First Daylily Blossom of the Year

Today, my first daylily blossom of this year opened and it inspired me to take you on a photographic tour of my garden.  It all starts with my yellow daylily...

Random Sunday

Some random things happening right now (or Very Soon):

• On Tuesday, we get see our long-lost friend Kim and meet her husband.  We were both really good friends with Kim in college and we haven't seen her since we lived in Bozeman--actually right after I found out I was pregnant with Henry.  It's been years and years. They're coming over for lunch as they head back west after staying in the Twin Cities area.
• The weather in Minnesota has been absolutely crazy.  Lots of storms and lots and lots of rain.  The benefit is that our yard looks fantastic (when we can keep up with the mowing!) and our garden is getting huge.  I have some grape tomatoes almost ready to harvest and I'm getting ready to pick the purple bell peppers.  
• I'm proud of myself because I've started working on Christmas presents.  Every year, like everyone else, I vow I won't be doing the last-minute freak-out thing, and every year it does get a little better.  Maybe this will be the year that it's totally relaxed (ha)?
• I'm seriously in love with my laptop.  Yes, my laptop.  I know, I know.  It's Brad's too.  In name anyway...
• My brother and his friend are coming into town late on the Fourth and staying two nights.  They are making a cross-country and back trip this summer to help someone move (I can't remember who now, sorry, Dan) and are taking a northern route while going east and then a southern route while returning west.  Make sense?  I can't wait to see him!
• Holly's gained 3 pounds since the middle of May.  For her, that's huge.  She's finally growing out of clothes she's been wearing for the past three summers.  It's amazing and strange at the same time.  We're so happy that we are seeing such good progress.  We'll be going back to the doctor on July 7th.  
• Seeing as how I have a bunch of people coming to visit me, you'd think I'd be motivated to clean my house.  Where is my motivation?  I Just Don't Want To Clean.  Sorry, Future Guests, if things aren't spotless...  Yes, the bathrooms will be clean, and yes, the kitchen will be devoid of grossness (is that a word?  It should be), but there will most likely be piles of unsorted papers, toys, and slightly gritty vinyl flooring around the back sliding door where the kids come in and out all the time.  Oh, and the knitting.  The piles of yarn, fibers, project bags, and books are probably not going anywhere either. 
• I want to cut my hair short but don't know who will do a good job for me.  My current hairdresser pretty much won't do it.  Any suggestions?  Yeah, I know most of you are far away, but still.
• I cannot believe that this year is basically halfway over.  Just can't. 

I think that's all I wanted to sort of just dump out of my brain for right now.

In case you haven't noticed, there's a poll over to the right here.  I would like to start blogging about my projects (mostly knitting and spinning, and things related to that.  Also some embroidery or sewing or whatever else I happen to be doing at the moment.  What can I say?  I'm multicraftual.) mostly for my benefit, and also for the few people I know who like seeing my stuff (very few).  I'd appreciate your input about this.

Hope you are all enjoying the end of your weekend.  Tomorrow is "Friday" for us because of Brad's schedule.  Looking forward to that, for sure!

Savanna Portage State Park

On Tuesday we headed north to Savanna Portage State Park.  It was a new park for us and we really enjoyed ourselves.  Even the drive was through new territory--we headed up Hwy. 65 all the way there.  It was a stunning drive, taking us through Solana State Forest, which is a lowland covered in Tamarack trees.  Very stunning area--and very different from what we're used to.  We felt like we were in the far, far north.

When we arrived at the state park, the weather was perfect and the scenery was beautiful--unfortunately we came at the wrong (or right, depending on how you look at it, I suppose) time for the deer/horse/ginormouslyhuge fly season.  It's supposed to be a lot better next month, according to the people working there.

That's a picture of Loon Lake in the park.  It's where we ate our picnic lunch and where you can go swimming at the beach.  Yes, there were loons in the lake.

We did some geocaching and found the cache along the Savanna Portage trail.  The trail is the one Native Americans and Voyageurs used to travel between the Mississippi River and the Savanna River--which took them to the St. Louis, into Lake Superior, and, eventually, to the sea.  There is a lot of history in the area and we would love to go back to camp because of that and because of the fact that it's stunning there!

This is Wolf Lake, which has backpack-in campsites on the far shore.  The campground is also right next to this lake, and it's very nice.

For more pictures of the kids (and the grownups) enjoying the park, check out our Flickr account.

Fresh Start

Our new computer arrived today!  The laptop is great, and we now have a webcam so we can make videos and do video calls through Skype.  We also upgraded our modem, which means we have reliable wireless internet now.  It's a happy day!  Still have a bunch of file transferring and setting up to do, but it's so nice to have a reliable, fast computer to use now!

In other news, our garden plants are getting huge and we've got some purple bell peppers almost ready to eat.  We've got a bunch of tomatoes--Roma, grape, and even pink--getting bigger and bigger every day.  I'm excited to get fresh tomatoes.  There's also a baby butternut squash growing and several pumpkin blossoms just ready to open, maybe tomorrow.  I've got some onions that I just planted starting to come up.  Our very generous neighbors gave us a bunch of onions to plant.  Can't wait for fresh green onions, and maybe some actual yellow onions as well.

What's new where you are?

Updating

We're updating our computer and modem in the next week.  We're excited about the deal we got on a refurbished laptop.  It's not a top-of-the-line model, but it's got great reviews and seems like it'll be perfect for what we need it to do.

Here's what we ended up with (only ours is a refurbished model, so we saved a decent amount of moolah!):  PCMag.com review

Can't wait till they get here!

Please Stand By

We're having computer issues here at Chez Kringler.  We seem to have picked up a trojan virus and are in the process of changing to another computer while we figure out if now is the time for us to get a new one (the one we have is old in computer years and is becoming too slow for all the things we want to do).

Hopefully we'll be back up and running with email and everything else within the next week or so.

Gluten-Free Eating Radio Show

If you have some time to listen to a podcast--this is a wonderful radio show to get more information on gluten intolerance, celiac, and food allergies. Dr. Wangen--the doctor who has helped my mom immensely, and us with making good decisions for Holly's diagnosis and care--answers questions. Along with Dr. Wangen is Shauna Ahern, who is a writer and blogger (glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com).

Gluten-Free Eating

Listen to help others you know or will meet who cannot have gluten, and listen for yourself--I promise you'll learn a lot!

Family Time

We've had a great few days with family! 

On Sunday, we went over to Buffalo to watch Harry, Todd, and Brian finish their triathlon.  The event was at the lake that the town is situated around and it's a beautiful area.  We got to cheer as Harry crossed the finish line!  Then we relaxed for a while at the park.  Later on that evening, we had a barbeque at Todd and Brian's place with lots of family, which was really nice.  We don't see them as often as we would like. 

The next day, we were going to see the new polar bear exhibit at Como Zoo with Grandpa Harry and Uncle Todd.  Luckily they arrived there first and called to alert us to the fact that every single school decided to have a field trip there for one of the last days of school.  Okay, probably a slight exaggeration, but it was apparently packed, with no place to park.  So we switched to Plan B, and headed over to the Science Museum.  It was not very busy and we had a great time.  We played outside in the Big Backyard area, watched an Imax movie called Arabia (which, by the way was absolutely fantastic), and just explored the museum. 

To top it all off, Harry spent the day here yesterday, helping Brad fix the downstairs shower!  It's working now--and we're not just saying that to get you to take a cold-water-only shower this time, we promise.  Henry now has his own shower to use, and we have a bathroom for guests to use when they come to visit.  We're so thankful!  After that was done, we celebrated with a great meal at PF Chang's.  We'd been wanting to try the restaurant because we've heard that they are very "gluten-free friendly" and it was true.  The food was really yummy and we had a lot to choose from.

Today we're just hanging around the house, relaxing after our long weekend.  I think I am going to try some more baking today.  I made my first from-scratch GF bread yesterday (with teff flour! Yum!), and it was good--except I've discovered that I do not like the taste of tapioca starch.  I'm thinking of tweaking an "all-purpose" flour mix into a cookie recipe we really enjoyed before the gluten-free change.  It'll be another experiment--this time a double experiment!  Keep your fingers crossed they turn out well.  It's always sad (and expensive!) to bake something and have to throw it out...

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's...

Tonight Brad and I were wandering around our yard, admiring the plants and checking how things were growing.  A bumblebee flew past, into the catmint flowers, which we need to cut back.  This turned our attention to the plant, and then to the bumblebee.  Or was it a bumblebee?  No, it was a hummingbird!  A teeny, tiny hummingbird.  No--hummingbirds don't have antennae.  What was that thing?

We looked closer and discovered a moth, which behaved and sounded exactly like a hummingbird, extracting nectar from the flowers of the catmint plant.  It also looked like a lobster, oddly enough.  Luckily, we grabbed the camera and got a good shot so we could identify our visitor:

Click on picture to enlarge

We then went online to identify what we had seen.  We saw a Nessus sphinx, according to this website. 

What's the most interesting creature you've seen in your yard?

Back to blogging after a long hiatus

So I decided that Facebook isn't for me. I felt like I was projecting an image of myself that wasn't accurate. It was too easy to be negative because I used it as a method of venting my frustrations--so I seemed negative all the time! And then I would feel negative. There are too many chances for misunderstandings there.  I will miss how easy it was to keep in touch with other people, but that's about it.

So what are we up to?

Right now, we are slowly finishing up schoolwork for the year. I'd like to finish most everything by the end of July so we can have a real break for about a month and a half. We still need to do Henry's standardized test for the year--his first. I'm planning on doing that soon.

We're enjoying being outside more often, and watching our garden grow. It's been great to watch the plants change and produce. Right now we have some baby peppers (bell) and tomatoes! We cheated this year and bought plants from the local greenhouse. Next year I will start from seeds.

Next week we should be heading out to enjoy some time together, and with Harry as well. I think we might go to Como Zoo, and hopefully some state parks. Brad took an extra day off for the week, so we'll have four days to relax.

The kids are doing well, Holly is doing very well with her new diet--she is getting healthier by the day. Actually, we all are.  I'm proud of my kids for accepting this necessary change so well. Henry is growing like a weed and is doing very well with his schoolwork.

That's about it for this time.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some spinning to finish!