San Jose!!!

Yay we made it! We started out on Monday Aug 10th, stayed in Hood River Oregon for a day then headed down to San Jose! Our apartment is also finally set up, we're just waiting for internet to come and it's nice sunny weather. I guess my few complaints are:

1) It's scary to drive around here

2) Everything is expensive

3) It's a bit too crowded for me! (Surprisingly enough, I'm NOT a big city girl)

But I love the weather here! It has been sunny, but not ridiculously hot. I also love how everything (i.e. library, shopping, grocery) is only about a mile away from our place -AND- there's good food EVERYWHERE!! You can get really good Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and etc all within a few minutes! Well just to let you all know, we're doing well!

Oh my Gardenz...

My garden is in full swing this year. It helps that I had time to prep everything in the fall and early spring. Now it's looking pretty good. I have beans, corn, pumpkins, squash, gourds, peas, tomatoes, lettuce, bok choy, nappa cabbage, jalapenos, and watermelons galore! I'm kinda sad that we'll be leaving for San Jose before lots of it is ready, but I have more fun gardening that actually consuming what I grow. Although, nothing beats fresh vegetables out of the garden.

This last picture is an arbor I constructed for my gourds to grow up, and to let all the gourds hang down. It might also be a nice shady spot to sit in once they grow some more.

Ponds Away!!!

I've been wanting to build a pond for a while now. And I finally got my mom to agree with me that she should have one, and she financed the venture. (I don't have anywhere to put a pond yet, so it makes sense it should be at my parents house). Anyway, here are some pictures of my creation.

The liner and plants came from a pond store in Redmond, they had a lot of cool stuff. I would love to build something like their koi ponds some day. I guess I'll have to wait until I have a house or something. I built the fountain out of bamboo that we bought at the Bamboo gardens. I used my geometry skills to make the octagonal border out of cedar. I really like working with cedar, it smells nice. Tomorrow Katrina and I are taking Hayley to chinatown to pick out a couple of goldfish to put into the pond. It's gonna be a party.

What Chris has been up to... and other exciting topics

What haven't I been up to? I guess it's been a while since I made any posts, so now it's make up time. We'll start with the state of the art chicken coup I built.

I didn't build the actual coup, it was a playhouse given to us by a friend several years back. I did all the modifications and chicken yard construction.

This is Easter sitting in one of the nesting boxes, which is easily accessible through a hatch on the side of the coup.

This is the feeding area. It rains a lot here, and it isn't much fun to clean out the food when it is soaking wet. So the chickens have a nice covered area in which they can eat.

The black and white chicken is Wanda the Wyandotte. She's my personal favorite. I saw wyandottes at the Puyallup fair last year and thought they looked really cool. So I had to get one.

Knitting, a very addicting hobby

I have a cousin that knits and I was always in wonder at the things she made. I finally had a chance to learn from Chris' grandma. Chris also picked it up as she taught me so we both started knitting. Ever since then we have been adamantly supporting our local knitting shop.

Chris was the first conqueror of knitting hats. This one is for his mom with Alpaca/wool mixed yarn.

It turned out great and she loves it!

We got a small Japanese book with cap patterns and Chris whipped this one up for me using Alpaca/Peruvian wool. He's still going to add a flower on the top. It's super warm!

One of our cats Yumi has also taken to knitting. If anyone is knitting in the house she will sit in their lap. Actually right now as I am writing this she is sitting in Chris' lap watching him knit a scarf.

This is my second project, my second scarf. It's simple with just knit and purl stitches, but I like the way the texture turned out. It made it for Chris!

So Chris and I are cautious with knitting. There have been times when we thought to ourselves, "I'll just knit a row or two" and end up spending hours upon hours working on a project. It feels sooo good to create and finish something!

Wild Wet Adverntures in the Northwest

It's been forever since we last posted but I thought I might include this interesting story:
Around November it had been raining non-stop, Chris and I barely came back from a night out. I was walking across the laundry room in my socks and I noticed my feet were very cold and soaking wet. Worried, Chris checked out the storage room which is in our apartment and this is what we saw:

Water was seeping through the walls in our basement apartment quickly. Our landlord (Grandma) Kevin and Dad came over and we started battling the flood waters with towels, a water pump and the boys digging a little ditch with a pump for the water under the house to drain.

We worked until midnight and finally beat the water. Chris and I were still able to sleep in our apartment that night, but in the living room since the carpet in the main bedroom was damp.

Woo hoo for adventurous times!

Merry Christmas, happy holidays!

Ok it's been forever since we've updated. Christmas was great. Chris and I were spoiled silly. We got gift cards galore, awesome cookbooks, games, money and DVD's. Chris also made me a kitty scarf and adopted a polar bear in my name through WWF. I made him some artwork, a Wii game and Threadless t-shirts. New Years was easy going and quiet. Anyway, happy belated holidays!