FOR BEST VIEWING, SET YOUR MARGINS TO FIT THE 3 DRAWINGS IN MARCH ON ONE LINE, OR, USE THIS LINE.

Nancy and John Dec 14, 2012
at a CWU scholarship potluck luncheon with pecan pies John made using his mom's recipe. 
We took two again this year but did not have our photo taken.

Thoughts on a winter’s day, nearing Dec. 25, 2014

With only 5 days before Christmas

Memories of the 12 months of 2014 from

Nancy & John Hultquist on the Naneum Fan

~~~~~~~~~

We have been receiving wonderful cards and newsletters from all our friends & relatives and decided we'd better get something down, at least for those who have email.  We missed getting anything out for 2013, so I'll review the blog to see events pictured, and share a few with you, yet this is mostly for 2014.  We'll star with December (2013), as we missed sharing it with you last year.  Our Christmas cactus is above the doggie window, keeping cool & growing well in the sun.
                                      
  
                                     Nancy & John 12/20 Scholarship Lunch --  Nancy @ Orcutt's Christmas dinner.

Look back a week to our own private "reindeer" -- a nice buck with a beautiful set of antlers, in our backyard. 

Below is a You Tube capture for your enjoyment:

http://youtu.be/csQ-1gS7Ad0

This includes highlights for our year that I (Nancy) have grabbed from our weekly blog that John helps me produce using Word Press.  It's too much trouble for him to add photos and links, so I decided to put this in the format as we have for a few years in the past.  If you are a regular blog reader, most of this will not be new to you.

       Our horses, Cheyenne, Jazz, Ebony, Myst, Frosty, Breeze
        (sadly, my horse Frosty died Dec 2013)

We still have many resident deer (15 was the highest count at one time on our property),
and we had visits again from wild Merriam Turkeys, in the trees and in our front yard (see photos below).

January.  On John's birthday (1-4-14), this year we celebrated at a Raclette given by the owners of the White Heron Cellars winery and Mariposa vineyard where John volunteers 5 weeks every spring pruning wine grapevines. This celebration is thanks for the volunteer workers and their family.

The following link will take you to a long but interesting and educational story about the Raclette we attend every year.  This next year (2015), it will occur on the eve of his birthday, coming right up soon!

http://www.rocknponderosa.com/nancyh/WhiteHeronCellars2014Raclette.html

We walked through the cottonwoods on our property and got one of the last photos of Shay (Cedaridge Legacy of Shay), who died this year at 14.  Her sister, Meghan (Skittles) is in the lower part of the picture and is still with us.  The middle photo shows large brush piles John has made for the quail, the trees he's fallen, cut into firewood size pieces, stacked, and the very largest cottonwood on our property, right of center.  The plant on the right by our driveway is iced rabbit brush.

 

February.  Photos below show a celebration at the Senior Center for Chinese New Year -- the year of the horse, and the other is taken at a play date at an assisted living home where I wore a special hoedown vest (a little small for me), to entertain the honky-tonk piano player friend there (age 88).

   

March.  John has encouraged me to clean up boxes from our past (I'm not doing a very good job).  I still have many boxes he carted home from my office, yet to go through.  I have tossed a lot of stuff, and given away books to students and others, but this find was from old notes way back in high school--a Health Science report with incredible hand drawn diagrams of systems and organs in the body!  I made an A+ and was proud of it, I guess, to keep it all these years.  I created it May 9, 1957, when I was 13 and in the 8th grade.  I scanned a few of the drawings just for posterity.  I only wish I had actually memorized and learned what I was drawing.  Then I would have known all the parts of my pulmonary system when doctors were talking around me in the ICU and, mostly, I hadn’t a clue.  Below are 3 for your (at least my) enjoyment.

                         

March 29, we got a call from Jeri Conklin about our co-owned dog, Cedaridge Kip's Camelot Shay Tre’ (Daisy), who won her Amateur Puppy Walking stake.  Here is a photo of her TWO blue ribbon wins– Open Puppy with 8 starters [Paul Doiron handling] for 2 pts toward her field championship, and Amateur Puppy with 12 starters [Jeri Conklin handling] for 2 points toward her AFC (Amateur Field Championship).  Paul and Peggy Doiron were heading to WA for more field trials and would be in the channeled scablands in early April, so John and I drove past Ritzville, to Goose Butte in the basalt cliffs area exposed by the ice age flood-- to meet and visit with Daisy. 

                                         

She is competing in the field and show, on her way, we hope, to a Dual Championship, (the AKC designation for a champion of both field (FC) and show (CH)   She also attained her Junior Hunter title, with Jeri handling, and can add a JH title to her name.   We are proud of Cedaridge Kip's Camelot Shay Tre' JH with thanks to Jeri Conklin.

April.  One of the places our music group plays is at Dry Creek Assisted Living home, where they have a recreation room with the Coca Cola theme, complete with 12 chairs and 5 bar stools.  Each time we go, they bring 12 chairs down for the players, because they did away with all their armless chairs in the dining room, and many of us cannot play our instruments in ones with arms.  They had to switch to armed ones for the safety of the residents.

 

Interesting flashback to my home town of Atlanta, where Coca Cola originated.  My favorite story is about Asa Candler (the founder of Coca Cola) coming into my grandfather's drug store (Brannen's Drug Store), and asking him to invest in his product and serve his new beverage for sale at the soda counter.  My grandfather declined and said he would stay with Welch's grape soda.  Oh, well.  We'll just rely on our own choices and enjoy our life on the Naneum Fan.

  
        Lilac near Carpathian walnuts behind           A regular apple tree in our "orchard."

JOHN'S TRIPS TO WHITE HERON WINERY TO PRUNE WINE GRAPEVINES
STARTED EARLY MARCH AND LASTED INTO APRIL

John explaining Syrah grape cluster shape from plant he helped prune

Spring 2014 found John driving over an hour each way daily to White Heron Cellars (winery) and the Mariposa vineyard to help for 3 hours with wine grapevine pruning -- spending about six weeks on the project.  On his way back, he'd occasionally stop and buy some large Honeycrisp apples from Double Diamond in Quincy, a distributor with controlled atmosphere buildings.  If you missed it, follow this old link to learn more and to see a documented example of their size on a scale.  

http://www.rocknponderosa.com/nancyh/HoneyCrispApple2012.html    

While we don't have any photos of the pruning activity, here is a video of Cameron Fries and John picking some grapes at the Mariposa Vineyard.  It also appears in the Raclette 2014 write-up, mentioned above in January.  This link takes you to Cameron and John harvesting Syrah grapes 9/20/13 in the wind. 

The picture above is from here, so you can hear the explanation.

http://youtu.be/aWG4qDJvYuQ

Below is a link to an old page about the White Heron winery and Mariposa vineyard, where we used to take our summer class (Geog 465: Wine, A Geographical Appreciation) for a field trip, tour of the winery and the vineyard, and where we would be served a catered dinner with 6 small courses and a different wine with each.  It was the highlight of the entire summer class and a fantastic way to begin.  The following link will give you a little introduction: 

  http://www.rocknponderosa.com/nancyh/WhiteHeronCellars2012.html

May.  More flowering things appear.

Wild bushes:  golden currant                 Oregon Grape                        Oregon Grape Cluster 

                       

                   Lovely apple blossom cluster -  Montmorency Pie Cherry with bee -  Wild sarvis (service) berry

We have many flowering trees.  In previous years we have shown others on our place, such as cottonwoods that are very interesting, Aspen Catkins, and "Pussy" Willow blooms.  For this year we'll show you some pines on our place:

  

  Lodgepole pine flowers,       Ponderosa pine flower,  and     Austrian black pine flowers.

   A large strawberry               with a line of Cabot strawberries & others with a quarter for scale.

  Nancy, Marilyn Mason, John                                 Nancy with Bethany Oliver

 John & Nancy with Brian Frampton                  Thomas Harold Brannen

Our homemade Kittitas Cobbler, our blueberries, cherries.    Megan Kaspar, bass fiddle/Nancy at July 4 celebration

 

Continuing through the month we reached our 45th anniversary celebration, of July 12, 1969.  We celebrated by finding and appreciating a special heart-shaped strawberry that we later shared with friends around our long rural block for their 37th anniversary. 

 
We stay busy as a bee (see this one, acually a yellow jacket, in our strawberry patch).

The rest of July was filled with picking and distributing cherries:  Bings, Rainier, Queen Anne, and even pie cherries.  We figure we picked hundreds of pounds and gave away most of them.

     

Our orchard is alongside our driveway, and the first tree (left) is a plum, on up the driveway are cherry, with our horses enjoying grass treats.
Trees eventually in full bloom (right photo), provided cherries for the final picking and distribution. 

     
That's John personalized WTA saw received from 50 days on the trail (left) and (right) a view into
the back of my Subaru loaded with cherries to be delivered, guarded by a stuffed rabbit.

WASHINGTON OLD TIME FIDDLERS MUSIC WORKSHOP is always held for a week near the end of July by the Washington Old Time Fiddlers Association (WOTFA).  It provides classes for all ages and many different instruments.  For the past 21 years I only had to drive 10 miles to the convenient location in Kittitas, WA.  Instead, in 2014, I had to travel to Moses Lake, WA almost two hours away.  I made two trips over and stayed with a long-time Brittany friend, Trudy Richmond, in her a/c RV.  I left mid-week and missed Thursday, so I was able to play with the Fiddlers and Friends that day in Ellensburg, had a good night's sleep and returned with John for the week's ending recital.  I participated in an Intermediate/Advanced Fiddle class with my favorite violin teacher, Roberta Pearce, from Nampa, ID, whose class I have been in for 20 years!  A friend jokingly said, "You should have learned by now."  The reason I go back every year, is that she's like family, and every year she teaches us a different repertoire of songs (~ 17).  I volunteer as her assistant and take care of certain things with the class, and in addition, I make movies and a few photos to share with the class.  I have just one photo to share this year taken at the class recital with 3 cross-tuned fiddle tunes played (in Calico tuning).

August.  Bad month for wildfires and way too close for comfort, moreso than the two in 2012.

A massive smoke plume from the Table Mountain Fire, north of us in 2012,
taken by a Wenatchee Rappel Crew en route to another fire.

The trip home took us north (west to east) on Charlton Rd before they closed it and shows the smoke barreling out of the Naneum Canyon north of us.  

 

    

The photo below was taken by my friend Celia Winningham on Thomas Rd., with a view of both canyons: 

 

Wilson Creek Canyon is the left plume; Naneum Creek Canyon, the right.

_{Every 6 hours, in conjunction with the MODIS satellite imagery flyover, I captured the data for hot spots, published them on a map from Google Earth, and sent to all people on my email list who were interested in keeping up with the advance of the fire.  I started the day after the fire, using the procedure I learned in 2012 from my friend Miriam Hill in Alabama to follow those two major wildfires near us (but not as close as this year's).  Closest it got to us this year was 1.8 miles.}

_{Below are 4 of the most important images created  -- from start to finish.}

 

_{Left gives the perspective of the northern part of the valley, and one can see the alluvial fan in Google Earth imagery (lower right) , where our house is located.  Right:  Aug 4 view gives regional setting with highways & Thorp, WA (5 miles west of Ellensburg, which is south of us).  Right image is not directionally oriented the same as the left.} 

This was the last image I distributed -- note the names of the local canyons and places in Naneum Canyon where we have ridden our horses.  The fire was stopped just as it reached the 2012 Table Mountain Complex fire as seen below in Jennifer Hackett's GIS coverage. 
Note our house on images, marked in dark gold, Hultquist Home.

Jennifer Hackett was feeding me updates daily that I also shared with my email list.  She has her own business here in town but was providing this as a public service.  She previously was my GIS student at CWU, and when I was recovering from my heart valve replacement surgery, she took over teaching my Intermediate GIS class until a new person was hired after I had to retire. 

The image below is to orient you to the regional view of two wildfires this year in our valley -- the tail end of ours and a new lightning caused one in the Taneum, southwest of Cle Elum.

 
While I was home keeping watch over the fire every 6 hrs from the satellite Modis imagery, John was taking trips to work on WTA events on trails.  You can read a little more about that at the end of the November discussion.

GARDEN GOODIES ON THE NANEUM FAN PROVIDING
FRUIT AND VEGGIES FOR US AND OTHERS

Other things happened in the gardens around our house during the fire.  Onions, blueberries, plums, dahlias, and tomatoes were harvested .

              

 

 

September.  Stories go all over the board --from our home on the Naneum fan to Franklin Falls and Snow Lake trail work on WTA trails (see below), to California Brittany trials, and to the Columbia River, including showing more of our garden produce.

  

                 Small cherry tomatoes     Our large "Fantastic" tomato    that grew adjacent  to the corn                   

           Thorn-less blackberries                        Oval plum, purple throughout

    

   Old fashioned delicious apples           &               wild asters  

 

John & Nancy White Heron Cellars (Winery)/Mariposa vineyard for Farmer Awareness Day Chef's
Extravaganza.  That's the Columbia River behind my head, at West Bar.  It's my birthday present every
year to attend this dinner.  We went with our friends from Ellensburg, Joanie and Ken.  We also enjoyed
the fruits of Grant County to compare with our own harvested acorn & butternut squash in Kittitas County.

 
Cedar Waxwing juveniles love the Nanking Cherry in the back and the Mountain Ash in the front yards.

In John's "newer" garden, besides strawberries, corn, tomatoes, and squash, he grew Dahlias.  One of this month's celebrations was to say good-bye to our Americorps volunteer, Moire Cocoran, who worked last year at the Adult Activity Center (Ellensburg's Senior Center) as a wellness coordinator.  She was a great gal, and there was a huge turnout to bid her adieu and good luck.  John's dahlias are on the entry table, behind which we are standing.  Nancy is wearing a lovely shirt made from material a former student, Clement Otu-Tei, from Ghana had his mother send him to give me when I was out of the hospital.  My friend Ellen sewed it into a blouse for me. 

 

We had much work this year in our orchard with a huge crop of Rainier, Bing, and Royal Anne cherries.  We had a tiny pear tree with 2 dozen pears and we probably gave away 100 pounds of plums.  Additionally, we had many raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries.  We did not succeed in winning the race with a couple of Douglas squirrels and consequently we got very few Carpathian walnuts this year.  We wish they'd have preferred the black walnuts, because we do not like them near as much as the English-like Carpathians (of which we have 7 trees).  They are English-like walnuts and very sweet.

Late fall, our friends on the south side (north facing slope) of the valley invite us over to pick apples.  They have a commercial orchard, but pollinators and other trees still have plenty of apples after the pickers come  through.  Three of us picked many boxes of apples, on an extremely windy day, just a few types, including mostly Gala and Honeycrisp.  We didn't dehydrate any apples this year, John made a little applesauce and froze some for making pies later, we ate a lot of them fresh, and we gave many pounds away. 

                                                      
Accepting pet                                 Daisy                                         field trialing      

           

 

Daisy's brother, Tug (Cedaridge Kip's Tug Toy), with his father, Cedaridge Tri-tip Kip, celebrationg Tug's two 5-pt show majors (Best of Winners) toward his show championship.  He needs one point to add Ch. to his name.  The computer behind shows a photo of Sonja Willitts (owner handler) in 1978, with his great-great uncle, Whispering Tic, from our breeding in Idaho, when she and I were running around to Shows and Trials all over the PNW.  Whispering Ridge was our kennel name there, before we switched in the 1980s to Cedaridge Brittanys.

October brought more wildlife visits, this time from Merriam turkeys.

 

Check this video:  

http://youtu.be/m5hf99ts00Q    Watch fast, it's only 12 secs, to see the Merriam turkeys leaving our front yard from where the above photo on the right came from.

Oct 26, I drove to Diamond Lake north of Spokane, WA to participate in a family reunion dinner of my friends, Sonja and Kevin Willitts from S. Lake Tahoe, at their "summer" home. 

View from the first floor, view from the second floor, Sonja with Tug and father Kip, and Tug is a celebrity, as the Ace of Clubs in a deck of cards from a fundraiser for the S. Lake Tahoe Humane Society.  Cedaridge in the news.

November.

Creating a truck rack from pallets we got cheaply from a CWU Surplus sale.

 

Here's a short 2-minute intro to the newly crafted truck rack from pallets.

http://youtu.be/MpxzYcPG5fU

KITTITAS VALLEY FIDDLERS AND FRIENDS

 

                                           Nancy at Fairgrounds, Feb, Spirit of the West & with two friends, at Senior Center Veteran's Day, November                                                  

WASHINGTON TRAILS ASSOCIATION (WTA)

 

The work crew for Microsoft's Day of Caring for trail work near Issaquah. 
John is a WTA Asst Crew Leader (orange hat)--others were there, but not wearing their hats.

John participated in many workday crews with young people, and folks from the workforce in the Seattle area, such as Boeing, who volunteer time on the trails.  He did not take many photos this year, but here are a couple on my camera, taken throughout the spring and summer (some during the time of the wildfires here in Ellensburg). 

Georgia & Liz Martin (Alli & Paul's girls, when younger) at Franklin Falls, end of the trail the WTA crew & John worked on 9/28 and again in October, where you can see the before and after of the trail work.  He actually went more times to this trail.  Below, he is on the right in some before and after images, taken a few days apart. 

             John at Snow Lake Trail, where he took cherry and pear tomatoes to share.             

December.  Festivities included many activities throughout the valley and we enjoyed them all.  We attended parties through the month at the university, and at people's houses.  Mid-month, we enjoyed a dinner with friends from my exercise class, Gloria and Paul Swanson, who have mutual friends we get to see once a year there.  Paul is in his nineties, but he shares a birthday date with John, right after the first of the new year.

I decided to end this month's report on a different note: 

Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) usage review, at the end of the year.

My story started in May with my cardiologist searching for answers to a weakness in the left part of my heart.  It finally culminated with being set up to use a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine.  From the medical dictionary, this is "a method of positive pressure ventilation, used with patients who are breathing spontaneously, to keep the alveoli open at the end of exhalation and thus increase oxygenation and reduce the work of breathing.  It is used with people who have sleep disorders, primarily apnea (paused breathing).  I do not have that, but instead, I have hypopnea (shallow breathing), very occasionally, which needs to be corrected by the continuous positive airway pressure, so that my blood's oxygen saturation percentage level remains above 90% for the entire night's sleep.  It will keep my organs healthier with blood flow that my injured heart is not doing as well as desired or needed during sleep.

The beginning of my introduction to this procedure was not nice.  It took me until the 3rd week of October, and suffering through two "masks" to find one I could use for the night.  I ended up with one called a nasal pillow (ResMed's Swift FX); it is much less confining than were the first two.  Those had a large nose piece (left below was a WISP, 2nd try, with many hard uncomfortable straps across my head and cheeks).  The first one (not pictured) was an Eson that pressed on my forehead and left an indentation, and was totally unacceptable.
 

My experience with the Swift FX has been more successful and will allow me to stick with the program.  However, I was frustrated, knowing I was only on the machine for increasing my oxygen saturation percentage (SpO2%), and for no other reason.  My frustration resulted from the CPAP machine's not registering either my pulse or my SpO2%.  My solution was to purchase an oximeter that allowed me to upload my overnight data to my computer to synchronize with the other parameters measured by my CPAP machine, which also records my nightly data onto an SD card I can upload to my computer.

Now I am able to experiment with the CPAP operating all night (including the oximetry too), or for the first part of the night, and then without, while the oximeter keeps recording the whole time.  One good example recently is below, for Dec 18.  The bottom line is the SpO2 shows a significant lowering when off CPAP application.  The past few nights I have used both devices all night and the results are positive.  The break in the red and blue lines represent taking the oximeter off my finger for a short trip to the back of the house.

These two graphic diagrams are produced by SleepyHead software (a free download from a fellow in Australia).   I wish to thank my friend Sam Scripter in Moscow, ID for introducing me to this and bearing with me as I struggled through all my entry into this procedure.  Now, I will be able to return the favor by helping him with his new oximeter purchase that is the same as mine.  Below, for Dec 21 shows a consistent situation all night on CPAP machine, with SpO2 in the high 80s and mostly in the 90s for the entire night, with no events:

While not cooking dinners, pies, or bread, John clears a lot of brush,
and he saws many trees trying to make our property more fire-safe.

 

December 25, 2014   We joined two different families on Christmas Day, and another the day after.  We hope your season was rewarding.  We celebrated Christmas with photos from California of my dog, Daisy, not particularly pleased with her antlers, but still looking sweet, with photos surrounding yummy bread made by John, twice in December this year. 

We end each year with friends at a potluck and jam session - Dec. 31 -- A very nice ending to the old year.

Thanks to everyone for connections through the years.  We appreciate your friendship and kinship.   

We appreciate the annual greetings of letters, pictures, and stories we receive.  

Our friends & family are all over the world; we enjoy postal and electronic mail.

We lost some good friends, relatives, and animals this year, and last.

We wish you all a fantastic new year in Twenty Fifteen.

Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings to you:

a Merry Christmas or Happy Chanukah,

with a big Happy New Year's wish to all.

Love and hugs, Nancy and John & all our critters
Brittanys, Cats, Horses
B*(Meghan, Dan, Annie);C*(Rascal, Sue, Johnny (Cash-ew),Woody,Lemon);H*(Ebony,Myst,Cheyenne, Jazz, Breeze)

HAPPY NEW YEAR
"For auld lang syne," as it appears in the first line of the chorus, might be loosely translated as "For (the sake of) old times."

   
First a sunset near the end of 2014 from our backyard.

---

This page was created by Nancy Brannen Hultquist - Dec 2014; the text is from the shared writing of John and Nancy Hultquist.  Comments to nancyh@ellensburg.com (only email account that John also reads)
or nancyb.hultquist@gmail.com or cedaridge@gmail.com    

Cedaridge is our "Brittany" name.  Previously, in Idaho, we used the name, Whispering Ridge.