Forest Fire!

We rose early (for a weekend) to beat the heat and spent our Sunday morning catching up on yard work after 8 days away on vacation. Mike mowed the lawn and I freed the garden from weeds.  The garden is on the south side of the house so I didn't get a view to the North until I finished and went inside. When I did, I was greeted by this view:

Sunday, 11:23

My first thought was that someone was burning but then remembered that the county burn ban was in effect.  And then of course decided there was too much smoke for a home burn pile anyway and therefore this must be a forest fire.  I called 911 to report the fire (just in case no one had yet) and was informed that DNR had been fighting a fire on Mt. Adams since early in the morning.  I know that the peak of Mt. Adams is 15 miles from our house and therefore estimated that the fire was ~10 miles from our house.

The fire grew quickly over the next hour and soon a fire fighting helicopter flew over our house.  By noon, we could see flames.  By 1 PM, the fire was creating its own cumulus cloud.

Sunday, 11:34

Sunday, 11:50

Sunday, 11:56

Sunday, 11:57

Sunday, 12:00 (flames!)

Sunday, ~13:00

Sunday, ~14:30

Sunday, ~15:00

Our friends Andrew & Amy called to ask about the fire so I emailed them some photos.  Andrew loves fires and couldn't resist the helicopter photos.  So he took his family for a Sunday drive on the forest roads of Trout Lake until they were turned back by a forest ranger.

The forest ranger provided the first real fire information of the day.  The fires was started by a lightning strike way back on June 29th!  Mom and I had watched that lightning storm and saw some serious strikes hit what appeared to be the same area where the fire started.  Apparently, it had just smoldered for two weeks!  That area has a lot of dead and diseased trees (spruce budworm) and is fueling the fire.

Mike and I took a drive to the Trout Lake School in the evening for a better view.

Sunday, 17:50 (view from Trout Lake School)

The pregnant photographer reflected in Mike's glasses

Sunday, 20:48

Sunday, 21:43

By evening, information on the fire was posted online.  The fire is named Cold Springs and occupied 500 acres on its first day. I made a mental list of the things I would evacuate with if needed but took comfort in the fact that the fire was North of us and the wind was from the west (as is typical for this time of year).

- Corinne (& Mike)

Taler du Engelsk?

What's the first thing you think of when you think of Denmark? Do you even know where it is?

I have to admit that before we decided that we were going to visit our friends Tara & Jason in Denmark, I wasn't even quite sure exactly where it was. I mean, I knew it was in Scandinavia somewhere, and I knew that Norway, Sweden, and Finland were all crunched together up there, but where is Denmark? Well, here it is (oddly unnamed on this particular map of Europe).

Denmark is comprised of a series of islands and a peninsula connected to Germany. The capital, Copenhagen, is on one of those islands, while the majority of the land mass is on the peninsula, Jutland. Since our friends live in Vejle on the east coast of Jutland, that was our home base for our week-long trip.  In fact, in the ~7 days we were actually in Denmark we never made it off of Jutland, and that was just fine with us. We did consider going to Copenhagen (on the island of Zealand near Sweden), but that was one of the trips that we skipped in favor of a more leisurely vacation.

We took a non-stop flight from Portland to Amsterdam, then a short-hop connection to the small airport of Billund in the middle of Jutland. Our first plane left Portland at 4pm on Thursday, and our last arrived in Billund at ~2pm Friday, with a 9 hour timezone difference to which we never did quite adjust completely. I'm sure you've heard that "everyone in Scandinavia speaks English". I can confirm that that is mostly true, but our bus trip from the airport to Vejle was our first indication that this was not a universal axiom. Thankfully Tara had prepped us with the necessary Danish phrases to get us by:

"Taler du Engelsk?" = "Do you speak English?"
"klipkort" = "punchcard" (10-trip ticket bus ticket that we had to purchase from the non-English speaking bus driver)

...and we didn't learn much Danish beyond that.

When we arrived at Tara & Jason's apartment in Vejle, we decided to just push through the jet lag in an attempt to adjust as quickly as possible. It mostly worked, although I don't think we went to bed before Midnight a single night (and we were often still eating dinner at that time!) Since we arrived on July 4th, Tara prepared a multi-course "American meal" of corn on the cob, potato salad, blueberry cobbler, and oven "fried" chicken. At 1:30am we finally went to sleep.

Our trip only afforded us 6 full days in Denmark, so we knew that we would have to pick and choose our activities. Since we were primarily there to spend time with Tara & Jason (exploring Denmark was really secondary), we ended up alternating day trips with more local activities. This also allowed us to more easily adjust our plans and schedules based on weather.

Saturday we explored Vejle with Tara & Jason, including stops at the Farmers' Market, cheese shop, bakery and supermarket. At the Farmers' Market we bought all sorts of local produce, most of which we could easily recognize and compare the English and Danish words with the farmers. Berries, though, were another story. The ones in this photo we figured out were currants (red and white), but there were some jars of preserves that were a bit of a mystery. Of course we had to buy some and then search the Internet for the Danish/English translation. Tara was excited to be able to report back the answers to the farmers the following week.

Danes really have a thing for licorice and gummy candies. I took this photo in a typical grocery store. Note that this entire section is JUST LICORICE AND GUMMY, and all of their food stores have equivalent sections. Both Corinne and I are big fans of licorice - including the salt licorice, or saltlakrids. At one point during the trip when we mentioned that we liked licorice, we were "tested" by being given the strongest, saltiest licorice that they had.  It wasn't our favorite, but we still liked it; apparently most non-Danes (or at least non-Scandinavians) spit them out. I guess that means that we passed.

There were so many ways to enjoy licorice, and we tried all we could find: sweet licorice, salty licorice, licorice chewing gum (Stimorol, made right in Vejle!), and even two kinds of licorice ice cream. We did lots of sampling while we were there, and brought back as much of the licorice and gummy as we could manage.

On Saturday night we did the unthinkable - we rented a car! Cars are the exception rather than the rule (as they are in the states); perhaps it is the 180% tax that is imposed on buying a car. Yes, that's right - 180%. That is a disincentive if ever I heard of one. Most people bike or take public transit (bus, train), but since making our Sunday day trip to the west coast of Jutland by public transit would have required at least 2 transfers and about 3 hours of traveling, we chose the rental option.

Sunday morning we hopped in our car and headed off towards Ribe, which dates itself back to the 8th century and is dubbed the oldest town in Denmark. Here we explored a Viking museum, enjoyed some Danish "street food" (hot dog shoved in a hollowed baguette with thousand islands dressing), climbed a church tower, wandered the cobblestone streets, and enjoyed the spoils of a Danish bakery - one of many that we patronized during our visit.

At the Viking Museum we all good a good chuckle out of a carving of a Viking-era boy, shown above in the yellow shirt. I guess public urination wasn't frowned upon back then as much as it is today?

From the top of the church in Ribe, it was easy to see how flat Denmark is. The highest point in the country is only ~500ft above sea level.





From Ribe we continued on a little further west to the coast and the town of Blåvand in search of German WWII bunkers. During the war when Germany occupied Denmark, the Germans constructed somewhere around 8,000 concrete bunkers which they used to defend the coastline. After the war many of the bunkers were destroyed but some have survived to this day.


We wandered along several different beaches and peeked into a number of small bunkers. (Note that the horse parts were added by an artist much later and were not part of the original German design.) We had to watch our step along the beach, as there were a fairly large number of jellyfish washed up on shore. Tara took it as her mission to 'save' as many as she could by flinging them back into the ocean with her sandal.

Denmark is also a leader in wind-generated power, with windmills dotting the land- and sea-scape all over the country. I've read that 20% of the power generation in Denmark currently comes from wind sources; I guess that's what you can do when there are no mountains in the way to block the wind.

Our next day trip involved Jason's employer and the reason they moved to this part of the world in the first place: LEGO. The weather on that day was a bit rainy, so we opted to skip LEGOLAND (the LEGO-themed amusement park) and instead took the bus to the LEGO offices. Jason's current project is on LEGO Factory which allows anyone to design their own models from a set of stock parts. As you would imagine, the offices were full of LEGO models just about everywhere you looked. Due to security concerns, we weren't able to tour the actual factory where the bricks are made, but we did get to see huge storage rooms containing bins full of all sorts of LEGO pieces, including a whole room dedicated to parts that are no longer made. We scooted down the wide hallways between rooms on trike-scooters (not made from LEGOs, thankfully), occasionally stopping to use the swings, mini basketball court or one of the other recreational activities scattered throughout the building.

At the end of the tour we were invited to have dinner at the home of Trine & Anders, Danish friends of Tara & Jason. We were pretty excited to get some authentic Danish experiences, and we were not disappointed. The house was lovely, and with a Scandinavian design feel; the food was delicious; and the hosts were delightful. After dinner we spent some time discussing the Danish royal family (by way of a Danish tabloid with lots of photos), then finished off the evening with a traditional Danish dessert called koldskål. Made from a yogurt-like dairy product (something like buttermilk but not quite - ever hear of ymer or A38?), koldskål is traditionally eaten with 'vanilla wafer'-like crumbled cookies, with sliced fruit being a more modern addition. It was delicious, and it was even more fun to listen to Anders and Trine's banter about whose technique was correct.

Our longest day trip was an all day outing to Århus, the largest city in Jutland. We jumped on the train early on Wednesday morning and spent all day walking around the city; we didn't get back to our home base in Vejle until shortly before midnight.

As it turned out, we even had a local contact in Århus. Our Trout Lake neighbor Pat has a daughter and son-in-law who live in Århus. Abby (Pat's daughter) spends some time each summer back in Trout Lake, and as luck would have it that time coincided with our trip. Thankfully her husband Steffen was still in Denmark, and he really went out of his way to make sure that our visit to Århus was enjoyable.

Steffen met us as at the Århus train station and gave us a map of the city, pointing out some of the attractions (including bakeries!) After we had spent a few hours exploring the shops and the Århus Cathedral, he picked us up and drove us to Århus Castle where the royal family was summering. Thus we had an opportunity to see the Danish changing of the guard, though it also meant that we would be unable to tour the castle or its grounds.

After the castle and a short walk through the park with Steffen, he dropped us off at Den Gamle By or "The Olde Towne," which is sort of like a Danish version of Colonial Williamsburg. Old buildings from all over Denmark have been disassembled and transported to create this town. We wandered through the buildings for a while, then grabbed a lunch of Danish meatballs, or frikadeller. (Think Swedish meatballs, only in Denmark.) From there we walked to the ARoS, a world-class art museum, before meeting up with Steffen again for dinner.

From the list of suggested dinner options, we chose the Rådhuus Kafeen for its offer of traditional Danish food. We started with Herring three ways: pickled (white), curried (yellow), and spicy pickled (red), all of which were delicious. Corinne had a hash for her main dish, while Steffen and I both chose the Råduus stew of beef in a paprika sauce. It was all delicious! I think we passed another Scandinavian food test: apparently when Steffen talked to Abby after our visit, one of the first things that he said to her was "They ate the herring!"

After dinner we head back to ARoS one more time, both for the exhibits and for a view of the landscape from the rooftop deck. We said our goodbyes and hopped on the train back to Vejle.

On our final full day in Denmark, we took another walk through the shops and up "the hill" to the Vejle windmill, a landmark than can be seen from many places in town (due to its location on the hill.) There is a small museum inside the windmill, primarily related to the windmill itself, but since all of the displays were entirely in Danish that's about the extent of our knowledge. If I had some knowledge of windmills I could have used some of the displays to learn Danish words, and vice versa. So we just looked at the pretty pictures and enjoyed the view.

Our flight left the following morning at about 6:30am, so of course we stayed up until after midnight eating another delicious meal from our hosts and building a LEGO model. The next morning the taxi arrived sometime before 5am and we were off.

We had a wonderful time on our trip and got to spend lots of time with our hosts. Denmark isn't the most "exciting" place to visit in Europe (no ancient Greek or Roman ruins, or Eiffel Towers, etc.) Everything is very expensive - I would estimate approximately double - and the weak dollar certainly isn't helping that right now. Having said that, we did have a wonderful time and enjoyed all of our experiences with the locals, the food was good, the weather was nice (although we've heard that we got lucky to avoid the humidity). And after all, it's not every country that can claim to be scientifically proven as the Happiest Country On Earth!

- Mike (& Corinne)

Countdown to Rocket: T minus 16 weeks

June 24th

Here's the next installment in the continuing countdown to Rocket. Here the two of them are at 24 weeks - only 16 weeks (3.5 months) left! You can definitely see significant progress since the last photo taken at 20 weeks.

We've been so busy that even this photo is a bit old now!

- Mike (& Corinne)

Leif's Poison Oak

Poor Leif! His Max-induced poison oak turned into a pretty bad case. Sometimes poison oak can cause swelling and even enter the bloodstream. When that happens, the rash will pop up other places that weren't exposed initially. Unfortunately, Leif got firsthand experience with all of these symptoms. He ended up taking antibiotics and steroids to clear up the poison oak.

Even though there were some miserable moments, Leif managed to keep his sense of humor about the whole thing.

 

 

- Corinne (& Mike)

The Ups and Downs of Gardening

I'm long overdue to write about this year's garden, so here it is. Each year our garden gets a little bigger, and we're a bit more organized. Unfortunately, that doesn't always mean that the garden will produce more or be healthier or fuller.

We continued building out our garden this year. The garden layout stayed the same this year: 16 beds, 4' x 10' each. I built two more of the simple raised beds this year, for a total of 4, with the other 12 beds remaining simple mounds. By late May, the snow was gone and the weather had turned warm enough that we were confident that we were beyond the last frost.

Last year we brought in over 2000 lbs of compost from a local orchard to enrich the garden soil. This year's compost would come from our own piles. There are two ways to manage a compost pile:

1. Carefully monitor the carbon (brown) and nitrogen (green) components of the material you add to the pile. Frequently turn and water the pile to maintain the correct temperature. Collect finished compost every 6-8 weeks.
2. Throw compostable material on the top of a pile. Collect compost sometimes, when you think of it.
   

Since the last time we collected our own compost was almost 2 years ago, guess which one we do? It took several hours for us to go through our 3 piles, but we were pleasantly surprised at how much compost was produced: 6 wheelbarrows full! Once we got over the idea of sorting through material covered in bugs, it was fun to sift through the remains, trying to determine what various chunks used to be. Corn cobs, mussel shells, banana peels - we encountered lots of partially decomposed material. By far the strangest find, though, was a green dinosaur ring. We certainly didn't put that in our pile, so we're still mystified as to where it came from. The compost we extracted was spread around the garden and some of the flower beds around the yard, while the remaining un-composted material (minus the shells and occasional bone) went back into the piles for another go.

The next step was to start the planting. Since we still don't have a fence around the garden, we tried to stick with the plants least likely to be attractive to deer: onion, garlic, herbs, some short-season melons (a new experiment this year), and lots and lots of squash. The one exception to the rule that we just HAD to have is tomatoes; we expanded to 3 beds of tomatoes, and put a makeshift fence around just those beds.

I had started some seedlings inside a few weeks earlier and had also bought some starts from local growers, but we also had a number of plants still in the garden from the previous year. Garlic is planted in the fall, since it needs about 9 months in the ground for optimum growth. We planted one of our raised beds with garlic last October, just hours before the first snowfall; when spring came, the garlic took off.

The rest of the growth was a happy accident. We had lots of carrots and onion still in the ground last year that we had intended to harvest, but we just never got around to it before the snow came. We had a pretty heavy snowpack all winter, so I think it provided enough protection that they all survived through the winter and have continued to grow this year. Our perennial herbs - parsley & chives - also came back, which I hadn't anticipated. It's amazing how motivating it was to see something growing in the garden even before you've done anything new that season.

On Memorial Day weekend, we managed to plant virtually the entire garden - that's the earliest date ever! We still had some tomatoes to put in and a few squash mounds to fill (we ran out of some seeds), but overall we were in very good shape this year.

We initially had some trouble with our irrigation system that threatened to delay our planting. When I went to turn on the breaker box for the system the first time, absolutely nothing happened. After last year's irrigation troubles, I was worried that this would be another month-long process of troubleshooting. I called our PUD (Public Utility District) to let them know about what appeared to be a problem at our 3-phase electrical box. Within a few hours later that same Saturday, two PUD servicemen came out to check the box. They replaced a fuse, we fired it up the system, and everything worked! Crisis averted.

I connected an overhead sprinkler to a hose in the garden, as in previous years, but my ultimate goal was to put in a drip irrigation system. I figured that a drip system would be more efficient with water, would allow us to work in the garden while it was on, and would significantly reduce the weed growth in the garden area. It took about a month of research and numerous trips to the local irrigation supply company, but we now have a drip system that feeds each bed with individual drip emitters (squash, melons, tomato) or localized sprinklers (herbs, garlic, onions, carrots). The system has 4 "zones": the 8 East beds, the 8 West beds, the North flowerbed soaker, and a pre-existing dripline for the young trees surrounding the garden. Each invidual bed also has an on/off valve, for more fine control. It's a manual system; there are no timers or automatic switching, since the irrigation pump has to be turned on manually anyway. There are still a few kinks to work out - like the fact that the system will occasionally have a "blowout" when a connection fails, and will send a geyser shooting into the air - but overall it is working well.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

Despite getting the garden in earlier than in any other year, it just wasn't growing. The weather was extremely hot for about a week in June, then cooled down to below the germination point for most of the seeds. Many of the seeds just never came up. We were so busy with other things that we didn't get around to replanting most of them.

Speaking of busy, our watering schedule wasn't as frequent as it should have been, either, which I'm sure didn't help. Nor did spending the better part of a week in Boston with no watering. (We have a housesitter for our trip to Denmark, so we won't let that happen again.)

And as I alluded to in the previous post, we also had a gopher discover the garden as well. We didn't see too much immediate damage other than the mounds and tunnels, but I'm sure he was chewing on the roots and stunting growth. And unfortunately, the gopher that Max captured was not the one from the garden. Dang.

So, the garden goes on. It will likely be a smaller harvest than we would have liked, but we will have a harvest. We've also agreed on a rough plan for the type of fence that we would like to put in at some point, so hopefully we'll get around to that soon (though the likelihood of this year goes down with each week.)

- Mike (& Corinne)

Max's First Gopher

After a few days of rest at home - inside - after his adventure at Leif's, Max was ready to go back outside. On Thursday evening after returning home from work, we let Max outside while we walked to the mailbox. When we got back, Max was in the garden and seemed particularly talkative. Upon entering the house, we found this on the dining room floor:

Bigger than a vole,
smaller than a rabbit

It's a pocket gopher! While we were out for our walk Max had apparently caught one of these elusive destroyers-of-yards. We've been losing the war against the gophers for some time; in fact, we've basically given up. Our lawn is covered with piles and patches of dirt that have been pushed up by the burrowing animals. Pretty nasty looking dude.

We like to think that this is Max's way of apologizing for the stress he put us through on Monday. ;)

When Max has caught animals in the past, he has always (to the best of our knowledge, anyway) brought them inside to whichever room we were in at the time, in order to show off his catch. We let him play with them for a while, but when they start to ooze or crunch we take them away before they make too much of a mess. This time, though, we weren't there to referee.

Circle of blood

Witness the "circle of blood". In all likelihood the gopher was already dead when Max brought him in, so this "ring of death" is just an indication of where he played with it. Thankfully Max decided to confine his "play" to the hardwood floor in the dining room. I don't relish the idea of cleaning gopher blood from the carpet.

With any luck, this will turn out to be the gopher that has been terrorizing our garden this year.

- Mike (& Corinne)

Missing Max

When we left on our trip to Boston, Leif was gracious enough to take Max to his place for the long weekend. Max has stayed with Leif before, and when I dropped him off on Wednesday morning it was clear to me that he was fairly comfortable there. He went upstairs to the second floor loft almost immediately, scoping out his favorite perch.

Leif lives on a hillside in Mosier, OR surrounded by open fields and orchards, and during previous trips Max has done some exploring of the surroundings. On Friday morning we received a status report from Leif:

The temperature has been nice enough lately that I have had the doors open.

Though the doors were open, Max wasn't ready to go exploring. He'd stand next to the openings for a while yesterday. Eventually he made it to the top of the steps. Then later yesterday he took off for a little adventure. I think he went down to the creek area.

He went out today again too. I think he's having fun.

When indoors....it seems he's been wanting a lot of attention lately....so I've been giving it to him.

Sounds good to us. It's always nice to be able to spend your vacation worry free. We continued on our trip until Monday morning, when I received the following email from Leif:

call me... this is concerning Max.

This didn't sound good. I knew it wasn't good when I noticed that Leif had sent the email only to me - not to Corinne. I called Leif as soon as I read the message. Apparently Max went out exploring on Friday morning as he had indicated, but hadn't been seen since then. It was now Monday morning, so Max had been missing for 3 days. Leif went out looking for him for several hours over the weekend but to no avail.

When Max left he was wearing his collar - which has our home phone number on it - so I called to check our messages. No messages. There wasn't much more that we could do, so Leif suggested that he could make a poster and put it up at the post office and in the neighbors' mailboxes, just in case someone had seen him. Mosier doesn't have mail delivery, so everyone in town would theoretically see the poster when they came to pick up their mail. I pointed Leif to a photo from the blog, hung up, and tried to keep my composure.

I relayed the news to Corinne, and we were both pretty shaken. Since we've had him, Max had never been outside overnight, let alone 3 nights. We were sure that he was gone for good, most likely the victim of a vehicle or a coyote. We held little hope of seeing him again. When we decided to start letting Max outside, we of course knew that this was a possible result. Corinne had made her peace with this fact better than I had, but neither of us was in a very happy mood that Monday.

This was not how we had wanted to spend the last day of our vacation. We managed to drag ourselves through the last day in Boston - poor Becky had the job of entertaining us! At 4pm we boarded our plane to return home. It was a long flight. By this point I had even started to mentally compose this blog post as a memorial.

When we arrived in PDX I turned our cellphone back on and checked the messages. Leif had called to tell us that Max had been found and was fine!

Apparently a nearby neighbor, Jennifer, saw the "Missing" poster in her mailbox and took it home. About a half hour after she got home, Max appeared on her deck! He seemed a bit needy but otherwise healthy. She even had a dog at her house, but Max must have been so deprived (food, water, attention) by this point that he was willing to put up with more than usual.

Our dispositions changed immediately when we heard the news. The drive home was much more pleasant knowing that Max would be waiting for us. Part of me was still a little uneasy, though. Since Leif hadn't yet picked Max up when he left us the message, it was still possible that it was the wrong cat or that there was some other problem not immediately apparent. But since we arrived home late Monday night, it wouldn't be until Tuesday after work that we would have an opportunity to head see him firsthand.

Thankfully, Max truly was fine, albeit a bit tired and hungry. He slept at Leif's most of the day on Tuesday and showed no interest in going outside.

We felt bad for Leif, too. None of it was his fault, and yet he spent the weekend stressed out about losing Max. He spent a good portion of the weekend searching for him, and even called for advice from other family members on whether stress could have a negative effect on his pregnant sister (hence the email only to me.)

We'll never know what happened to Max during those 3 days. Was he chased by some animal? Did he end up in a tree or simply get lost?

What we do know is that while Leif was wandering the hillside looking for Max, he was also walking through plenty of poison oak. Oops. And apparently no one had told him that you should apply Tecnu BEFORE you show any symptoms. Double-Oops.

- Mike (& Corinne)