started thinking all sorts of terrible things about great big cats with great big fangs and big silent feet. Yikes!

He made it back just fine (obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be writing in such an almost cheery manner) with the good news that he had gotten phone reception and had called some friends who we knew would be able to haul us out of our predicament.  Only problem was, they didn't answer the phone... so that didn't go according to plan.

Oh well.  We shared the peppermint patty, choked down some ginger, and tried to get some sleep under the blanket that had fortunately been left in the car.

It was uncomfortable, and it was COLD, but surprisingly enough, there was some sleep to be had.  We woke up a few times and ran the car heater to warm up, and made it through to dawn, at which point Daniel headed back out to call our friends for help.

They answered!  Hurray!  We later found out that it was purely by accident that Maiera noticed Jason's phone was ringing (it was on vibrate), but they agreed to come and save us.  Daniel was able to explain fairly clearly where we were thanks to the map we had with us and our educated guess as to our whereabouts.

As it happened, we were actually planning to spend the day with them and their children, but our original plans did not involve them rescuing us.  So... that didn't go according to plan, either.

Anyway, we waited for our heroes.  Daniel decided to walk down the road to meet them and make sure they didn't miss us, while I decided to take some photos. We didn't think to bring a shovel, but of course we had a camera with us.  Sheesh!  What a pair of idiots.

While I was waiting and taking photos, a young guy on a BICYCLE came by.  It was so funny, it was almost surreal. I mean, we were way out in an unpopulated area. He just happened to be riding the same route that we had driven.  He must have been fabulously fit.  He was very concerned, mentioned that he'd seen Daniel, offered me all his food (I said no), offered to call someone (I explained help was on its way), and then pedalled on his merry way.  Nice guy; I hope he gets a laugh out of his encounter with us.

When Jason and Maiera arrived, along with Jess and Ethan, they not only had a tow chain, they had FOOD! and COFFEE!  Bless them, bless them, bless them.

It took all of 20 seconds to get us pulled off the snow bank, and then we made our way home.  In the sunshine.

Kind of lends new meaning to the term "car camping", I guess.

Here are some of the photos I took.  I'm afraid I don't have any of the car being unstuck - I was too busy drinking coffee and being grateful.

Our Sunday Drive didn't go at all according to plan, did it?  I have come to the conclusion that sometimes the only worthwhile thing to do with a plan is abandon it and see what happens next.

A (Not So Lazy) Sunday Afternoon

In fact, it was a very busy one for me.  I built a new garden bed!

I had been wanting to extend one bed for a while, and since I'd bought some plants the other weekend, I decided I might as well get on with it.

First, I got to with my tiller - once I got it started, that is.  I was trying to be diligent and take good care of it, but I got a bit carried away with the amount of oil I put in it.  After many, many attempted starts, some minor swear words, and cleaning up a whole lot of excess oil, it blew smoke everywhere and then settled down to the task at hand.

And a new bed is born!  There was a lot of grass to be raked out of it, but that all ended up in the compost bin.  No doubt there will be bits of grass that I missed poking up for months to come. So far, so good.

Next, I dumped some rocks in there:

The rocks were recycled from a footpath that we used to have running from the back door to the back of the yard (we now have a bit of a cow path of smooshed lawn), and some that we stole borrowed from the desert south of here.  It's all lava rock.  It's not technically a rock garden, because it doesn't have tons of rocks in great big piles everywhere, and it isn't very tall, so I'm going to call it my Desert Rock Bed.

The plants I bought are all drought tolerant, and quite a few of them are Idaho natives, or native to the region.  People here are slowly starting to catch on to the idea of native gardens.  Yay!  This bed is in full sun and doesn't get much of the flood irrigation during irrigation season, so it made perfect sense to go native, as it were.

Some digging, more raking, a few more rocks, a little bit of compost and a lot of water to get them started, and I was done!  There's even a footpath in there so I can get to all parts of the bed as needed.

Apologies for the quality of the photos; the sun was quite harsh and I'm discovering that taking decent photos of a garden bed (as opposed to a single plant) is really quite difficult.  That, and my arms were a little wobbly from all the rock lifting! 

The plants had all perked up by this morning.  I can't wait until they start to grow and fill the space in.

Here's the list of what I planted if you're interested (sorry, I don't have the botanical names):
Showy Fleabane
Dwarf Culinary Sage
Mountain Blue Grass
Partridge Feathers
Kinnick-Kinnick
Coreposis (I transplanted that from elsewhere in the garden)

If you want to learn more about them, here's the nursery I bought them from: Draggin' Wing Farm

I'm feeling a bit sore and sorry for myself today, but it was totally worth it!

Taste.com Strikes Again

Last night, we went to visit some friends and their new baby (a real little cutie named Camilla Lou).  We took dessert and drinks, and I wanted to make something with a bit of a spring theme.

I started with the idea of something involving rhubarb since it's such a spring thing, and it didn't take too long to find this cheesecake recipe: Vanilla Cheescake

I don't make a lot of desserts, and I've always been a bit intimidated by the idea of a baked cheesecake, but this one was actually quite straightforward.  It took a little time, but it was well and truly worth it.  I used vanilla bean paste that I brought back from Australia (they want a king's ransom for vanilla beans here), so I got all that lovely vanilla bean flavour.

It has two layers to it; one is your classic cream cheese and eggs, and the other is yoghurt and sour cream.  I ended up with a smooth, and quite delicate cheescake that wasn't too sweet.

The poached rhubarb part of it was the crowning glory, though.  My goodness me that was yummy!  It wasn't rhubarb from my garden, which isn't ready yet, but the store-bought stuff turned out just fine.  The recipe said it would take about 20 minutes to cook the rhubarb, but it ended up being more like 50.  If you try it, serve the rhubarb at room temperature so you get the full impact of all the flavours. 

I read the comments about the recipe on taste.com and I have to agree; this will be my basic cheesecake recipe if ever I want to make another one.  You could top it with just about anything.  I'm thinking mango and lime, maybe, or berries and star anise... the possibilities are endless.

I made a baby blanket for Camilla, too, but I didn't get around to taking a photo of it.  Needless to say, it's my best one yet ;)

Another Yay Daniel!

So earlier this spring, Daniel rode in a couple of bike races known collectively as the Dirt Bag Dash.  Why the Dirt Bag Dash?  They were riding over dirt and gravel, rather than on the paved roads they usually ride on.  The terrain must have really suited Daniel, because he placed in each race in the series, and came in second overall in his category!!  Yay Daniel!  He even got prizes....

... some fancy handelbar wrap for his bike, and a bottle of blackberry mead, of all things.  Apparently mead's becoming quite the thing.

For those of you who are interested, he rode his cross bike rather than his road bike.  Cross bikes are a little sturdier than road bikes, and stand up to tougher terrain.  It's Daniel's favourite bike; he bought the pieces and built it himself.

He hasn't opened the mead yet, so I can't tell you what it tastes like, but I'm hoping 2006 was a good year.

Ah Spring...

After a long, slow, wet spring, things are finally, FINALLY starting to happen in the garden.  My vegie patch is underway with lettuce, rocket (lots and lots), radishes (I got some fancypants "gourmet" blend - we'll see what happens in a week or two), peas, cabbage, and broccoli. I also have a lovely patch of  rhubarb that should be ready any old day now.

Got my asparagus planted, after losing track of the little box full of corms I received in the mail for several weeks.  Strangely enough, they were right where I'd left them.  Imagine that!

I had daffodils that held their bloom for about six weeks, which was a surprise and a delight Thank you Cool Wet Spring. And I have the best crop of dandelions ever ;)

The crabapple I planted in the front yard was at its best this week.

Crabapples are very popular around here, but most people plant the double bloom  pink varieties. They get so overladen with blossom that you can't see the tree for the bloom. My preference is for something simpler, because I like to be able to see the structure of the tree - probably because this is the first tree I've ever pruned from the beginning. I like to see how my handiwork is holding up.  She's been in the ground for about four years, which I think makes her a seven year tree all up.  The variety is Snowdrift; lovely apple blossom scent, but not obnoxious.  And the single white blossoms are just lovely.

 

This is a spiraea I planted last year.  You see them a lot in public landscaping around here, so I made sure to plant things around it that you don't find in public landscapes (like chives and sage).  I don't want my garden to end up looking like a carpark.  I planted it last year, and as I recall the leaves were lovely oranges, yellows and reds before they dropped in the fall.  For those of you who are interested (Kris!) the botanical name is Spiraea x burnalda 'Goldflame'.  Can't remember the name of the blue one next to it, and I apparently didn't save the tag because it isn't in my garden book.

My Rosemary That Will Not Die has gone bonkers, which is making the bees very happy, which in turn makes me very happy.

And, finally, another plant I got last year that is blooming for the first time, my Tiarella 'Sugar and Spice'.  It's a shade plant, and the leaves turned burgundy in the fall.  I thought it would die right back over the winter, but it didn't, so I had a little bit of colour in my shade garden.

It's by the back door, too, so I get to see it often.  It has the most delightful wee flowers on the spikes it sends up.

I bought some plants on Saturday for the part of the front yard that I am turning into a desert (ie native) landscape.  I bought them from a woman who raises all the plants herself from seed, and a lot of them are Idaho natives.  Even better, she has a demonstration garden so you can see what they look like.  I'm pretty excited about getting them planted, but first I have to dig up some lawn and move some rocks.  I was planning on getting started with that today, but it's bloody raining, isn't it?  And has been ALL day. Sheesh!  And it's gotten cold again. I ended up doing housework....

Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

Cheers!

Capitalist Excess

I think it would be fair to say that Daniel and I are not huge consumers when it comes to household furniture and decor.  Most of what we have has been given to us (because we're lucky to have crafty and/or generous people in our family).  I can count on three fingers the new items of furniture we've bought in the sixteen years we've been married; a bed frame that we bought with money that we were given when we got married, a spare bed when we finally got a house that had two bedrooms, and a couch that we bought a couple of years ago when we realised that we just weren't up to sitting on a futon anymore (we donated that to a refugee family who really needed it). Most of our extra money is spent on trips home, entertaining friends, my gardening habit, and Daniel's bicycling habit.

I think Spring Madness got to us, though, because we sallied forth last weekend to buy a new telly.  The one we had was 20 years old, and had a very small screen.  It wasn't even HDTV capable (although we got a little box of electronics to solve that problem when all TV went to high definition a few years ago).

Soooo... we ventured forth and got ourselves a new one.  Since a lot of what we watch is movies, we decided on a larger screen.  We also decided on one that is web-ready so we can stream our movies from Netflix (which is where we rent our movies from).  This is actually a good thing in that we won't be using up resources having the Netflix people deliver DVDs to us; it's all dots and pixels flying over the airwaves.

These new tellys aren't cheap.  Once you buy the actual TV, you also have to buy a whole bunch of other stuff so you can connect it to the DVD player and stereo, and on and on.... nothing in the world of electronics is cheap anymore, it seems.  If we had a firstborn child I'm sure they would have asked for it.

And I have to say, if you really want to feel like the world has passed you by, just go out and by some electronics.  It's all changed so much that I am now officially clueless.

So anyway we got the thing, and then we had to get something to put it on.  Our old TV had quite happily sat on a small wire table thingy (I guess that's piece of furniture number four) that I believe I bought for the princely sum of $20 when we rented our first house.  Said table thingy is now hosting my Draecena....

I had to move the Draecena because everything in the living room had to be rearranged to accommodate the TV, but it seems to be doing okay in its new spot.  I love that plant!  It was maybe 10 centimetres tall when I got it, and now it's at least a metre tall - in spite of being ravaged by the furry folk as revenge for me leaving them on one of my trips home.

We looked and looked and looked for some sort of purpose-designed TV table (we didn't want a cabinet), and were failing miserably in our mission.  They were really, really ugly, the wrong wood, the wrong style, overpriced... you get the idea.  And I was adamant that I didn't want anything with a dark finish.  I thought our house was too small for dark, monumental pieces of furniture. And let me be frank here; our house is so small that even a teacup can look monumental.

We finally stumbled across something at a furniture clearance center.  It wasn't a purpose-designed TV table, but I'm very happy with what we found:

I know, I know... it's a very dark finish (the official term is "chocolate"), which I suspect I won't hear the end of, but it's pretty groovy and fits in surprisingly well with our 1930s house for all that it's very modern. And it really doesn't dominate our little house at all, which was quite a surprise.  If we ever get around to refinishing the floors and fixing the mantlepiece around the fireplace, the living room will look quite fancy!

It's actually a buffet, and it was made in Canada (which is only a long day's drive from here). The top drawer is even felt lined for cutlery. Daniel drilled a few holes in the back of it for all the cables and we were able to fit all our stereo gear and the DVD player in the main cabinet.

Here's a detail:

There's a really nifty switch on the back of it that you tap a time or two to switch on the lights in the side cabinets so you can show off your crafty family's gifts that they've given you over the years. Pretty fancy schmancy!

Best of all, we got it for two thirds off the original asking price.  Can't say fairer than that!

Now all I have to do is figure out how to work the telly....