Adventures in Homemaking

Andrew and I sold the house and bought this sweet van.  This blog is going to be a lot more exciting now.  We're going to spend all of our non-working hours on adventures, and will retire early because we're saving so much money.  

Or...I can lead with this picture of our trash and recycling cabinet.  I love our trash and recycling cabinet.  It's an ideal space-saver for a small kitchen - except that you have to  give up precious cabinet space.  

We have not yet abandoned our house for a van, but we do discuss that option daily.  We still have a house, but no longer own a wet bar.  Andrew had to do more plumbing than he expected to remove it - something to do with sewer gas - and he and Kitten spent a lot of time in the crawl space together.

Andrew and I spent our first Thanksgiving together in Reno at home, preparing for our new floor.  The downstairs of our house was very uneven, and we used five bags of leveling compound and a few sheets of plywood to straighten it out as best we could.  Our Thanksgiving dinner was simple, but delicious.

Katherine, Randal, and Milo stopped by Thanksgiving weekend on their way back to Klamath Falls.  Milo already has a great sense of humor and helped us pose with my favorite Muppet Tree.

Andrew and I really enjoyed the first couple of days of laying the floor. We started with the biggest rooms, and the work went quickly.  Halo enjoyed the amount of time we spent on our hands and knees, and Kitten loved all the new boxes and scraps.

I took this picture at the end of our first night of working on the floor.  Laying floor is a piece of cake.

Halo thought we were giving her a new rug every time we spread out new subfloor.    She enjoyed each new layer before we covered it up.  It took us about a week to make it to our guest rooms, and then another week to finish those, because small rooms require a lot more work.  We haven't done any of the trim yet, and enjoy looking at camper vans while we procrastinate.

In addition to looking at camper vans, we've had a fabulous time playing in the snow.  Winter here is so beautiful and fun, and we've made most of our new snow shoes.

For our biggest adventure of all, we hosted the Wissels for Christmas.  We cut down the blue spruce in our front yard because it was encroaching on our garden, and it made a beautifully rustic Christmas tree.  Andrew's parents brought his childhood ornaments, and the tree represented his interests over the years.

Andrew's sister Elizabeth is a domestic goddess, and she helped me reupholster our kitchen chairs (which a neighbor had given us for free) her first day in Reno.

Liz also helped Andrew and his dad assemble our new shoe bench, and hung our first pictures (after finding me the best deals on picture frames.)

We had a beautiful white Christmas in Reno, and played in the Arboretum on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  I'm not sure why our Arboretum has a dinosaur grove, but I'm glad it does!

We piled all seven of us into the Subaru wagon for many of our adventures.  Madeline and I sat  in the trunk, hoping not to get pulled over.  A police van did pull up behind us, but luckily the driver only smiled and waved.  

We continued some Wissel traditions, such as smorgasbord dinner for Christmas Eve, and added a fantastic new one - tamales on Christmas Day, thanks to our newest member, Audi (Madeline's fiance.)  

Now that Andrew and I don't have any guests to prepare for, we're putting aside homemaking for awhile, and are spending our next two weekends camping and hiking.  We rely heavily on visitors for extrinsic motivation for housekeeping, so please come visit!

Houses are for Grown-ups.

A lot has happened since my last post, and if I try to write about everything I'll keep putting it off, so I'm going to narrow it down to 6 highlights.

1.  Lassen National Park. We celebrated Andrew's 33rd birthday at the end of September with a trip to Lassen National Park.  It was our first time sleeping in the truck, and it worked out perfectly.  Andrew found a quiet place to park along a seldom used dirt road, and there was a full moon (sadly, the pictures of the moon turned out terribly.)  We parked around 10pm that night and went right to sleep.

 In the morning, we had our first trailhead mostly to ourselves.  We had a simple breakfast tailgate of peanut butter bagels and coffee, and then hiked up Mount Lassen. Mount Lassen is an active volcano that last erupted in 1917, and is one of the largest lava domes on the earth.

 On our way up, we saw our first snow of the fall.

 We ate  burritos at the summit.

 The mountain in the background is Mt. Shasta, another active volcano, and the second highest peak in the Cascades.

 2.  We moved (again.)  Just a few days after we returned home from Lassen, we closed on our house!  Andrew and I were full of energy and excitement, and immediately got to work and pulled up the downstairs carpet.

Our first night in our house was also our third wedding anniversary - we celebrated in style with take-out burgers from a restaurant that buys all it's meat from local ranches.

Still full of energy, we bought a new sink, and Andrew replaced it after work one evening.

3.  Sierra Buttes.  After the excitement of the new house wore off, we were exhausted.  Houses are for grown-ups, and we've enjoyed being kids together.
Everywhere I looked, I saw parts of the house that I wanted to change, and I felt an overwhelming sense of buyer's remorse.  Many people told me this was a normal part of buying a house, and Andrew remained optimistic and encouraging.
Even though we have a lot of work to do on the house, we decided we needed to keep going on adventures on the weekends to stay balanced.

Our new friends Marty, Sarah, and Wilson the dog joined us for the trip to the Sierra Buttes.

Ah, mountain snow-fed lakes (Upper Sardine, Lower Sardine, and Young America)

So happy to be away from the new house!

4.  Yosemite National Park:  Reno's proximity to Yosemite was one of the top reasons we picked it, and we finally visited it together.  

We slept in the truck just outside Yosemite, and drove into the park at sunrise.

One of the perks of visiting Yosemite in October is you get the best views mostly to yourself.  During the summer, May Lake is crowded, but it's quiet and peaceful in October.

Andrew is really excited that we just hiked down from (the base of) Cathedral Peak.

5.  Weekend with Emily.  I had a week off in October for fall break, and so Emily and I met up in Ashland, Oregon.  Baby Alsea loves the outdoors, and was happiest when we were hiking or eating outside.  

6.  Mom's Visit.  My mom came out to visit at the end of my fall break...and I really regret not taking any pictures during her visit.  We drove to Lake Tahoe (mom's first time in California!) and walked along the Truckee River.  Mom also helped Andrew and I pick the new floor for our house.  We've been living on plywood and avoiding making the decision.  Hopefully, I'll have a picture of the new floor to post by the end of the month.

That's it for now.  The next post will focus more on the changes we've (ok, mostly Andrew) made to the house in between hiking and working.

The Best Part of Reno is....California?

Sorry, Reno, I know you have many good qualities but...our best weekends so far have been based in California.

For Labor Day weekend, Andrew and I traveled to Point Reyes National Seashore to camp, hike, and play with Madeline and Audie.  The seashore is home to a herd of tule elk.  The elk are very comfortable around people, and dozens grazed close to our trail.

The bachelor elk hung out together, thinking about love - it's rutting season.  We saw a couple of them rub their antlers against the ground, which is a sign of aggression, but no one came to blows.  I was relieved there was no violence, but I think everyone else was disappointed.  

These female elk are grazing near the reigning bull.  

Andrew, of course, found a tree to climb while the three of us hydrated, fashionably.

And we added to our collection of photos of me disapproving of Andrew's risky endeavors.

All ten miles of our Point Reyes trail bordered the ocean, and at the end of the hike we ate burritos (of course) on the breath-taking Tomales Bay.

We spent the night at a busy, family-run campground.  When we arrived, the RV campers were in full-swing - country music blaring, Confederate flag waving, even karaoke.  After hot dogs and Reese's s'mores, we found quiet and a sky full of stars at the ocean, just over a dune from our tent.  When we awoke the next morning, the the rest of the camp was still asleep and we could hear the ocean waves.

Breakfast Labor Day morning was delicious.  Madeline and Audie have assembled quiet the camping accouterments.  Freshly percolated coffee, toasted bagels with bacon and fried eggs, and chunky guacamole.

Wagons are for cooking!  Madeline makes a home wherever she goes!

After breakfast, we packed up and spent the rest of the day on the ocean before heading back to Reno.  The traffic heading the opposite direction (back to California from Burning Man and Lake Tahoe) reminded us how happy we are that we live close, but not in, California.


The next weekend we explored Desolation Wilderness.  It sounds like an empty, dreary place, doesn't it?

It's not.  The Desolation Wilderness is one of the most majestic places I've traveled to.  Our pictures aren't great because of the smoke from the Valley Fire, but even on a hazy day the views were amazing.  And it was quiet.  For most of our 15 mile hike we neither saw nor heard any sign of other humans - just pines, peaks, and pristine mountain lakes.

California may have the best hikes, but Nevada has the highest percentage of BLM land in the country.  Andrew's new (used) truck passed it's first off-road  test on the Mount Rose foothills, and I only screamed a few times on the rocky, uneven terrain.

Another Reno perk is the desert amphitheater in the park next to our apartment.  Last week an acting group rehearsed for the musical Cinderella - this is our view from the top of the hill above the theater.  Few cities offer live entertainment while hiking.

So, weekends are still fabulous, and weekdays are still just okay.  It's quite a difference switching from a school designed to support students who have dropped out and want a second chance, to a school where many students are at-risk of dropping out for the first time.  I see the mounting factors - the unexcused absences, unfinished work, shrugging of shoulders - and I know where it leads, but I don't know how to stop it.  Big high schools have so many perks, and the successful students thrive with all the extracurricular activities and sports and electives.  But I miss the close relationships from my little school, and all the support and time I used to be able to give my struggling students.

Next weekend I will go to my first homecoming game of my life.  I don't know if I'm cut out for a huge, traditional high school - I certainly wasn't when I was a teen - but I'm trying to make it work.

Love from Reno!