Love These

New snack obsession:





1 cup creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/3 cup almond meal
1/2 cup honey or agave

optional: unsweetened cocoa to roll it in.

Mix all the ingredients together as best you can in a bowl then roll out into small balls. Then roll in unsweetened cocoa, if wanted. Eat right away, or if you can wait, refrigerate them for an hour or so, they are better that way.



{inspired by this recipe}

Earth Day

The Man Born to Farming
The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?
~ Wendell Berry

We're trying to preserver at this garden growing thing... I had some bad luck with our garden plot in front of our house, it gets too much shade. I was given some advice, "just keep trying". So, I am. We are looking for shade loving plants to put in the plot and in the meantime I am trying more herbs and potted plants.

The snap peas are doing really well, and the spinach. I also have some rosemary, basil, thyme, cilantro, parsley, sage, and oregano growing. The bush bean and chilies seem to be doing well. So, we push on. I want to be a good gardener, I want a green thumb. You live, you learn. You try, you learn. You keep trying, you get better.

A Little More Wedding

A little more of Jen & Charles' wedding...

Weddings and such

I have been silent. There has been a lot going on, some good, some bad. Sometimes the bad weighs so heavy that I feel strange posting and pretending everything is good, so I choose silence. The bad, or sad, is that my aunt is in the hospital with 3 malignant brain tumors - it was very sudden. That sort of news is shocking, deafening, silencing. Right now she is recovering from the brain surgery and we are hopeful - awaiting a miracle.

On the happy, lighter side some close friends, Jen & Charles, were married on April 10th. It was such a beautiful, simple, intimate wedding. I was luckily enough to photographer their big day. Here are some shots, I will likely post more later:

Aren't they a GOOD LOOKING couple!

Another weekend in the desert

This last weekend we camped at Slab City and worked with Leonard Knight at Salvation Mountain. To tell you the truth, I wasn't looking forward to this trip. It was our 3rd time there in 2 months, and I expected it to be HOT. But the weekend exceeded my expectations. Not only were we with some great people, but Slab City is great. We met so many wonderful people, we got to help out Leonard with the mountain, we got to go to the Saturday night talent show at the Range, which.was.amazing. Our friends, Jubilee Singers, played at the Range, some people joined them on stage, others danced up front. It was straight out of a dream. It made me so happy to be there.

On top of that we finally got to see the Mud Pots. We unsuccessfully tried to go our first trip but got lost then gave up. It was worth the search, it is so neat. There are several areas of boiling mud, slurping and bubbling up. We stayed for a while just to watch the mud pop.

The guys got to spend a lot of time with Leonard. They even got to go to the hot springs with him, which I am VERY jealous of. That is one thing that I need to do next time we go.

Overall it was an enjoyable weekend - refreshing and tiring, exhausting and dirty, but fun and exciting. There's talk of another trip... even in the extreme heat. We'll see about that...

Photos:
1)The Range 2) The Chain Gang chipping away at the adobe
3) A self portrait inside Salvation Mountain 4) buckets of paint at SM
5) the mud pots salt bed 6) mud pots
7) The floor at the mud pots 8) j&a at the mud pots