My Papa

I recently found out that my Papa, who lives in California, has cancer. Luckily, it appears to be in Stage 1 (yay!) and is confined to one nasty tumor. He'll be having surgery soon, and he and my step-mom, Marie, and their sweet little dog, Angel, will need some assistance. My sisters and I will be taking turns helping out.

Papa loves to mug for the camera. As soon as he sees someone ready to take a picture, he must hear an invisible director yell "Action!" He's been this way for as long as I can remember. Our home movies are quite entertaining.

Here he is doing the Fish Face. Everyone in our family had to learn how to do it.

      Acting drunk on Father's Day 2010.
      I think he'd had about three sips of
      beer.

I'm not even sure what to say about this one.










I do have some "normal" pictures of my Papa. If you ask him, he'll  suppress the urge to mug and smile like a regular person. This was taken on Father's Day, 2011.

Here we are right before I moved to Idaho.













And this is my Papa and Marie on his 87th birthday. What a good lookin' couple!

My Papa's been the best dad in the whole world. I'm more than ready to be by his side as he rides over this little bump in the road. Cancer - get ready to have your butt kicked!

A Bit of Bandon

Back when we were still planning on building a house on the Bandon property, we had several trees cut down to clear the lot. The largest of those trees was a Port Orford Cedar that was already starting to die due to a soil fungus. It still had plenty of great wood in it, however, and we planned to use it in our house. Here it is on the truck, along with several neighboring trees.

We had the trees taken to a nearby mill, where the bark was stripped and the trees were milled into cants. There they sat for years, drying, while we waited to build the house. Then we decided to move to Idaho and sell the Bandon property. Now what to do with all of that wood?

We had it shipped here to Idaho a few months ago, and our friends Gary and Patti are graciously allowing us to keep it at their local log furniture/gift store.

We plan on using it to build our greenhouse and chicken coop next spring. We also plan on having Gary build several pieces of furniture for us.

He already built us this beautiful Adirondack double glider out of some of the Port Orford cedar.

It's nice to know that we were able to bring a bit of Bandon with us here to Idaho. Every time we sit in the glider, walk into the greenhouse or go check on the chickens, we'll see that beautiful Oregon wood. Right now, though, I can't wait for the first frost to knock out the yellow jackets so I can actually enjoy that glider!