Doodly-doos

Yesterday I was working in Corel Painter (or trying to) and Kate crawled up into my chair with me and wanted to play. The graphics tablet attracts her like magic. ("Color?") So I let her scribble on the screen a bit, and then she had me drawing animals for her. "Green mouse! Red rooster! Orange lion!" Animals are always her big thing. The other day Doug made her a paper dragon, which she received with great interest, then pointed at him and said, "Horse? Horse paper?" Now we have little paper animals all over the house. Poor kid--it's going to be quite a blow someday when she realizes there are things her parents can't do.

Dilemma

Kate just bit her tongue and wanted me to kiss it for her. What to do, what to do....

Harvest Moon

Kate and I went for a walk this afternoon and picked these flowers (and other things). Fall is here! Kate also wanted some blackberries, which we had more trouble with, since there are barely any edible ones left on the bushes, but I managed to find a few. It was rather difficult to explain to Kate, who could see that there were clearly berries there, but couldn't understand why her mom wouldn't get them for her.

Doug started back to work yesterday. He's teaching four classes this quarter, at two different schools. His schedule cuts it a bit close--he's only got half an hour between classes to get from here to Auburn, which could be a problem if traffic is bad. It's going to be a busy quarter. We're adjusting to the new schedule.

Today is the Asian mid-autumn festival, harvest moon festival, called Chuseok (추석) in Korea. It's the 15th day of the 30-day lunar month, and falls on the full moon. I've been told that it's the biggest holiday in Korea, but I don't really have a good sense of it because I was only in Korea for one Chuseok, and nobody invited us over. I was serving as a missionary in KwangJu with Sister Shelly Jeppson from Utah, and had been in the country for about five months. We went over to the elders' house and had a picnic outside their apartment (I had made apple pie, which I remember they were pretty excited about). Other people in the apartment building kept coming out onto their balconies to look at us. ("Check out the foreigners! What are they doing?") So that's my Chuseok memory. I was reflecting recently how, through some cruel twist of fate, I spent four summers in Korea and only one fall. It's just not fair. (Well, when Doug and I went over to teach English six weeks after we got married, we arrived in late October, so I guess we did catch the tail end of that fall.) Autumn in Korea is such a gorgeous time of year, all the more wonderful because it follows a miserably hot and muggy summer. If you ask any Korean what their favorite season is, they will most likely say fall. If we get to go back to Korea again I hope we can go in the fall. Or spring. Spring is quite beautiful, too. Or maybe we can go in the spring and then again in the fall, and skip summer this time. Sounds like a plan.

I've been working on a Korean-related digi kit, which I hope to have done within the next few days, but it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and I haven't been able to work on much else. We went to the fair on Friday, but I don't know when I'll get around to posting pictures.

My brother Peter and his wife Karen just found out they are having a girl! Big fluffy pink wahooos!

Animated Joles

I got a hit on my blog from somebody doing a google search for "animated jole of the day," which amused me greatly. I'm assuming that's supposed to be joke of the day. Since I've got a Sitemeter counter, I can see where people are coming from and what searches bring them here. One of the weirdest was "And if we're very lucky, perhaps we'll both find WooHoo." I'm almost afraid to ask what that's about. I get quite a lot of people looking for a papercut pig. I should put a picture of my piggy over in the sidebar or something. I feel kind of bad, when a search brings someone to my blog but not to the specific entry that they need, and then they don't find what they're looking for.

It's gotten chilly here all of a sudden. Sweater weather. It's nice. Doug had a pork roast in the oven for about four hours yesterday, right in the middle of the day, and the apartment was just comfortably warm rather than sweltering. It was definitely a good oven day. The leaves are starting to turn, too. I'll have to get some pictures of Kate kicking leaves this year, especially since I've got all these great potato print leaf stamps now.

In other news, Doug was released from his bishopric calling, that he's been doing for just over two years now. No more early Sunday morning meetings, and we'll actually get to sit together in church! Yay!

My dinner with Ernie

Ernie Hernandez is our tech guy at NDISB--admin, site ogre, and also Theresa's husband. He was in the area recently for his other job, so we got together for pizza down at Owen Beach.



Ernie is a fun guy, and not at all ogre-ish in person. We had a nice visit, though it was rather short. It was pretty late in the evening when we got out there, and then it was getting dark, and chilly. Kate kept Doug busy walking on the driftwood logs and checking out beachy treasures.




I had to make an alternate version of that first picture for the NDISB board. Ha!

Shake it!

I was going through some old photos today (I am so far behind on archiving--yikes!) and I found some pictures of a squirrel that I took at Wright park last year. It's a bit hard to tell but I believe this is a picture of the squirrel shaking himself. Obviously my shutter speed was not high enough to keep up with squirrel shaking. Look at how the blur patterns are kind of centered around that one spot on his flank. Perhaps that's where his shaking motor is located.

Here's another picture so you can see what a cute little guy he is. He'd just finished burying a peanut, so he's got some dirt on his face.

11 years

Yesterday was our eleventh anniversary. It was pretty low-key, since I ended up sick, but we did get some pictures at the park the day before. I found Shanna (at digishoptalk) who was willing to come take some pictures with my camera, so we met down at Point Defiance. Kate was not into the picture-taking thing, and Shanna and my camera apparently had some disagreement that manifested itself as focusing problems. We ended up with a lot of not-very-usable shots, but we did get a few cute ones.



I've come down with a head cold, most likely picked up from the little darlings in the nursery at church. I was wiping a lot of noses this last week.