Family, flower, fowl, and fiber photos

The old-fashioned variety in our pasture

Rick complains that the Japanese maple in front has gotten too big; this photo made me see it!

Our weather has finally moderated; we awoke this morning to cool, gray, drippy skies. Our month of late summer weather has been replaced with NORMAL for awhile – hurray! The only bummer is that Lance has already had four days off for assorted reasons and he won't want to ride with rain in his face; hopefully we'll get a break. Oh, and the other bummer is that I still have seven sheep to shear, and this weather is not conducive to that. Not only are warm fleeces easier to harvest and bright light easier to see by, but my shorn sheep were shivering this morning. The house is cool, too, but I plan to remedy that by turning on the oven for rhubarb cake and bread, and making a kettle of creamy lentil stew for supper.

On Friday an unexpected package arrived. It contained an adorable knitted bag holding a "Debbie Plyer," both handmade just for me by a talented and generous blogpal! I can't wait to try plying with this; the eye-hooks should work much better than the loops on my Jennie Plyer, which often catch and hold my singles.

Sabbath afternoon we went on a walk with friends and saw this lovely stand of camas and – buttercups?

Mothers Day here was fantastic, with family and food and flowers (and waterfowl), oh my! It did end up being a very long day. We picked up my MIL first thing in the morning and then headed towards Portland, stopping for breakfast at a place we hadn't tried before. I got strawberry rhubarb French toast which was good, although it was hard to detect any rhubarb. Then we continued on to Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden (along with a whole lot of other people) to enjoy the beauty. There were lots of ducklings and goslings, so apropos for the day we were celebrating.

By the time we headed home we were all hungry again, so we stopped at Olive Garden for the other meal of our day. So unusual to eat out like that, but I'm not complaining! (A little cherry on top was that just before we left the garden, the Portland Trailblazers won round two of the NBA Western Conference semi-finals. 👏🏻  )

When we finally got home, we all set about doing what we could before bedtime. Somewhere along the way, my FitBit came off; the band had been disconnecting the last day or so, probably weakened from wrassling with my son. I had a pang of panic; it certainly isn't a necessary tool, but it was my Christmas gift from Rick and it does prompt me to be more active. I traced all my steps inside and out with no luck. The next morning it occurred to me that I might be able to figure out its general area asking my iPhone app to sync with it, so I retraced all my steps. It was exciting to have its presence confirmed, but the location – the lower barnyard – is made up of woods, the Ram-ada Inn . . . and the big compost/manure pile. I spent 30-40 minutes searching through the straw I'd dumped there the evening before, again with no luck, before having to leave for work (don't worry; I took a shower first!). When I got home, I put my iPhone in a grain can and tried to use it to narrow the search area (at the suggestion of a friend's engineer husband), again without success, while Rick built a screening box.

We sifted and sorted and sorted and shifted until Rick thought of another friend who owns a metal detector and called him. After he searched unsuccessfully, he said, "I wonder if there's a 'FitBit finder app." Waddya know; there is, I downloaded it – and it worked! We found my FitBit buried in the straw of the Ram-ada Inn; it must have dropped off when I put hay in their feeder the night before. We gathered for a prayer of thanks and our friend left.

With all the driving Saturday and Sunday, I was able to get quite a bit of spinning done. I'm finally working on a sample pack of dyed Shetland combed top I bought years ago from Jamieson & Smith; this is the first color, all spun up:

And this is the second (yes, there are more colorful colors coming):

That's it for now from . . .