Summer Catch-Up

 Here we are, another summer where I inevitably neglect my blog. Vincent has spent much of the last six weeks with the Nike Innovation team in New York City working on a sneaker customization project. Read about it and watch a video here! I'm really proud of him. Solo parenting has left me with little-to-no energy in the evenings for blogging. I'm lucky if I can manage to finish an episode of Outlander and a bowl of popcorn before falling asleep.

We spent a week at the coast, eating fried fish, apple pie and lasagna, playing in the sand, reading, visiting a new favorite brewery and touring coastal towns. The kids went to camp up the street at the park and had a blast, with crazy hair day, the slip 'n slide, and the solar eclipse. I savored every episode of Game of Thrones. I made this salad a few times. It is very good. Make it now before the summer corn is gone. The garden has been growing, giving us more squash than we know what to do with, and glorious, juicy tomatoes. I had a birthday and made myself a Norwegian Cream Cake with Strawberries. It was so good that I'm already looking forward to making it again. We picked 97 lbs of pears and apples. I'm predicting that the pears will all be ripe by this weekend and we'll make our annual batch of apple-pear sauce.

Forest fires are raging less than an hour's drive from here, bringing smoke and ash to Portland. It is almost surreal. The quality of the light is very strange. The sun is hot pink. It's almost like a scene in a sci-fi movie where we are on another planet where the sky is always pink and there are giant glowing moons. It smells like a campfire and ash is swirling around. I heard on the news this morning that the fire is 33,000 acres and is 0% contained. I'm sending all of my good thoughts to the fire fighters and everyone else nationally and globally dealing with the ongoing and impending floods, hurricanes and famines.