Orchard Party, Garden Party

Brent acquired 80 free fruit trees and decided to plant over half of them in our front yard this morning. He somehow convinced Jamie, Jesse and I to help. We quit after awhile to pursue our own vision of finally starting the garden.

This is Brent, Orchard Extraordinaire:



Mike and Brent, hard at work planting 50 trees:



A before picture of our garden boxes:







And after:


(The white spot on this pic is SLEET; we didn't have the best landscaping weather today.)

Sis turns 23 in style

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Breezy and the Colorado Crew hit the road for a wild birthday mini-vacation. Here are the nomads at Lake Powell, Utah:






Happy Birthday, Sissy!

Reader Appreciation Day

Seeing as you regularly put up with my very amateur photos, I thought I'd treat to you to something a little more professional. Here are a couple of pooch pics, courtesy of [my friend] Sara Nylin:

Jaime Baby Update

Have you heard about this???

Call me naive, but when I listened to last week's edition of This American Life, I was SHOCKED to learn about the purgatory that is New York City's "Rubber Room." Apparently the public school system in NYC, which has 80,000 teachers and one million students, has a rather archaic method of reprimanding its incompetent teachers. The New York Times did a short but informative write-up last October on this maddening situation.

Finer Things Club

This week at Jamie and Jesse's...

Manzanita

I had a couple days of work in Tillamook and, thanks to Steph's travel guiding, decided to hang out in Manzanita on Wednesday evening. It's quite a lovely coastal town with a wonderful beach that provided hours of entertainment for Lucy. Here I am "working" on a conference call:





Live entertainment at Vino, the wine bar I stopped at after sunset: