Oregon tours, home improvement, and big plans to import cars

Well! As usual, the lack of bloggage indicates a rather busy schedule. This time you can thank Lukas for prodding me to post something. I've had a busy couple weeks at home catching up with family and friends, attending my cousin JoAnna's wedding, and convincing mom to undertake a variety of home and yard improvement projects (most of which she was already considering in some form anyway. I just affirm where affirmation is due: "YES! New flowers and a new patio would look GREAT there! Let's go buy stuff right now"). Today, for example, we agreed on a location for a firepit ring (which I fully intend to make, because good grief! those things are overpriced!), and we did some scouting for free brick on Craigslist for the new patio areas we are now planning to build. Furthermore, we've assessed a variety of options for keeping bugs off one porch and making it a more user-friendly "outdoor living space" for the future. We'll be paying Ikea a visit next week to investigate their curtain options.

In the midst of all that planning, we're also working to make our bathroom more fabulous and coordinated than it already is. We're painting an old brown spice rack white to serve as shelf for small things, and since foreign European words make everything seem more sophisticated, we want to put some word on the face of the shelf. Unfortunately, the most obvious option, "BATH," translates to "BAD" in German and "BAIN" in French, neither of which sound one bit sophisticated. The German is out for obvious reasons, and I for one couldn't look at "BAIN" without thinking "BANE of my existence."

As fun as all that has been, certainly the highlight of my time home so far has been showing off Oregon and toodling all over this Northwest corner with Raphael, who was here for a week and a half. You're just going to have to wait for more pictures, cuz I only have a few to show you at the moment. We camped a few days at Trillium Lake near Mount Hood, caught trout from the canoe and fried them up for dinner, went to a rodeo, climbed Multnomah Falls and drove up the Columbia River Gorge, visited Cannon Beach, and ate a humongous, hot, gooey, glazed cinnammon roll at Camp 18. I love American food. We also went to the Auto races, drove some fancy pants cars (I didn't; he did)...hmm. This would all be much easier to talk about and more interesting with pictures. So I'll tell ya more about my Oregon tourism later.

Raph's first catch of the evening. He got another one too.


On the way to Cannon Beach.


Driving nice cars. Woohoo. :)

Finally, about importing cars: Raph and Brian and I have been discussing the possibility of importing old, hard-to-get American cars to Switzerland. Will keep you posted.

That's it for now I suppose. Laters!