Mt. Rainier...Again!

We couldn't help it.

We went back to Mt. Rainier again in August for the third time in four weeks.

This time we took Grandpa Pat and Grandma Suzie!

The kids were determined to climb even higher than they did the first time, 

and Mike and his parents were willing, so climb they did!

While my mountain goats family went up and around (the long way), 

I headed back down the path (the short way).

 They're on that path up there, on their way back down.

What do you mean you can't see them?

They're right there...that pink dot in the middle is Jaela.

Hm.

Just take my word for it.

They're all there.

That was our last trip to Mt. Rainier for the summer.

I wonder what it's like up there in the fall...

Four Days Later

Four days after our first visit to Mt. Rainier, the kids and I went back again,

but this time we took Grandma.

We took an easier one mile hike that had plenty of views like this one.

Our destination was Myrtle Falls,

and this was the view looking up from the top of the falls.

Half of the kids thought the bridge was great

(the other half weren't so sure it was engineered properly), 

and they were all delighted to make a new friend

(from a distance).

Too much fun and way too beautiful to only go twice...

Mt. Rainier

On Sunday, we went up to Mt. Rainier on a four mile hike.

And when I say "we",

I mean we ALL went.

See?

The hiking part was fun,

and the mountain was even more beautiful the closer we got,

but crossing the snow patches on the trail was the most fun.

(Especially when we got to slide down the snow-covered trail on the other side!)

We saw a buck, two does, a marmot, and a lot of wildflowers.

A lot of wildflowers.

(So many that I got overwhelmed trying to pick which pictures to post.

So you get to see two.

I'm sorry and you're welcome.)

Too much fun and way too beautiful to only go once...

In The Back Field

The Bookshelf Saga: Part 2

Once the bookshelves were finished, I started loading them with books, beginning with the shelves we bought.  Those shelves are at the end of my new shelving system, and I alphabetize our books by author, so I started with Z and worked my way backward until I filled the shelves...

...and ran out of room.

So I got creative!

I found this set of retro mustard yellow suitcases at Goodwill earlier that week, and I still hadn't figured out exactly what I was going to do with them.  So I used the smaller one as a bookshelf at the east end of the lighted bookshelves!

(I filled the big one on the bottom with denim I'm saving to make quilts for my kids some day.  

Storage in plain sight; I love that!)

This is my Desert/Cowboy Corner:  a rubbing of a Native American petroglyph (my step-grandma made it along the Columbia River in the 60s for an art class, before the dam flooded the area), a paint-by-number my grandpa did, jars of jawbones my kids collected in Nevada, a too-small cowboy hat and too-big cowboy boots, and a desert-scape picture my brother-in-law took in South America (the frame belonged to my great-grandma and is made out of cactus).

On the wall facing that, at the west end of the lighted bookshelves, I stacked up a few old wooden crates from my mother-in-law and filled them with books (because I knew by the time I got to the M's that I was going to run out of room), and I used a horseshoe-shaped book holder turned on end to take part of my Louis L'Amour collection vertical.  To continue my cowboy theme, I filled some too-small cowboy boots with coins to use as bookends and added a red bandanna and my father-in-law's moose jawbones.

I'm happy with my little extra shelving solutions, and the bookshelves we bought and assembled are very nice, but my hands-down favorite are the lighted bookshelves!

I love how easy it is to read the titles, even on the oldest and most worn spines,

and really I love the soft glow that showcases my beloved friends books;

especially at night!

The Bookshelf Saga: Part 1

When we moved from Tennessee to Washington, we had 33 boxes of books, and by the time we moved into this log house, I had collected just a few more.

(Boxes?  Or books?  I'm not telling!  My husband's reading this!)

That collection has grown even more during the years we've lived here, but they're (mostly) for school, and I like to plan ahead, so...

We want to put in some really cool built-in shelves along these walls on the upstairs landing, but in the meantime, my shelves were cardboard boxes, stacked up on top of each other and reinforced with boards between layers.

The shelves along this adjacent wall were even worse:

and there was no improving them.  In the last configuration the box-shelves were five rows tall instead of the three in this picture, with no wooden bookcase and with less uniformly sized boxes.

And the top two rows were starting to lean forward away from the wall.

Scary.

To save our children's skulls and their mother's sanity, we bought some "temporary" bookshelves for the larger wall,

and Mike built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me along the short wall.

But my husband doesn't do things half way.

He built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me...

...with built-in lighting on each shelf!

The rest of the story (or at least more pictures) is coming soon!

Moving In

We played our cards just right and got my mom to move up to Washington, where she is renting a duplex 15 minutes away from us!

(Those G-R-A-N-D-K-I-D-S cards are amazing things!)

The kids and I worked on cleaning her new place while she finished up the packing at her house in Oregon, and then towards the end of June my cousin drove a moving truck up to Washington with all of her household stuff in it.  (She stayed behind in Oregon for another week to finish up some work and house sale details.)

More of my cousins met us at my mom's new place and we unloaded the truck.

There were five adults and four kids - and when we were done, the duplex looked...

um, not empty.

Then, because my mom knows how much fun I have doing it, she let us rearrange furniture, unpack some stuff, and set up enough things to make the place livable as soon as she walked in the door.

She's been here a few weeks now, and we're still helping her rearrange and get things set up how she wants them.

I'm not sure we'll ever really be done, but it's so much fun, why would we quit?!?