My sites: Welcome to Oregon! Our Happy Home! My music page A little about me... Live and let live Bikes = Wonderful Let's...Go...Climbing! Other Interesting Sites: Dearric Winchester Photography Your source to find out if that forwarded email is full of it May The Farm Be With You... Billy Bragg Lucas Brunelle Tenui Nec Dimittam A great band you never heard... Mighty Joe Castro

Our little man is such a little outdoorsman! (he's also not a bad photographer...check out this mugshot!) Ah, it's been a good camping summer for Max. First up was Leavenworth, but that really wasn't "camping", as we were in a "Kabin" at a KOA site. Still fun, though. And I'm pretty sure we didn't take one picture the whole time we were there. We've since camped at Sparks Lake, which marks the first Max camping trip where he didn't wake up screaming in the middle of the night (and I didn't have to drive back to Bend to get him to sleep. Twice). No, little man went for a nature hike, caught some critters, sat by the campfire and roasted marshmallows, got into his pjs, and slept through the night in his little sleeping bag (well, he actually woke up at 3 AM asking for a book, so I recited Good Night Moon from memory until he went back to sleep). A couple of weeks later, we went to the beach. Well, Oregonians call it the "Coast". I'll just say it was absolutely rad. We stayed at Cape Perpetua, near the quirky little town of Yachats, Oregon. The first night we stayed there, I drove into town to get some pallets to burn...but upon reaching this sleepy town of 600, realized they don't have any stores big enough to use pallets (so I instead brought up some driftwood from the beach). The Oregon Coast is gorgeous: steep rocky shorelines interspersed with little nook beaches. The water is fantastically cold, but that didn't stop Max from heading in. Again and again: We actually stayed TWO nights at Cape Perpetua. I think his second night's sleep was aided by the 1.5 mile uphill climb to the lookout over the Pacific...he actually walked uphill quite a bit of the way. What a trooper. We'll push our luck by heading up to East Lake (inside Paulina Peak's crater) tomorrow. What else...the garden's coming in nicely. Broccoli's a little smaller than last year, and the pumpkins took over everything! Awesome, though...we even got some eggplant and berries! In between building bird feeders, Max and I also did a little river exploring in Bend: Biking's been great (as you'll see in the video below). So's climbing and drumming. Speaking of drumming, Necktie Killer has had our first few shows, and they were all totally rad. In unrelated news, we generated our 2000<>sup>th cumulative kilowatt of power in August! However, the meter said this. And, of course... Nonna came out to visit for a few days in July (holy crap, is it really September already?)...and provided me with the footage for the scooter video below. Hope you like 'em both! (these were as fun to make as the old soccer one) (I also hope you can hear the SOAD song in the scooter video; immediately after uploading it, I got an email from Youtube reminding me that the song was copyrighted. Freaking record labels. If you can't hear it, but want to, I'll Dropbox you the video). See you soon!