It’d been way too long since I saw this man:
It was so nice to reconnect with him. Thank you, Yoni. It’s been a wonderful week of feasting, meditating, partying, gutting punkins, giggling with Sam, beachin’, talkin’, walkin’.. All the goodest, bestest things in life.
I made a flotsam maiden at the beach while he chi gonged, too.
See more pics here.
Aside from the stoopid chicken pox episode, it’s been a fabulous few weeks. My dear friend Yoni flew in from Ireland-well, he’s been living in England mostly lately, but did a sweet sojourn in the isle of Guinness-to visit.
Yay! Sure missed ‘im. It was so good to catch up on everything and see his cool pics of Avalon. Ooooooh.
I had to postpone my Knotty Lingerie party due to Sam’s itchypoxybadness, so instead, Ms Rowan came over and we hung out and laptopped and laughed our butts off. Then, sunday, we had a passel of friends over for pumpkin madness!
Yoni made punkin soup, Rita brought punkin cookies, Ben made punkin pie and we all scooped the guts out of a buncha punkins and made loverly lanterns.
Flickr’d pics here.
Stoneboy came down and stayed with me for a whole frickin’ week!
He had a stone work symposium to attend down hereabouts and sculptures to work on for his upcoming gallery show(WOOOT!)..
So he had a lot to do, but we found time for lots o’ fun too and it was a marvelous thing to just do the silly little everyday boy/girlfriendly things that we generally miss out on, being citizens of different countries and all.
There was much beach time, cuddling, playing crazy ninja snuggle-monkeys with Sam, reading each other stories, lazing in the sun, cooking, eating, ‘xplorin’ parks, hanging with friends(who now believe he actually exists-isn’t merely a figment of my fertile imagination) and he even turned my mattress over-
-erph! Of course, for such an heroic effort, I had to reward him:
As only a bad faerie can. 
A thoroughly enjoyable week. Too long ago, now.
Damn I miss that boy.
October’s been a hoppin’ month so far! So much so in fact, that only now am I finally getting around to flickring and blogging about some of my autumnal adventures.
Phweph. Downtime, it’s a good thing.
Anyway, first in line is the Appling trip that Rita, Ben, Sam and I went on to get enough lovely, round globes of tart sweetness to make our own cider-yummmmm!
Lucky for us cider-happy peeps, South 47 Farm in Redmond was having a harvest festival. After wandering through the corn maze, gawking at the wooly cuteness of the alpacas, and coveting the squashes, we filled up our baskets with apples, onions and a bonanza of squash and buzzed on home to clean off the cider press Rita had discovered under her house.
We loaded up the machine while Sam boinged about excitedly on the trampoline and crunch, crunch, MUNCH! it ate up all the apples and yielded a lovely, bubbly, brown cider.
Soooooooooooo goooooooood! You could taste the crispness of the apples singing in the rich, thickness of the gorgeous brew.
But that was only the beginning of the apply goodness… Ben proceeded to make an OMG delicious apple pie for after-burrito dessert and I took home a jar of cider that would later evolve into cider brownies and cider cocktails and hot apple cider…………
I love fall.
Added even more sand bunny(not to mention Led Zeppelin) goodness to my PNE sand sculpture set on flickr.
Many kisses to Delayne for the photos.
A sweet beach afternoon with Sam and Rowan..
Led to the creation of a bizarre articulated sand worm that Rowan says looks like a Pokemon-eeep!
Then the tide came whizzing in and we had to abandon the worm to the inexorable fate of all sand creations as we retreated to a more expansive part of the beach. Soon, the lovely miss Rita joined us and I made her a troll foot and built a small crowd of little rock people watching the multitude of parasailors leaping in and out of the water, with varying degrees of skill.
By and by, to my delight, Delayne made it into town(after much harrassment at customs-forgetting his passport didn’t help, but they never can resist f—ing with his irrepressible inner coyote) and restored the kidz swiftly drooping spirits with delicious sparkly beverages.
A brilliant launching point for a scrumptious week.
Pics in the usual location.
Sam and I had a lovely weekend staying at a little farm on Whidbey Island.
We met Velvet,
a very sweet jenny(female donkey), a bunch of buttheaded goats, chickens, ducks, an overwhelmingly enthusiastic young german shepherd named Savannah and a sweet kitty whose loft-leaping prowess has been sharpened to ninja-worthy extremes by Savannah’s ebullience.
Many thanks to Ginger, Delayney and Caden for sharing their beautiful place with us. It’s a gorgeous cabin and the loft was very cozy and happily for Sam, the dog could not climb ladders. Sam and Caden had a ton of fun bouncing madly on the giant trampoline out back.
Whidbey is beautiful too. We browsed the Langley galleries with their gorgeous bronze animals, awesome carved wood thrones and glass menageries and spent long, luscious afternoons on the beaches.
I made a sand dreamer
and Sam and I created a fort with three entrances and three bridges to reach the tunnels in the outer walls..
Beware the catapults of doom!
‘Twere a loverly weekend, capped off with a waffle(to the joy of my waffle-crazy boy) brunch in Langley on our way home.
Not so lovely to come home to clouds of flies hiding out in my eyrie and corpses all over the kitchen! Apparently Sophie waged war against the midges while we were gone and the ones that didn’t get bombed to death all flew upstairs. Gack.
More pics here. Of the trip, not the fly massacre.
My friend Azra asked a rockin’ question on her lovely blog Dreaming of Chiaroscuro.
If you prayed for God, instead of to God, what would you pray for?
Go see my answer and add your own two cents.
My freezer is now full of plump, delicious blueberries.
Rita and I picked ‘em out at Blueberry Blossom farm in Snohomish. Yum.
I also took her nettling for the first time yesterday out in Discovery park, with my other new foraging convert, Rachael.
The secondary growth is not as lush as the spring pick was so we didn’t overpick the colonies, but we all harvested enough to have a few good yummy nettle meals. Rita and I celebrated later that evening, with sauteed nettles and shallots as a side for sweet potato bisque and smoked gouda grilled cheese sandwiches. Mmmmmm…
My Bad Fairy Dreads were fun an’ all,
(click to embiggen)
but it’s high summer and they were hot as hell, heavy and itchy. They had to come off! Luckily, I know some excellent debraiders. :} Soon, Rita and Sam had me lopped down to size:
(click to enlarge)
Then the great unbraiding began and with Ben’s nimble fingers coming to our rescue at the last moment, when Rita and I were reeling in a hairy delerium, my poor tortured frizzy head of doom emerged at last.
(click to expand teh frizzy head of doom)
OMFG it felt heavenly to scratch my scalp! And wash my hair. Phewph. I love having crazy long wild wanton she devil extensions, but there’s a reason I only do shit like this once a year.
My poor traumatized hair. I decided it was time for a mercy killing.
(click to maximize my cute bobness)
Ah, the short summer bob.