Big Trees

We went to Calaveras Big Trees National Park. The kids have never seen the giant sequoias before and were suitably impressed. Charissa missed out since she's in school this year, and Robin missed out since she was camping in Yellowstone with a friend.



Here's the girls sitting on "The Big Stump" with the cut log end visible to the side. The grooves you can see were made by the miner's drills since there were no saws big enough to cut the tree. The tree was felled in order to take a cross section to San Francisco as a side show.



This next picture is of the kids standing in the bottom of a fallen tree. (Sorry for the blur.)




Here's Katie standing on a fallen log.



I have a few more pictures on Flikr here.

Fairy Houses at the park

The kids make these during a trip to the park about a month ago. (When it was still warm!) Unfortunately, the fairies who live in them are very shy, and wouldn't let us get a picture of them.


The one above is Karli's, and below is a close up of it.




Next is Jessie's:




And Josh made one too, with Robin's help:

My boy

My boy plays with dolls--

--- and I think it's the cutest thing in the world!




(His dad isn't so sure ..... LOL)

Night Sledding!!

It snowed around Christmas which made for some fun sledding for a couple of weeks down our driveway as well as on the big hill down the road. It's almost gone in this shot (our driveway), but still enough for some late night fun!

Wood Heat

We just finished installing our wood burning stove, and fired it up for the first time last Friday. So far it's working great for us. It even keeps the house warm all night. I load it up with hard wood at night, shut the damper down low, and go to bed. In the morning I have a bed of red coals that's still hot enough to ignite a stick of dry pine.

It's so much more fun that just flipping a switch to get heat.

I really enjoy building a fire.

I like splitting wood.

I like hauling it into the house.

I like watching it burn.

It just feels good.

DailyLit.com

Here's a neat website:
http://www.dailylit.com/

Pick your book(s) from their large selection, and they send you in bits daily, three days per week, or weekdays only. If you get too busy, they'll let you "pause" delivery.

I just started the poems of William Blake.

Last of the harvest