On the Oregon Trail: November 2017

October Recap

In October, we had a visit from Grandma and Grandpa the weekend after my birthday! It was great to have them see our home and show them around town for a bit. We had dinner at Grandpa's favorite Shari's restaurant.

We also visited Lone Pine Farms for a fall adventure. It was raining pretty hard and really muddy but still a lot of fun. We went through a huge corn maze, saw some farm animals, and picked out a pumpkin from the patch for our jack-o-lantern.

We watched several Halloween movies: Coraline, Paranorman, The Halloween Tree, The Addams Family, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. To go along with the movies, we had an assortment of fall treats!

And now, pictures!

Colorful leaves!

Lone Pine Farms

Corn Maze

On the hayride to the pumpkin patch

The Jack Skellington-o-Lantern!

Pumpkin seeds

Caramel apple cookies

Pies and caramel apple

Even a Halloween black cat!

September Recap

Hi Everybody~!

So September was still as hot as August, which pushed us out of our apartment. Instead of park events though, we went to the movies (Wind River), walked around the mall, and tried new places to eat. We tried the famous Voodoo Doughnuts (which were good, not great) and Mod Pizza. We even went to the Eugene Saturday Market and enjoyed delicious falafel. We've also started a Saturday tradition of eating burgers and listening to the podcast Lovett or Leave It.

Awbrey Park

Also Awbrey Park

Mod Pizza

At Mod Pizza

Hendricks Park

Also Hendricks Park

July and August Recap

Well, it's been a while again since we've posted. Time to get up to date!

Courtney was on a musical kick through most of July. I listened in to a lot of Grease and saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat for the first time. While finishing up work on the dollhouse, she played her favorite Harry Potter podcast, Witch, Please and watched The Great British Bake-off on Netflix. It took us a few years, but the dollhouse project is finished (see pictures below)!

We took advantage of a lot of the free Eugene summer activities. There was a Sunday Streets day that had kind of a carnival atmosphere in the streets of Downtown Eugene and a Platypus Clarinet Orchestra (which got its name because it has musicians from both Eugene and Corvallis, which have the school mascots Ducks and Beavers, respectively) concert in a park. There were a couple of movie nights as well. We brought a picnic to the park for Rear Window on Courtney's birthday, and we saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail a week later. We also went to a Shakespeare in the Park showing of Henry V.

My phone had been slowly dying for a while, and in July, it finally gave out. So I got a new one from Costco, and it's been working pretty well so far.

The transition at work to a partnership with Quest Diagnostics has meant a lot of my coworkers have been let go, but my department has been lucky to see a steady enough workload to keep us all on.

We did make some changes around the apartment, though. There were some mold concerns with the books on our shelves in the bedroom, so we moved them all out to the living room, which tends to stay drier.

Towards the end of August, everyone seemed to be talking about the eclipse. We weren't close enough to the path of totality to see anything too spectacular, but it was still fun to experience.