Onion and Blue Lakes Camping Trip

Last weekend Kade and I took a camping trip before school started for me. We decided to go all the way up to Onion and Blue Lakes up by Denio. It was a 2 1/2 hour drive including a hour drive through a rough 4-wheel drive road. But it was worth it. It turned out to be a great camping and fishing site. When we got there on Friday evening we started fishing Onion Lake. Kade reeled in two big rainbow trout within ten minutes, but I never got one. A little later while I was back at our tent, Kade caught another one. The next morning we packed up our camp and drove to the Blue Lakes trailhead and hiked up to the lakes. Blue Lake was really pretty. It was surrounded by trees and had really clear water. A family was already up at the lake swimming and jumping off the rocks. We fished for a while there and caught two smaller trout. We were going to let both go but one of the fish was going to die so we kept it. That evening we hiked back down to the truck and drove home. It was a great relaxing weekend and now we have four fish to eat :)
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Summer Project

I don't know if you remember, but a couple years ago when we were living in Utah going to school, we were in desperate need of a dresser. We were so lucky to find a free dresser sitting by our apartment's dumpster. The thing was actually a dresser with a changing table on top and was very sad looking. After leaving Utah for Winnemucca and a new house, we were able to get real furniture. We seriously thought about throwing it out or giving it away, but I decided I wanted to try and fix it up. So this summer I started working on it in the garage. I removed the ugly handles, stripped the old finish, hammered some parts back together, and put wood putty on the scratches. It took me quite a while stripping off the old finish because it was hard to work on for more than a couple hours at a time. But I finally got it all stripped and sanded so I could put some new stain on it. With some new handles the dresser looks just like new! Kade couldn't believe how much better it looks.

Kade's Big Buck

Once again, Kade has killed a monster buck. Bow hunting season just started a week ago, but Kade had his eye on a nice buck coming into the farm at Adams Peak. On Friday, three days after Brandon got his huge buck, Kade saw this deer with his group of 8 other bucks and stalked him out of the field into his bed in the brush. He sat crouched down for almost 4 hours waiting for the big deer to stand up so he could get a shot. One of the smallest bucks got up and came 16 yards from where Kade was but didn't even know what he was. Finally, the deer Kade wanted stood up to scratch his back and he got a shot. Because the arrow was a little off it took a while for him and Brandon to track him. They left the farm at dark and we all went out the next morning to look for the dead deer. After finding a bed, Kade and Brandon were able to track the deer to where he died. Kade was so excited to get that huge deer. He measured it 29 inches. The head is currently at the taxidermy waiting to get mounted.
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New Garden Pics

My beautiful garden! I love it :)

My garden is doing really good this year and I just had to put new pictures up of it. I have regularly been getting delicious tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, strawberries, corn, broccoli, and carrots. I was able to freeze two bags of peas, a bag of beans, and two bags of broccoli because we couldn't eat it all! We are still picking onions whenever we want one and the potatoes are pretty much ready. We have already had some really good baked potatoes from the garden. Some of the cantaloupe look like they are almost ready. But I'm not so sure about the watermelon, I really hope we get some this year. I'm amazed at how the corn is taller than our fence!
Here is picture of what I picked one day: tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, corn, onion, beans, and the last of the peas.My flowers are looking good, too!

Painting

Because I knew I would have so much more free time after school ended I had to have a project ready to be worked on. So, I planned on painting the house. I had never painted a room in my life and was not expecting how exhausting it would be. I soon discovered muscles in my arms that I didn't even know I had. Therefore, I only painted the great room, kitchen, and hallway (mainly because it would have looked weird if I would have stopped early, which I desperately wanted to do). I got super lucky on paint because the week school was ending, there was an ad in the local paper for buy one get one free gallons of paint at True Value. So I was able to get my paint half off! I took about a week to paint it all and I was wore out by the end of that week so I have no plans of completing the house until I can completely forget about my first painting experience. But it did turn out good :)

Garden, Year 2

I have started my second year of gardening. I'm so glad we got our landscaping done so I could grow a bigger garden this year. We also put up a little fence to keep bunnies and Roxy out. Compared to last year, the garden is much bigger. I'm so excited that we got everything planted and I wanted to put pictures up of its progress so far. I packed my garden to the brim with delicious vegetables and fruit. On the left I planted strawberries, broccoli, 3 rows of tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, cantaloupe, watermelon, carrots, 2 grape vines and raspberries along the back fence. On the right side we planted onions, peas, 3 rows of potatoes, and six rows of corn. The pots have some herbs in them.We have already picked lots of delicious green onions and today I picked my first strawberry. We planted the corn a couple weeks ago and its coming up quick. The potatoes, peas, and carrots have gotten really big and the broccoli is coming along really well too. I started the cantaloupe and watermelon from seed in my window and transplanted them because last year the melons didn't have enough time to grow big enough when I planted the seeds.I also planted some flowers in the front of the house.

Yosemite National Park

A couple weeks ago, May 1-3, Kade and I drove to Yosemite National Park in California. Because neither Kade nor I had ever been we thought this would be the perfect vacation before the busy summer months. As usual, I looked up all the information about the park and the best things to do and trails to hike. I also kept checking the weather because our trip relied heavily on good weather. We were not going to spend anytime wasted indoors. Up until the night before we were leaving weather.com showed partly cloudy or sunny with a high of 60. Thursday night I checked the weather once again just to make sure and sure enough it changed to 80% chance of rain on Saturday. Wonderful. We seriously considered canceling the hotel reservation and going another time. I checked out reservation and we were too late to cancel so we left the next morning.
On the way to Yosemite we stopped in Reno to do a little shopping. We continued on south through Carson City and into California. Our hotel was in Angels Camp, CA about 2 hours from Yosemite; any closer and there weren't really any hotels for us to stay in. Angels Camp was a small mountain town famous for its Frog Jumping contest, very weird. I read that it was made famous by one of Mark Twain's writings. Angels Camp was also surrounded by a lot of caves and caverns. The closest about 5 miles away was Moaning Caverns. Saturday morning we woke up to rainy conditions so we spent the morning taking the Moaning Caverns tour. The cavern was really deep and had a huge metal 100 year old staircase you had to climb up and down. The cave was pretty cool, but the staircase was scaring me.
Thankfully after taking the cave tour the rain had let up almost completely. So we started heading to Yosemite. By the time we got there it was barely sprinkling but it was extremely foggy. We didn't have much of a view of Yosemite driving in because of the fog but it stopped raining completely. We stopped in Yosemite Valley first to hike to Yosemite Falls. We couldn't believe the amount of water in the park. There was water everywhere! flooding the trails and blowing you over next to the waterfalls. It was a really pretty place. We even saw a couple taking their wedding pictures in front of another famous waterfall, Bridal Veil Falls.
After taking a few trails and driving around Yosemite Valley we started heading down to Mariposa Grove, the biggest collection of giant sequoia trees in the park. It was about a 45 minute drive with a spectacular view. The absolute best part of the park was the Tunnel View. Pulling into the full parking lot off the road, we stopped in front of the famous view of Yosemite Valley. It almost didn't seem real it was so beautiful. At that time I really wished I hadn't forgotten the battery to our digital camera because all we had was two disposable cameras to capture the view.
Mariposa Grove had huuuuge sequoia trees throughout the trail. We saw the grizzly giant, the California tunnel tree, the bachelor and three graces, and the loyal couple. We were trying to find the fallen tunnel tree (the one with old pictures of cars driving through it) but the signs were not very helpful and we got very confused. After a while, we started heading back to the parking lot. It was crazy how ginormous those trees were! The pictures do not do them justice.
Even with the rain the trip was great and the park was beautiful. I really hope to go back someday. Oh, and Kade and I celebrated our 3rd year anniversary right before the trip. It's crazy how time flies, it has already been three years??

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