We spent Tuesday showing the Kris' parents around the Willamette Valley.
Our first stop was the Kropf Family Nursery just outside of Hubbard. Rich and Karen gave us a tour of their operation. While the other adults looked at shrubs and trees, I spent most of my time photographing Antonio (a.k.a. Pepe) and Diego.
Our next stop was at The Oregon Garden in Silverton. Conceived as an answer to Victoria, B.C.'s Butchart Gardens, The Oregon Garden is a pale imitation. There are some nice displays of native plants and wetlands, and there are many birds who call the garden home, but the place lacks some essential spark. Whereas the Butchart Gardens are vibrant and exciting, The Oregon Garden is boring.
During the mid-afternoon, we took a scenic drive south through Stayton and Scio and Lebanon. We admired the scenery and the old houses and barns. We stopped to photograph a covered bridge. In the evening, we spent time in Corvallis with Kris' kindergarten teacher, Joan, and her husband, Marvin.
Joan and Marvin live in a beautiful round house that they designed and built themselves. (Construction took six years during the mid-eighties.) They've filled their home with paintings and sculptures from Germany, Japan, and Turkey. Best of all, it's a home built by book-lovers for book-lovers. There are dozens of built-in bookshelves.
The round house is situated on thirteen acres of wooded land on an island in the middle of the Willamette River. We took a stroll around the property, marveling at an enormous dogwood, avoiding poison oak, trying to identify the birds we saw. ("Is that a junco or a chickadee?")
Today, we're staying close to home. Kris' parents will help us with yard work (possibly our last major yard work until fall). We'll eat lunch at The Bomber (Kris' father is retired Air Force), tour the Pittock Mansion, and maybe see War of the Worlds.
As usual, I've posted additional photos to my Flickr photostream. I have several more photos of Antonio and Diego to post later today, too. Right now, Kris' father wants me to go outside to help him prune a laurel...
On this day at foldedspace.org
2004 — The Spider-Man Cometh I can hardly believe the reviews I'm reading for Spider-Man 2, which opens at midnight tonight.
I have been to that cool house. What I was most impressed with at the time was that the horizontal blinds in all of the windows are between two pieces of glass so they never get dusty. I might have been impressed by that because we had just moved from Hawaii where I have to dust all of the window blinds.