greaterthansparrows

Today we did something we've never done, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  We went to the annual car show and exhibition at LeMay and Marymount center. This was in two pieces.  For the ticket price of $10 we drove to Washington High School in Parkland, got on a bus to the LeMay family estate, took the shuttle to Marymount, and reversed the process.  From alighting the first bus to go buy our tickets, to getting off the last bus to go back to our car, we spent three hours.  I have no idea how many cars we saw. Harold LeMay was nuts about cars.  He brought them home from all over.  When persuaded to sell some, he bought more.  He bought the first ambulance ever created.  He bought Bristol double-decker buses from Pennsylvania made in England.  He bought a 1924 Chevrolet Phaeton in Johannesburg, South Africa.  (That one was very rare and particularly gorgeous.)  He crammed cars, antique fire trucks, tractors, steam engines, you name it...

Such a wonderful weekend!  We've been busy since our carriage turned back into a pumpkin, gently, Saturday evening. We had just entered the freeway when I realized that my camera was still at home.  Hubby was not going to go back, and I agreed.  But we had to have at least one picture for the record, so we bought this at the new huge ferris wheel down by the aquarium, below Pike Place Market. We checked into our hotel and took the Monorail over to the Seattle Center and wandered around a little.  The old section of amusement park rides and games was replaced a year or two ago, after many proposals, with a Chihuly permanent exhibition .  Dale Chihuly is a Tacoma native and a premier glass artist. This was something we had walked past before and said, someday.  We decided this was a good 'someday,' we were on holiday and celebrating, and it was gorgeous.  There was such color, and a progression of his styles, also an outdoor garden with exo...

This is our 40th wedding anniversary.  On the one hand, that's pretty cool, on the other, part of me wonders how is that possible?  Not how is it possible that we're still together, but how can it have been so long? I don't feel that old. We had a garden reception at my Great-Aunt Elizabeth's place, the house where my grandfather grew up and where we lived upstairs for our first two years.  (The first picture, I trust, makes it obvious where the wedding ceremony was.) My Grandmother Jeppson came from California, and my Bennett grandparents were there too.  Bill's Grandpa Condie and his second wife Cecile were there, but I don't have a picture of them in this short stack;  the main group of pictures is in a box too buried for me to get today. The scanner doesn't like the surface of the old photos, sorry about the distortion lines.  Last of all, here are the two of us with our parents.  We didn't put them in the receiving line, and w...

Like anybody else, we've changed some over the years.  This is a caricature done by a friend, who does them free for all comers on occasion at a ward party.  Otherwise, you can find him at various places eking out a bare living but having fun. Our official engagement picture This is my favorite picture, from 1991 But before we were even us, or imagined that we would be, we were... in Brigham City in Maryland ...until we could meet up at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in the University 15th Ward.  He was a senior in law school, I was a freshman.  (As in, an eighteen year old.)  We were married two years later.       We've had some fun through the years.... Last year, mugging for King Tut in Seattle But wherever we've been, and whatever we've been through over the course of forty years (tomorrow), we're still smiling. ll

Surprise!  Beauty awaits here, with or without admirers One thing that's been nice in the new place is the flowers.  The yard was so overgrown, and the weeds so out of control by the time our friend's lawnmower was fixed, that we had no idea this rose existed.  The base was bigger once, and just one long dead stick and one not quite dead smaller stick stuck out of the ground.  Didn't know what they were, hadn't thought about it.  This rose budded and opened after the massive attack on the (sort of) lawn.  This spot isn't visible from the front entry, nor the back garden strip unless the currant bush is beaten back. (That's another story.  This supposed currant bush was cut down to stubs the week before we took possession, and grew enough in three months to make the space almost impassible and eliminate the visual corridor, but it doesn't have currants on it.  We don't know what it is.) A lot of our changes seem to have featured flower...

I am blessed with the most generous people in my life. We were told that the new family, who were a couple of weeks behind their hoped-for schedule in moving in, would not have time to do anything with the apples at our old house, and the transparents were ready.  A friend lined up two of her grandkids, early teens, and a day to go pick.  The thirteen year old boy was very happy, his grandmother observed, to be instructed to climb up in a tree, and he and his sister were a great help.  Then Joyce took the apples to her house and we were set to come there two days later to make applesauce. Not only her labor, but her kitchen.  I don't have Carole this year to help, and I couldn't do it alone.  I don't have a dishwasher or any prep space next to the stove, so this was a huge help.  We're going to get an IKEA cabinet to sit between the stove and the wall, where the refrigerator has been moved out across the room, but we're not set up yet. This kitchen wil...

We had our first dinner guests yesterday in this house, the elders.  I wanted very much to be able to share the fruits of our garden with the elders who made it possible, and one of them is still here.  Since he just got his third companion in our ward, we all figure he's due for transfer.  So, it gave us a deadline to get some work done--we still have too many boxes--and a reason to make plans with our produce. We had sugar peas, saved up from a couple of weeks of daily picking, and three kinds of tomatoes in our green salad.  The small yellow ones I thought I had bought were small, all right, they were cherry tomatoes, so I have three cherry types and one regular, which is actually a smaller variety.  Only the one called 'chocolate cherry' is not ready yet, though coming.  (Those will be purple.)  The yellow ones are really sweet and we've been having them for four weeks, easily.  The tomato plants were large and cheaper than the stores, bough...