To Be Surprised: "I want you to move to California for yourself"

Well that was a nice little break wasn't it? :) Things have been weird, but I want to start writing again so, here I am.

They all look so happy pre-squirrel attacks

So on a lighter note, we've been quite the outdoorsy set lately! Really sprucing up our back patio and this past weekend we had our Wilderness Survival Class. I wanted this to be a picture heavy post but as I'm coming to realize more and more, iPhones are the WORST. They seem really cool and awesome. Until they cost a million dollars and you can't do something as simple as rotate a picture on your computer because Apple and PC's refuse to get alone. Of course. So I'll just post the handful of pictures my iPhone has deemed acceptable. Son of a.... (EDIT - Using Ed's Mac, I'm attempting to post what seem to be rightly oriented pictures... Success! So I'll also update my post on my 10k with a couple other pictures if you are interested!)

My happy place

Anyways. The patio (and upstairs study) gardening has been more amazing than we could've imagined. The potato box is exploding in general. We had to pull up one plant that wasn't performing very well and up came the CUTEST baby potato you have ever seen. It was about the size of my thumb nail. I have picture but I couldn't rotate it... grrr... The rosemary and basil are fighting to hang on, and I'm not sure why they are struggling so much. The other herbs are going gangbusters. Ed also finished making me a beautiful new table so I can sit and have coffee or read during the day by all the lovely plants. We moved our indoor tomato plants out next to it as well and I looooove the smell of tomatos. With my lovely colored lights it reminds me of Mom's, which is a very good feeling indeed.

Our adorable baby potato!

We've been waging a war against the squirrels here. I'm partly to blame because I refuse to give up my wonderful bird feeders, thereby disposing of the cats day-long entertainment. But that means that all the little seeds that drop down from the feeders scatter everywhere and attract everything onto the patio and also into all the plants on the patio. Several of the herbs have met a grisly end, uprooted by these chubby grey squirrels who are truly very UN-afraid of us. If I had any reservations about getting a BB gun before, those reservations were gone with the last murdered parsley plant. We're trying a less violent option of chicken wire first so think happy thoughts for it or these squirrels are going to have a lot more than poor defenseless plants to contend with... In fact, we have been training Rosie pretty intensely lately... Hmmmm.....

Awesome path up to the training area... left everyone pretty winded

Now about the Wilderness Training! We had to drive up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, always terrifying for me in any car because the roads are so tiny and the drops are straight down and extremely far. I highly recommend anyone who wants to visit California that they must make a trip into the woods. It's stunning. The trees go on for ages. Everything is just so much bigger than on the East coast. Too bad I'm too terrified to drive the truck up those tiny roads or I'd visit more often! The training took place on a boy scout reservation high up this windy, woodsy trail following Boulder Creek. Our teacher Jack, who was the real deal, was my sister's age and had spent many a night out in the wild. He said he lived outdoors for a year, and was very familiar with spending the night in a debris hut. What is a debris hut you might ask? It's exactly what you think it is. And we got to make them during our shelter training. (You can see Ed enjoying our group's shelter at the bottom of this post)

We also learned how to make spoons and bowls out of pieces of wood, and then how to boil water using rocks. One of the sillier, but still fun and useful parts of class was learning how to stalk prey in the woods (they do offer a traps class but they had to separate it from their usual stuff because people kept trapping and injuring house pets - yikes) But my favorite part was making fire with the Bow Drill technique! Muahahaha! Let's be up front and honest here. Ed did all the hard work.We tandem whittled a spindle and a fireboard and a handhold, and notched a bow. Ed did the manual labor after that in terms of burning holes and creating the dust coal and I made a beautiful tinder ball (blame iphone for the lack of pictures) that nurtured that coal until it burst into flames! I learned two things from this experience. One, Ed and I will not die during the Zombie Apocalypse or Hunger Games situations of the future. Two, people do not know nearly enough about survival or basic respect for nature. It was really good to get out there and learn things that as Jack and his co-teacher Mark put it, are skills that our ancestors have used and passed on for thousands upon thousands of years.