The Heathen Housewife

I’ve been stockpiling all kinds of real-life blogfodder over the past few weeks, but have been so obsessed with knitting (specifically the damned Spiral Sweater) that when it comes down to spending my evening writing a blog post about all the cool stuff we’ve been doing this summer.

We have, in fact, been doing lots of cool stuff this summer, the girls and I especially. We are all sporting tans despite our regular use of sunscreen. We have been outside all the time, we have been swimming and running around the yard and doing some other stuff, some of which I’m going to show you now, not in any particular order.

The Friday before the Fourth, we all slept in till 9:00. The girls and I came downstairs for breakfast while Joe slept in a bit for his holiday day off. We knew that our diseased trees were coming down, but we didn’t know *when* they would be coming down. But surprise, surprise, there was a crew of guys out in our driveway with a couple of giant trucks and a bunch of chain saws.

I, of course, went running back upstairs to put a bra and some daytime clothes on (right after I snapped the first couple pictures). As I was getting dressed, I hollered in to Joe that the tree guys were here, but got no response from him. The girls and I watched the show out our kitchen window while we ate breakfast…and dudes! That guy is up in a cherry picker, wielding a chain saw like it is no big deal. He was dropping branch after giant branch with giant earth-shaking thuds.

After we ate, the girls and I joined our neighbors on their hill directly across the street to watch the show.

Here’s the lovely neighbors and the kids all lined up like a row in a movie theater. The other bestest neighbors showed up a bit after that, and they all rolled their eyes at me for taking their as-is pictures for the blog. Remember, this is early in the morning of a holiday. We’re laid-back people and we’ve all just rolled out of bed. I promise you, these people all look better than I did that day.

Here’s the giant truck that hauled the tree bits away. It took two loads. Also, it blocked our view part of the time, which was a bit of a buzz-kill, and made me wonder how much the tree guys really loved having a peanut gallery watching and commenting from across the street.

At one point this guy was up *in* the tree by our garage, which struck me as a little hilarious in this very depressing scene. And by the way, I am incredibly sad about losing our trees, which turned out after ring-counting to be about 50 years old. It completely changes the way we can play in and use our yard, the way we see the whole landscape of our street, and the light and temperature of our house. Someone commented that we should have tried harder to save our trees. There is an anti-fungal treatment that can be used on elm trees to prevent disease, but it only works if you use it before any signs of disease present themselves. We got a bid for the treatments the year after we moved into the house, but didn’t get around do having it done, and then the next year (last summer) the first tree started withering and dropping leaves. Lesson to everyone out there – if you have old elms, get the treatment.

And finally for this segment, if you are interested in watching the trees come down, plus listening to all the commentary amongst our group as it happened, I have a little YouTube video for you. The teenage son of the other neighbor was on his way out of the house and coming over, which is why you hear his mom yelling at him to hurry up.

Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you the funniest part. Joe slept through most of the noise, and when he came down and acted surprised that our trees were being cut down I asked him “Didn’t you hear the chain saws?” and he said “No, I thought that was you grinding coffee.” Ha!

Okay, and that was a long-ish post right there, but if you’ve been reading here for any time at all, you know that I tend to go a little crazy when it’s time for a photo-dump.

Joe had his annual weekend away with his college friends this last weekend, so the girls had what I billed as and “All-Girl Party Weekend” – basically my attempt to turn what could have been a weekend of oh-my-gods-I’m-doing-this-on-my-own and constant missing of the daddy into an especially fun time for us at home. Mostly, it involved me not cooking at all and all of us eating way too much junk food. Also, we went to the Como Zoo.

We saw a ton of animals, but I’ve got a few highlights for you. We liked the orangutans. I think this was an adult male, and he was just kind of hangin’ out, watching the people.

And then along comes a baby orangutan! Squee! It was climbing all over the place, and then it came down to pester the old guy on the ground.

The old guy wasn’t much fun, so the baby started climbing back up – and I loved how the old guy held onto the rope for the baby to help steady it as he climbed back up to see his mama, who was laying around on a platform up above.

Sophie really liked the giraffes, and we stood there enjoying them for a bit…

And a kind stranger took our picture together at this little photo-op spot.

And we saw a big lazy tiger through some glass…

And then we found another building where this little baby giraffe was hanging out all by itself. It was soooooo cute!

Our last stop of the day was the butterfly house, which the girls absolutely loved. My girls love butterflies. The butterfly house at the State Fair is always a huge highlight, but this free attraction was ten times better. Much less crowded, prettier flowers, more bugs.

Earlier in the day, the girls kept saying “Let’s go find more animals!” over and over, even right as we arrived at the cage of an animal doing interesting animal things. Not here.

At the State Fair butterfly house, you often see people sort of collecting butterflies to sit on their hands and clothing. At the zoo, the staff made it clear that it was not cool to try to get the butterflies to land on you, and I hammered the message home to my girls. They were very well-behaved and followed the rules despite their desperate desire to hold a butterfly. Luckily, they each had at least one butterfly land on them by pure accident while we were there. Maybe it was their flowery dresses.

Oh, and here are a few shots from our trip to Edina’s 4th of July parade. It was raining when we set out for the event, but the rain stopped and it turned into a fine day.

Some of my favorite entries from previous years were there, like the Icelandic ponies.

And the trick horseriders dressed like characters from the wild west…

And even the nerdy super-heroes….

I’m glad we’ve made this a holiday tradition, and the girls had a great time collecting candy. I think I’ve already mentioned this, but now you’ve got the visuals to go with it.

Alright, this is the last event for tonight, promise. Last night was the grand opening of a new park near our house. We live just a few blocks away from a greenway bike trail that runs along a highway and into downtown Minneapolis, then onward right to the Mississippi River and all over the place in the Metro. Our city, St. Louis Park, recently restored an old beehive-shaped fire pit that sat by the side of an old road called Lilac Way in the 1930s, back when it was a country road lined with hundreds of lilac bushes and before it became a busy metropolitan highway (100). People used to drive out to the country to see the lilacs, and stop for roadside picnic barbecues at several parks with these barbecue pits and matching limestone tables and benches. Well, the city moved the last remaining intact barbecue away from the busy highway and to a park adjacent to the greenway where modern-day bicyclists and pedestrians can enjoy it all once more.

They had the grand opening last night, and lots of people walked and pedaled over for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. See all the bikes lined up?

Here’s our Mayor Jeff Jacobs giving a speech before the ribbon cutting. They even had a pair of giant scissors for the event.

Julie and Sophie stood on one of the restored benches for a better view…

And after the ribbon was cut, we went up and took a closer look.

This park is right next to the NordicWare plant, and the company donated a couple of cakes made with their beehive molded cake pan for the even – you can see the NordicWare smokestack in the background. I totally need to make it over to their outlet store one of these days.

The event included free hot dogs, chips, soda, and ice cream sandwiches, plus I packed along some berries and carrot sticks to help ameliorate the junk food factor – we were still coming off the all-girl party weekend, after all.

All in all, it was a lovely evening, we were sitting with our lovely neighbors, of whom I got a great picture, but decided to leave out of the blog because really I know they’d rather keep it to themselves. Hey, Mrs. 5 – I’ve got a picture I need to print out or e-mail to you! This kind of thing makes me love living where I live and being part of this community.

Whew! Now you’ve seen a few of the non-knitting highlights of our summer so far. Next up, I have an update on some spinning I’ve snuck in over the last month, as well as some pictures of the new Kauni spiral sweater. I promise, I’ll get started on a post detailing the sleeve instructions for the sweater knit-along and hopefully get it up by the end of this week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 2:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.