Saturday night, Sept 1, something that did not make it to the blog. Later that evening I received a cool birthday present. It was an email with subject: [BRITTANY-L] gas-card raffle, stating the following: The drawing was held yesterday at the WBC/GSP of WA Double/Double Hunt Tests and the winners are C. R. of Kent, WA and Nancy Hultquist from Ellensburg. Congratulations to both and a huge thank you to everyone who bought tickets and supported the 2013 ABC Summer Specialty. Cool, eh? Turns out when the card arrived in the mail later in the week, it is a VISA that is not specific, so it can be used for anything anywhere. I think I will use it for other treats, even though gasoline only would have certainly been quite nice. I have donated to this club through the years and in recent raffles over the past year, I have won two gifts. Guess my pay out for donations is being rewarded! The other win I had was a happy doggy paw print meant to be used as a dust rag, but I use it to cover and protect my camera when on a tripod and waiting to make movies. (I wish I’d had my tripod along for my trip reported last week on the view around the burned valley from a high spot on a highway crossed by the wildfire.) I will put a link to that in the page I have been sharing.
Sunday, Sept 2 Began early today, delivering squash and yellow beans to 5 families on our way to visit another, who had advertised a Yanmar 1610D tractor 3 cylinder diesel (4WD) with 4 attachments (3-point backhoe with thumb, front-end loader, blade, and box scraper or blade box, depending on to whom you’re talking). Turns out the person is someone I knew from the University. We ended up saying we would buy it. He bought the rig in 2008 (so called “gray market”), but does not really need it on his 1-acre place. He has put about 60 hours on it, since he bought it. He and his friend (another person I know from CWU), will deliver it to us with the friend’s trailer (formerly one of my students!), sometime in the next week. For years, John has been doing things by hand or shovel and using our old 4WD truck. Also with a chain and truck pulling trees, plus digging holes for fence posts, and hauling rocks and gravel around our place, not to mention taking hay from one place to another. Our pole building contractor accomplished much for us between building down-time and after seeing all that, John is happily contemplating more. We hired the backhoe and front-end loader work since 1989. We started searching a month ago, by contacting our friends who are in the businesses which require traveling to construction sites, and we even went to the Kubota dealer in Cle Elum to check out their new ones on our way back from our doctor’s office visits. They don’t ever carry used ones. Checked with another place in Ellensburg, that mostly repairs tractors. Occasionally they sell one for a customer, but don’t have any right now.
Monday, Sept 3 Happy Labor Day. Staying home to work on chores in house, and on computer, preparing for the interviews this week for our presentation in Olympia (with my colleague from Geography). John did an amazing amount of work while the temperatures were in the 60s, but still came in for lunch, all sweaty from moving 11 bales of hay from the runway of the barn down to the lower pasture, where he is feeding now, and also he moved two large metal feeders down as well, because this hay is very fine and, if thrown on the ground, would blow to Grant County. It would have been easier with the yet-to-arrive tractor with its front end loader. I’m sitting here munching on Cheetos, after eating lunch, for which John fixed a hamburger, an ear of our corn, and red grapes we bought yesterday at Costco, oh, and I added a yellow tomato one of my friends traded me for the yellow squash we delivered yesterday.
Tuesday, Sept 4 John took off early for a the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) –starting south of Snoqualmie Summit at Windy Pass and working north. John has worked there ~9 years ago. This week he mostly dug a large hole in an abandoned logging road to provide dirt and rocks for rebuilding a trail that had turned into a trench. Others were in the trail digging and setting rock “check” dams. Plastic buckets with about 20 pounds of soil had to be hand carried from John’s source into and up the trail. I will add some pictures to our continuing web page for August/September, that he took on his last work day this week for Washington Trails Association.
I spent the day on various projects, including the hay presentation, getting money for our recent acquisitions from stock accounts into our checking account, talking to neighbors, getting information on my grandparents’ house in Seattle to my cousin in GA whose son and wife are visiting and want to drive by to see the old house our grandparents built. Then it was fixing BLTs for dinner, cooking a ear of our corn, and numerous other small chores.
Wednesday, Sept 5 John’s going to Windy Pass again. You’d think he’d have enough wind in Ellensburg. I have Food Bank Soup Kitchen and SAIL exercise. Then we meet in EBRG, for dinner at 5:00 with friends. Our contribution is a bottle of wine and a pan of our famous Blueberry-Cherry-Walnut Kittitas County Cobbler. Big deal finishing a song late for us to play to fulfill a request at the nursing home from a resident. She requested “Half As Much.” Now we have added that to our repertoire.
Thursday, Sept 6 Again, John’s off to Windy Pass. I have a 9:00 interview with Anderson Hay and Grain, a processor/exporter here
. . . and then a fast drive to Kittitas for another interview at 11:00 a.m. with growers and a bite of Taco Thursday lunch at Curly’s; then I drove back to play music at Royal Vista at 2:00. There is another fire east of us in the Parke Creek drainage (no threat to us, but always scary to see smoke filling the valley). It didn’t threaten any homes, but it took firefighters, mostly from the air, 2 days to contain it.
Friday, Sept 7 a LONG day. I had an early morning (8:30 a.m.) appointment with a hay grower in Kittitas, for an interview. It was very interesting and successful, and we also got some good photos. Interesting they are located on Parke Creek and use it to pump irrigation onto their fields, using old water rights that go back for this farm to 1899.
I made a stop to see the manager of Super One grocery — “a Rosauer’s employees store” — in our town and delivered popped wheat berry samples, four varieties in 4-ounce packets from friends from Condon, OR’s wheat country. We had a nice visit. I picked up four of my meds and some orange juice for John. I forgot the canned cat food we were out of for our inside/outside cat. He doesn’t like the cheap tuna and tuna/mackerel (.39/can) we buy for the ferals. I stopped by the bank and a garage sale on the way home, and found John 3 “new” condition shirts for $1.00 each. It is hard to imagine they were ever worn. One of them had too short sleeves for him (all are long-sleeved because he won’t wear short sleeved ones), but I can wear it. It might have been marked wrong, because the shirt part was also too tight across his chest and shoulders.
I skipped my exercise class and the potluck with music I normally participate with, because John and I are leaving at 4:30 for an hour+ trip away to be there at 6:00 pm. for a chef extravaganza we go to each year at the White Heron Cellars (winery),
http://www.whiteheronwine.com/aboutus.html
where John volunteers his labor for pruning and bottling. They bring in 3 chefs from the area, and they gather all local produce, meat, and the cooks have grills and make all sorts of concoctions out of the local products and produce. It is really cool, neat, and good. Then there is a music group to provide entertainment. The view is lovely from up on a hill overlooking the Columbia River gorge as it turns a 90-degree angle and heads south at West Bar – as shown here: (The person in the picture is Cameron Fries, the owner, winegrower and winemaker, and host for the events held throughout the summer and into the fall there.
http://www.winomagazine.com/blog2/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/grand-poobah-2-106.jpg
I’m fairly sure the wine in the bottle he is holding is Roussanne, which he has made since his first planting began to produce after planting in 1990. It is our favorite white wine and he makes a nice dry one. We named our largely white Brittany female (now 5 years old), after it. Her name is Cedaridge Vintage Roussanne. Appropriate or what ?
I will put a video I took while there on the page below so you can see the view we experience each time we visit the winery. We used to take our Geog 465 class (Wine: A geographical appreciation) there for their first field trip and Cameron always gave us a tour of the vineyard and the winery, and added a 6-course catered dinner with a different wine for each. It only cost the students $30 for the meal, as the transportation costs were included in the field trip costs paid for by their course fees. Tonight’s cost is $25 / person, but it is my birthday present every year. We take our lawn chairs and sit up on a bench on the hill that’s carved out like an amphitheater. There was great music (sort of jazzy), or Cascade Mountain Funk as they called it. Food was extraordinary. From memory, I’ll mention a lot of the food, but will add some pictures to the link for your enjoyment. We were presented with honeydew melon cut into flat pieces with fresh peppermint on top, fresh plums, blue cheese on a piece of a mini- pizza, tortilla with local beans, corn, tomatoes, onions, and fresh salsa for on top. Later there was some skewered ground beef mixture with bread crumbs, spices and onions, a little hamburger (tiny) with Feta cheese, grilled tomatoes halved with cheese seasoned and sprinkled with Panko (Japanese bread crumbs). There was grilled trout (pen raised near Ephrata) topped with thin sliced Gala apples, and something else, maybe Kohlrabi (?) or a cheese? The only dessert was corn fritters deep fried as we arrived, with a sauce on top, made up of blueberries in raspberry compote. I will follow up this mouth-watering description with pictures. The 1.5 hr drive back was not nice, in the dark, but it was worth it. John drove over and I drove back, as the designated driver. I only had a taste of Rose’ and Roussanne wines, because of my limitations by the meds I’m on. Our outing was really fun, plus we met some friends there and had a nice visit… plus short visits with the very busy owners. Here is the introduction by Cameron: A number of years ago Farmer Consumer Awareness Days (FCAD) called and asked us if we would do something on the Friday evening prior to FCAD. An iron chef type event was suggested and has taken place four times over the years. White Heron, on Friday September 7, 2012, starting at 6 PM, will put on the fifth annual Chef Extravaganza which is designed to complement FCAD by showcasing local food products. Three days prior to the Friday are spent collecting produce and meat from farms within ten miles of the winery. Three chefs come every year. New this year is Dave Toal from Ravenous Catering, with Richard Kitos from Ivy Wild, and Amilee Cappel-Olsen from Chelan returning from last year. In essence, when the chefs get to the winery all the food is piled up, they sort through it, and start making small plates. For twenty minutes or so each chef will produce one plate and then they will shift and start to produce something else. This continues throughout the evening until desserts appear. The only thing prepared ahead of time is dried beans are soaked so they can be cooked immediately. All of the meat and produce are donated by local farms and are gathered in such a way as to be as fresh as possible.
Saturday, Sept 8 We are getting the “new” used tractor with 4 implements this morning after 11:00 a.m. The seller is delivering it. I will try to add a couple of pictures to the evolving web page, mentioned in several blogs recently. I wish I had a picture of John’s first foray with the tractor — rain was threatening tonight and he decided to move it. I have a short segment of him backing it near the smaller of our round pens, and then he went across a corral area just east of the house, navigating two gates to the barn, and backing it into the concrete runway. It is completely protected, and facing out. He then propped up the backhoe on a short length of 4×4, and the front-end loader on planks.
New material is now on the link, still titled August, but it has extended into September.
http://www.ellensburg.com/nancyh/August2012Rock’NPonderosa.html
This link will continue to have a few things added this weekend, after this blog is posted, so check back for updates.
Just now (7:41 pm) there is thunder rolling about us, but no rain yet. Okay, a few drops hit while we fed the horses. So, we’ll post this and think about supper.
Hope your week was a good one.
Nancy and John
Still on the Naneum Fan