Roses for a Birthday

One of the big reasons my husband and I moved to Oregon was to be close to family.  Neither of us had family in Indiana, and Oregon offered a much larger job market and a relief from winter, unlike northern Michigan.  I have loved getting to spend significantly more time with family as a result.

My mom's birthday is at the end of May, and this year it was on a Saturday.  It worked out perfectly to take her on her actual birthday to explore the International Rose Test Garden in Portland, right at the peak of the roses blooming.  Almost every plant had at least some fully open blooms, and most varieties were filled with beautiful, fragrant flowers.  The sky was a patchwork of clear blue and white puffs and the temperature was just right for jeans and a t-shirt.  The day could not have been much better.

Being that the gardens are so popular and it was peak season, we had to start pretty early because it gets crowded fast during the peak season, so we arrived around 9:30 and got a parking spot right up front.  As we wandered the rows upon rows of roses (ha!), time flew by and the crowds got thicker.  We ended up staying for over 3 hours!  I think we saw every variety of rose.

Of course I took loads of photos.  It's hard to resist when you have such great subjects at your disposal.  When editing the photos from the Tulip Festival, I feel like I used a bit of a heavy hand with some of the vibrancy and color saturation adjustments.  So with these, I only edited the exposure and nothing else (except removing an occasional speck or something like that).  No adjustments to contrasts, vibrancy, or saturation.  I really wanted to let the flowers speak for themselves.  Here are some photos of my favorites.  (Click "Read More..." to see more)

It may look like a peony, but it's a rose!

Tulips in March

Oregon's Willamette Valley is incredibly fertile land, home to countless farms that grow a giant variety of produce, hops for beer, grapes for wine, and plants and trees for landscaping.  One such farm produces acres upon acres of tulips.  Each year during peak tulip blooming season, this farm hosts the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival where thousands of visitors come to take in the vast array of tulips.  Nick and I visited the festival on a crisp Sunday morning last March and of course I took loads of photos.

Tulips happen to be one of my favorite flowers (besides orchids and roses!).  I particularly love the pinks and purples, and there were lots of both!  So many gem-toned blooms!  I couldn't get enough.  But eventually the crowds were getting a little annoying so I called it a day.  Thankfully we went early in order to beat the majority of the crowds.  Here are some of my favorite photos from that morning.

More after the break...

Jefferson Park Hike and Camp

First of all, wow it has been a SUPER long time since I last wrote in the blog.  Whoops!  I have three more blog posts on my to-do list from various events/photo subjects over the past few months.  I just need to find time to edit all the photos.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed I find time within the next two weeks!  In the mean time, I've managed to find a few hours to edit photos from our camping/hiking excursion last weekend!

My first experience camping was not a good one.  It was in Indiana and involved driving right up to the campsite with a group of friends, setting up our tents and hanging out for the evening.  That could've been fine had that been the extent of the experience.  However, once we went to sleep, the sky unleashed its wrath on us, pouring buckets and buckets of rain, thundering and lightning right overhead.  It was rough.  Our carpool buddies decided to pack up and go home, which forced us to wake up our friends (if they managed to still be asleep at that point) to figure out a new ride home the next morning.  Everyone was soaked, tired and grumpy.  It.  Sucked.

So when a couple of our friends invited us to go hiking and camping with them, I was hesitant but willing to give it another shot.  Weather in Oregon is most likely to be dry and sunny this time of year, the scenery is beautiful, and I love hiking.  All we needed to do was borrow some backpacking gear and buy a few camping supplies and some freeze-dried meals, and we were set (this was going to be serious camping, not drive-up camping!).

We hit the road Saturday morning.  Destination: Jefferson Park via Park Ridge Trail Hike.  Most of the drive was through the Mt. Hood National Forest, with sky-high evergreens and winding roads.  The turn-off to the trail head started out as a gravel road and quickly devolved into a rocky/boulder-y rutted dirt path.  Eventually we got to the point where we would be risking major damage to our vehicles if we continued on, so we backtracked to an open spot to pull off and park our cars for the night.  Then it was just a matter of hiking the rest of the way to the trail head.

The hike was awesome!  Of course the scenery was breathtaking and the company was fun.  If you are in the Pacific Northwest and are looking for a great adventure outdoors, I HIGHLY recommend Jefferson park and the Park Ridge Trail hike.  We were sore and tired by the time we got back to our cars on Sunday, but we were happy.  Such a great experience!  Feast your eyes:

Several years ago there was a fire in the area.  Many dead barkless trees are still standing.

See that straight line of tiny trees?  That is the ridge.  We climbed over that and down into the valley.  Jefferson Park is on the other side.

More after the break...

Cattleya Crazy & Crazy Fog

Two of my cattleyas are blooming right now.  One is a large red/magenta one I bought a few years ago and practically tried to kill it (kept knocking it over, the shock killing the roots).  Thankfully I managed to nurse it back to health and it has bloomed for me the past couple of years consistently.  This time it has two blooms out at once!  Here you go:

Catt. species unknown

Frilly lip!

Frilly lip!

This is my favorite cattleya, and I'm sure you can understand why.  These blooms are 4.5-ish inches across at the widest part.  Their color is so incredibly vibrant.  And I know you don't know this through your computer screen, but they smell amazing!  Wouldn't scratch-n-sniff computer screens be awesome?  During certain times of the day, the smell is much more potent than others, and it's this lovely sweet/spicy scent.  My one regret is that I lost the tag so I don't know the exact species/hybrid of this particular plant.

My other cattleya that is blooming is a mini that came from dividing my mom's plant when it overfilled its pot.  This is a cute little one that is a vigorous grower and often puts out multiple canes of new growth at once, producing several blooms.  I currently have 7 (SEVEN!!) blooms blooming on this little guy!  I've never had a cattleya that produced so many flowers in one go!  These flowers are about an inch to 1.5 inch across, and I haven't noticed any smell from them.  Anyway, here's a peek:

Catt. species unknown

I love the bright yellow with the red lip.  So cheery!  Thanks, Mom!  Have I mentioned that we enable each others' orchid addictions?

Changing gears here, we have been experiencing intense fog lately.  The past few days not so much, but there were a couple weeks off and on where on the way to and from work, it would be so densely foggy that visibility was reduced to about a tenth of a mile, sometimes even less.  There were a couple evenings coming home from work where I couldn't tell how far down the road I had gone, whether I'd passed my street or not.  Crazy!  There's a street light and a tree across the street from my house and it produced some creepy shadows and light rays that I wanted to capture.  It didn't work out quite as I'd hoped (the light rays through the tree branches are a lot easier to see in person than in the photo) so I'm going to try again the next time we get some pea-soup-fog, but I'll share a photo that I took anyway:

Fogggggggggg

Star Gazers

My birthday happened recently and my in-laws got me a gorgeous bouquet of flowers: roses and star gazer lilies!  And over Christmas, I received a lens capable of taking macro photos, which has been a lot of fun to play with!  So I got up close and personal with the star gazers for a photo shoot.

I love star gazers.  They are so tall for lilies, and I love their vibrant colors.  And the smell!  Their smell is so strong but incredibly delicious!

Christmas Cookie Monster

One of my favorite times of the year is Christmas.  It's a wonderful opportunity to spend time with family and friends, celebrate the birth of Christ (if you're Christian), and to just generally be thankful for everything you have.  In addition to all of that good stuff, I also love making and eating all the sweets that come with that time of year, particularly cookies.

Most likely an inherited trait, I have a MASSIVE sweet tooth.  I practically require sugary stuff on a very regular basis.  Cookies, candy, pie, cake, brownies, blah blah blah all of the above.  My mom is also this way, so we enable each others' sugar addictions around Christmas by making loads of Christmas cookies.  One might say this is a tradition of ours.  It's especially easy now that my husband and I live so close to my parents.

Every year, there's a list of several types of cookies that we'll go through, choosing 3 or 4 to make a few dozen.  This year, we got together over a couple of weekends and made sandwich cookies, candy cane cookies, spritz, and toffee (not a cookie, but a must-have Christmas sweet).  Separate from that, my mom also made cinnamon sticks.  I didn't take photos of everything, but here are a couple from the baking extravaganza.

Spritz Cookies

Candy Cane Cookies

COOKIESSSSS!!!!

If I Stay

Happy new year!  How is it already 2015?  Time has flown by!  Do you have any New Year traditions?  Making resolutions, plans for celebrations, etc?  I usually just get together with friends or family and hang out until the ball drops and then go to sleep.  Sometimes I'm so awesome that I don't even make it to midnight before sleep overtakes me (yawn).

I didn't make any resolutions on purpose, per se.  I usually say things like "be healthier" blah blah blah.  Obviously that doesn't really mean anything.  It isn't a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound).  It accomplishes being relevant and time-bound (health is always relevant, and time would be bound to the particular year for which the resolution was made), but not really all that specific, nor measurable, and as a result not really achievable.  How do you achieve something you can't measure and haven't even specified?

This year, I signed up for a 100 mile bike ride.  Technically it's 104 miles.  It's called Reach the Beach and is a bike ride starting in Portland and going all the way to Pacific City at the coast, supporting the American Lung Association.  My boss has participated in this ride with his wife and various friends for about 7 years, and he's been trying to convince people in our group to sign up this year.  I caved.  I guess it counts sort of as a NY resolution because it's a goal to do something to improve myself (health) this year, but I hadn't thought about it in the context of a resolution until it was actually New Year's Day, and I'd already been signed up for it for a few days by that point.  So anyway, it's May 16th (Time-bound), so I have over 100 days to train still.  100 miles is a LOT (Specific, Measurable), so I'll need to start training as soon as possible (Achievable).  I keep putting it off, though... it's cold and wet outside!!  But thankfully my parents let me borrow (have?) their trainer so I can set my bike up in the living room and ride while I watch a movie or something.  I'm hoping I'll get into pretty good shape doing this (Relevant) since I don't get a whole lot of exercise outside of an hour of crappy volleyball once a week.  We'll see how it goes.  I'm excited and terrified at the same time!  Thankfully husband Nick and friend Ryan signed up with me so I have their support as well.

Anyway, the reason I titled this post "If I Stay" is because I wanted to write some thoughts about the book of the same title.  I read it over Christmas and then found out that it's also a movie!  When I bought it, I'd seen it on a top seller list at Powell's, my favorite book store in Portland.  It wasn't until I started reading it that I realized it was intended for a teen audience, indicated by the URL for the publisher's teen page on the bottom of the front cover.  It certainly read like a teen (maybe even tween?) book.  It had simpler language and didn't go into too much depth about the setting or the characters.  And there were definitely teen themes throughout (teen romance, high school, etc).


The story follows a teen girl who grew up in a tight-knit musical household; her dad was part of a punk rock band for several years and her mom was heavily involved in the band as well.  As a result, she picked up music, but of a completely different genre: classical, via cello.  On a snow day in the Portland area, her family decides to visit some friends and on the way they get into a horrible car accident which kills her parents and critically injures herself.  The story then goes back and forth between her current state (out-of-body experiences while she's in the hospital) and background of her life, family and her aspirations for her future in music and love.

While the book was a good read, I would probably give it a 3 out of 5.  I found myself constantly wanting more out of it.  I wanted more resolution (two major parts of the story are left unresolved).  I wanted more description of the setting to really ground me as I read.  While the story is based in a Oregon, there aren't a lot of specific references to places, just a lot of generic vague descriptions.  As a result, it just kind of had this shallow surface feel to it like the author had the intention of it but not the commitment to researching it or giving the reader a full understanding of it.  Except for the mention of Portland and Oregon and one specific building downtown, it could've been anywhere.

Part of me feels that my rating of 3 out of 5 isn't quite fair.  I'm an adult reading a teen story; maybe if I were a teen reading it, I'd think it's a great book.  I'm an Oregonian reading a book set in Oregon written by a non-Oregonian; maybe if it were set elsewhere, I wouldn't have cared as much since I'm not as knowledgeable about other locales.  I don't know.  I just know I was left wishing the author had gone deeper in almost every aspect.

I won't go too much into the movie... But don't see the movie right after you read the book!!!  The movie is such a loose interpretation of the book!  I'm a purist and when movies are based on books, I want them to match.  I want the characters to look the same, I want the plot to be the same.   I can understand cutting a few things out of the plot for time's sake, but not needlessly altering the plot just because the director felt like it.  There were so many inconsistencies that I was constantly saying "that's not how it happened!" or "that's not how he/she looked according to the book!"  Even though the movie itself is fine on its own, I was so bothered by the differences between it and the book that I almost wanted to stop watching partway through.

One thing I did like was that one of the major loose ends in the book was tied up in the movie (I won't spoil it).

Back to some more adult reading....  I'm currently working my way through "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith.  So far, much better!  I'll possibly do a review of that when I finish.  We'll see.

Sorry, no photos today.  Hopefully tomorrow if I get around to editing some photos!