stormy

It's pouring rain outside, and we're currently under a severe thunderstorm warning. And after 3 years of no storms to speak of, I am LOVING every crash and bang! (I'd love it more if I could spend the afternoon enjoying it from inside the house, but hey, three clients (at least) is nothing to sneeze at!)

So. Camping. We got off to a rough start (nearly forgot hamburger meat, couldn't find my swim trunks, had to stop for allergy meds), but once we got out of the metro area, the drive was great, and we were at the campground by 12:30. We picked a beautiful rustic tent site looking out on Foote Pond, and by 5 o'clock, we'd gotten the tent up, cooked sausages on the fire, made love, and taken a nap. It was idyllic and blissful. That night, we cooked hamburgers on the fire (we didn't bring a single vegetable or fruit! LOL!)...and realized that we'd forgotten pots and pans. It turned out not to matter too much, because we overslept Saturday morning, so breakfast was handfuls out of our (almost three-pound) bag of trail mix, and we bought coffee at The Dam Store on the way to the canoe rental place.
 
We got started down the river shortly after 9am, and had the water to ourselves the majority of the trip. We each caught a fish (trout, i think - and mine was a Golden Rainbow Trout!), but they were too small to keep. Both were caught on my line, using Frank, my fake minnow lure, because the fish kept robbing E's live bait off her hook! Alas, eventually my line snapped on a cast, and Frank is a permanent resident of the river. We just hope he sank to the bottom without inflicting any damage on the other residents.

We ate our turkey sandwiches along the way, and made several stops for rock hunting and swimming. Nothing like swimming in a cold, clear river, with nobody else around! I brought home a pocketful of rocks, too - one really neat agate, and lots of fossils, which I'm hoping to get identified. Fascinating stuff.

By the last leg of the trip, the wind had come up, and we had to paddle hard to keep from being blown into trees. There was one point when we couldn't get our nose pointed the right way no matter what we tried, and after that, we were pretty much done, lol! We were still having lots of fun, but we were also exhausted and just wanted out of the boat. You should've heard us cheer when we saw our destination, lololol! We drove back to camp, took showers, got ice cream at the camp store...and passed out. For six hours. It was the most epic nap ever! LOL!

We woke up around 10, bought more firewood and a cheap frying pan, re-heated the hamburgers, and went back to sleep. On Sunday morning, we boiled water in the frying pan for the French press, then cooked an entire pound of bacon and some eggs for breakfast sammiches. We got the site packed up (So easy! We work so well together!), and took a much-needed dip in the pond to cool off before driving home. We changed clothes in semi-privacy...except we forgot to close the drivers' side door, and I *may* have unintentionally mooned some passing cars. Oh, well. Worse things have happened, lol.

All in all, it was an amazing weekend, and we are definitely going back next year! Pics and further details later, time to head to work.

Oh - I regret to announce the death of Fibonacci, who passed shortly after we got back from Portland. He was a wonderful snail, and much missed. We have his shell, and are keeping it.

No More DOMA!!!!

Today, I woke up to the best news in a long, loooooooooooooooooooooooooong time - the US Supreme Court has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act!

This weekend, E told me that she is my wife, and I am hers, and that someday we will stand up in front of our family and friends and say so, regardless of legal status. There is still work to do...the SCOTUS ruling doesn't automatically end Michigan's same-sex marriage ban...but thanks to that ruling, we are one giant step closer to our legal wedding day.

I can't stop pinching myself!

aaaand, we're back!

I'm giving up on the 52 Weeks of Happy. Don't look at me like that! I'll still be posting happy things. Promise. It just got too hard to remember every week.

So, where'd we leave off? Late April? Gosh, so much has happened! The tomato and strawberry seedlings, alas, did not make it. The baby basils did, and are thriving in their new container home, along with some baby alpine strawberry plants I purchased. So far, so good! E's started some roma and beefsteak tomatoes, and they're almost ready to transplant. We acquired two hops plants (Nugget and Willamette), which also need to get in the ground. The garlic is doing great (and we harvested and ate some scapes the other night), the mulberries are sloooooooooowly ripening, and oh yes, thanks to a chance encounter at the health food store, I'm the proud owner of a continuous-brew kombucha setup! Batch one is in the fridge, batch two is almost ready, and my pet scoby is healthy and happy.

 
Little V (and fam) flew in for a belated first birthday bash, and I taught her all about dandelions. Mostly she just enjoyed waving them around. Cutie pants.

 And speaking of pants, I'm learning to make them! Well, pajama bottoms, anyway. These still need finishing, but YAAAAAAAAAY PANTS!

This morning, I went to a local U-Pick berry farm and came back with a whole flat, ostensibly for freezer jam. Except there are now ten 1/2-pint jars of said jam, plus another cup or so of crushed berries for ice cream making (no-churn, no-machine...if it works, I'll share the link), and I still have three quarters of the flat left. We're already planning strawberry syrup and pancakes...and Mom likes smoothies...and somewhere, I have a recipe for strawberry bread...

Ten jars of summer flavor should be plenty to see us through the winter!(plus, that's all the freezer space we can allocate for jam, lol!)

Work has been steady, but there's room for improvement. I'm womanifesting 20 clients a week. So far, it's between 12-18, which isn't bad! E and I are going camping in Oscoda, MI next weekend, and that includes a canoe trip down part of the Au Sable river. Super excited, we've been planning this trip for months and months! This weekend, we're getting me a fishing rod, and we have high hopes of cooking fresh fish at the campsite. I haven't been fishing in over 20 years, not since my cousins' bass pond in Kentucky, and that was catch-and-release...but catching, killing, cleaning, and cooking my own food is a skill very worth learning.

More later...right now I have to run an errand, and then E's coming over for Arabic food (we seriously can't stop) and berry wrangling. Thanks for hanging around, readers! You're very much appreciated!