People are talking to me so I got the pictures up in the wrong order 😎 but here is the family (minus Stephanie who was visiting at the school) on our ride up to Boulder Lakes Trailhead. That’s Billy’s Peak in the background. We live at the foot of it. There were loads of flowers blooming and the further up we went the further back into spring we went. The dogwood is still flowering about 4500′ and there was snow higher up. It was lovely. I need to get out there in the middle of it more often.

Graduation at Coffee Creek School. There were two 8th graders. Carlie and Duke, in the blue dress and blue shirt. The school had 11 kids this year. The girl in the white top is my grandaughter, a “guest” singer in the program. This is the school I retired from after 17 years, so “grew up” with a lot of these kids.

We drove up to the trail head of Boulder Lakes yesterday. Here they are at the foot of an “old growth” (over-ripe, nearly rotten) fir. It was a nice ride, some snow near the top but the road is open. We saw a grouse hen and her new chicks, and lots of chipmunks, of course.

Daughter Karen wanted to try her hand at the big tri. She went though my stash of acrylic and picked colors and is making good progress. Chris was envious so got my 12″ tri and is weaving small tri’s to put together into a shawl of his own. He plans to weave 9 tris into a shawl. He did his first one in just 2 hours and has a good start on the second. He wanted to know if he could put those “hanging strings” on his, too, so I assured him that he could have a fringe on his shawl, too! 😀 We haven’t gotten to the dying yet. I’d rather do that outside and it’s been cold and showery this week so far.

The boys were disposing of the pancakes their sister made them, she was concentrating on beating Mom a game a scrabble (Mom was taking a turn at the loom while she waited), and Gramma was snoozing. Well, actually, I was really playing Nintendo! lol But a gal my age would be better admitting to a morning nap, don’t you think?! 😛 (Shane wasn’t up yet and we sent Grumpa off to work… sombuddy has to pay for all those groceries!)

Here they are at the view point for Mt. Shasta. it was bell clear on the way up to Rogue River (where there’s no safe pull-off) but had a cap on the way back. This volcano is always impressive, anyway. I didn’t get one good picture of them with Rosy and Rex, what a bummer, and Karen forgot her camera altogether! Daughter is worse than mother! We’re going to put Stephanie or Shane in charge of remembering the camera! lol

Grandson Chris finished his bear today. The yarn is some carder waste that I spun up. Chris started on this four days ago and got it sewn together today. He had quite a bit of advice from Gramma but did the weaving and most of the assembly by himself. Now his little brother wants to try. He got about half a block woven today and seems to have the hang of it, tho his attention span is a bit short.
Today Karen (their Mom) read the article in the new Spin-Off by Veronica Cox that featured a picture of my loom, and now wants to try her hand at Kool-Aid dying and the spinning wheel. More fiber addicts! 😀

We celebrated Karen’s big 4-oh last night. I BBQed some ribs (I’m a pure amateur at the grill but it was eatable! lol) and we baked a brownie cake… the chocolate-ist thing I could think of! It was a noisy little family celebration but fun. I told her that having a 100 year old woman at the party was the best way I could think of to make 40 feel young! lol Grandmother thought that was a pretty good joke, too!

We are having a ball! We went to the swimming hole yesterday. The boys all took the boats Grandpa made for them out of leftover lumber ends. We put strings on them and they pulled them around most of the afternoon. Grampa had the water pistol and Karen and I sat in the shade with the camera. Our little dog turned out to be a water bug, too, so everybody had a good time! lol We went home and made milkshakes then the boys played in the creek with their boats for the rest of the day.

Shane had a school field trip to a farm and brought home some llama fiber. He brought it to California to have Gramma show him how to make a teddy bear out of his llama wool. Here he is carding it. We got it spun up and we’ll start weaving the bear later this week. We also spun up some wool to make his ‘stash’ go further! He did fine but I didn’t get a picture of him spinning. I’m sure there will be more photo ops later!