Weeds and Wheat

This was the take away from the homily on Sunday. Are you wheat or weeds? Do you grow to choke out the spirituality of others or do you grow to become nourishment for those around you? It has been stuck in my head for the last few days….especially since I am typing this to procrastinate pulling the weeds and picking up pinecones in my yard today. I mowed yesterday. It was a lot of mowing…. a lot of area and with tall, thick grass. I listened to a couple of hours of my audiobook while doing it though and I am blessed to finally have a level yard, so that was nice. I know a lot of you are in places the heat has been absolutely unbearable as of late. It was 99 here near Kalispell on Monday. The weekend wasn’t much better. But a cool front popped through and we are hovering around 80 with low humidity, so there is no excuse to not be out working in the yard. Sigh….unless you feel you need to catch up on your blogging, that is.

So we returned to Omaha early in the morning on Thursday, July 13th. Tim flew in from California that same day, just 22 hours later. Yes, it was a long day. Tim got to go furniture shopping in our house from the furniture we had not moved and were going to sell. He also went through his belongings to take to his new place. I think I told you before that for the last 18 months, he has pretty much been living at a boarding house. He has a room with a twin bed and a small desk that he purchased. It was supposed to be temporary but ended up being 18 months. In fact, I had a facebook memory pop up today that said it was 2 years ago today that I moved him out of his apartment in Fort Collins, Colorado. We moved him from there to Morgantown, West Virginia, and 6 months later, moved him to East Palo Alto, California. Anyhow…I think he’ll be staying put for awhile now. We rented a small uhaul trailer to put the furniture, bike, and boxes in. Tim and I took off on Friday, July 14th, less than 24 hours since he arrived, to head the 25 hours to his place in East Palo Alto. It was HOT crossing the desert areas of Nevada, Utah salt flats, and Wyoming. The air conditioning in the car just doesn’t keep up well when the outside temperature is 109 degrees. We listened to a couple of audiobooks, and a half a dozen or more podcasts. Once we arrived in East Palo Alto on Sunday night, we got to work packing up his room. We left Monday afternoon to head to San Diego. We stopped just short of there so we didn’t have to try to unload in the dark. We drove up to his new place Tuesday morning around 0945. He has three roommates and they seem pretty nice. Tim has two rooms: a large bedroom and then a smaller room he uses for a den with a couch and TV, and his home workout stuff. We unloaded the uhaul and car by 11:30 and then took the empty uhaul around San Diego picking up furniture he had bought off of Craig’s List or similar. We dropped all that off at his place, returned the uhaul, then started unpacking and building furniture that came in boxes. By Wednesday afternoon, we needed a break and went to the San Diego Zoo. It is only about 20 minutes from Tim’s house. His work is 14 minutes from his house and Miramar…the infamous Top Gun Navy Aviation training base, is 14 minutes in the opposite direction. We got to hear the “sound of freedom” quite often. Good thing he grew up on Air Force bases and is used to hearing jet fighters screaming across the sky morning, noon and night. Thursday morning I flew from San Diego to San Jose. Tim and I switched vehicles so I now have my old car back and he has my newer SUV. We had parked the car at the San Jose airport on the drive down to San Diego. That allowed me to shave 7 hours off my drive to Montana. I through California to Oregon on Thursday. Friday, I took a small detour and went to Crater Lake National Park. Rich, Tim, and I went snowshoeing there in March of this year….there was so much snow that everything was closed. This time I saw a completely different scene and was able to go up to the rim and do a two hour trolley trip around the rim and hear stories of the park. I will share all of that when I get my photos from my good camera uploaded and processed. I continued on to Washington state, where I stayed Friday night and then drove the rest of the way back home to Montana on Saturday afternoon.

I have been trying to do work around the house and some of those random tasks like getting a Montana’s driver’s license . Plates are next. Actually, pulling weeds are next! I should hop to it! Here are some photos from the trip with Tim and then from California to here. I took a couple of sunset photos here Monday night….it was amazing. Can’t wait to introduce Lily and Tallinn to our new home!

These were some of the stand we saw on the way down from Palo Alto to San Diego. So many farmers’ stands with garlic this and that….even garlic ice cream. No…we didn’t stop.

Here is the final shot with Tim and the Stanford women’s basketball team during one of their summer lifts. Several are missing because they are playing with their country’s national team during summer play. Also a view of the desert as we drove across the country….and then the Utah salt flats.

Here are some photos from Crater Lake National Park in Oregon…

These are the deer who are hanging out in my front yard…

This is the sunset in Washington state I took when I was driving in the middle of nowhere. There was a lot of smoke in the air from some forest fires in Oregon…and that smudge is actually smoke and not a cloud. It was eerily beautiful.

Here are the sunset photos taken about 6 miles from my house on Monday night.