Yellowstone Vacation after a tough July

So, ages since our last post. July was as tough a month as June was nice. But we all survived, and the end of the month was a nice vacation in Yellowstone.

The whole lot of us (Janette and me, Angel, Ryan, Joshua, and Roxanne) flew into Idaho Falls on Friday evening and drove to the cabin we rented in Island Park. We only took time to look up and see a skyful of stars before going to bed, because we wanted to start the day early, get some hiking in before meeting up with Nat and Shannon and my folks. Our first big hike was at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which runs alongside (you guessed it) the south rim of the canyon. Nice hike. Here’s some photos, the best of which were Ryan’s.

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We met up with Nat and Shannon and my mom and dad at Old Faithful, where we had lunch just before the geyser went off, and then we hiked up to Observation Point, which overlooks Old Faithful and the geyser basin. After a 15 minute wait, we watched Old Faithful again from 200 feet above. The Aurum Geyser erupted at the same time, putting on a nice show.

We wandered through the Artist’s Paint Pots area, and everyone declared themselves sufficiently blistered, sunburned, and generally hiked-out that we made that the last walk of more than a quarter-mile. Mammoth had elk (lots of them) and the incredible terrace forms of the hot springs. Mammoth was nice and pleasant, with a brief, light thunderstorm and the elk setting a leisurely "we-will-not-be-rushed" tone to the little village, and I think the springs are phenomenal, just made for photographs, though none of mine really turned out well. The nice one, again, is Ryan’s. On the way out, we stopped at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, which was not the tourist trap you might imagine. The kids loved it (Roxanne and Elizabeth got to go into the grizzly bear habitat—while the bears were gone, of course—and hide food for the bears), and us adults found it pretty interesting and informational, as well. Here’s more photos (in this batch of photos, I’m throwing in a buffalo in the middle of the road that might have been from Saturday’s drive…).

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Monday, we had enough driving and enough hiking, and so we did the #1 greatest lazy thing you can do in the outdoors: floated down Henry’s Fork of the Snake River from Big Springs to Mack’s Inn in a big rubber raft. It was three hours of lazy, relaxing, but still engaging fun. No big mammals were seen, but there were numerous blue herons, an osprey (pictured), ducks, and some kind of plover. My right foot and left knee are still pink from the sun.

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(The whole lot of photos, if you're interested, are posted to Shutterfly, here.)

Then we drove back to Idaho Falls and got to spend a few hours at my folks’ place, seeing the vegetable gardens, picking buckets of raspberries, and enjoying a great meal before we left (thanks mom & dad!) It turned out to be a really nice trip. Great to be together with family and to bring families together.

The final wild animal list, kept by Roxanne:

• Buffalo (lots)
  Elk (lots)
  Mule deer
  Coyote
  Eagles
  Herons
  Plovers
  Kildeer
  Bluebirds
  Ducks
  
  

The last wonderful weekend of a wonderful June

The weather was great the whole month long.  We went hiking and I only hurt myself a little. The chickens got officially big.  We did fun stuff like seeing Wilco.  Janette found out how fast Ryan’s new WRX is.  We went to movies, some of them pretty dumb, a couple of them pretty good. And Janette got the new iPhone 3Gs, which has provided hours of entertainment this weekend.  (I’m getting one next month—I gotta have it!)

And we finished it off with Ryan, Angel, Joshua and Roxanne, and Chris coming over for dinner. The menu and the recipes are posted to our cookblog (check it out, the recipes there are wonderfully simple to make).  Chris brought down his new ‘75 El Camino SS 454 (it’s a monster!). 

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And the USA soccer team came that close to winning the Confederations Cup, but got thoroughly outclassed by Brazil in the second half. Did you watch it, Taylor? Oh, well, we enjoy watching FIFA matches, and now have the World Cup to look forward to next year.

Here comes July!

Things Janette learned this weekend, according to Paul

1. Wilco is the best rock & roll band in the world. We went to see them Friday, and had a spot ten feet from center stage. They are the most fun, most talented and rockin'est band around. They were already favorites of ours, but the show confirmed their greatness.
2. The Subaru WRX is a FAST car. Janette drove Ryan's new WRX when we went to pick up Vietnamese food for dinner. She put the pedal to the floor and let it run up toward the redline, and got a look on her face I'd never seen before: half exhilarated, half scared, and totally surprised. I thought she was going to say a bad word or two (which she never does). What she finally said after she let off the pedal at probably 60 mph was "Holy COW!"
3. You can still laugh at an extremely stupid movie. We saw Year One. We definitely do NOT recommend it, but we have to admit we laughed plenty. A lot of good comedic acting in the middle of a terrible, ill-conceived movie.

Best Game of Sorry Ever

Roxanne and Joshua spent the day with us last Friday and we decided to play a game of Sorry. Things were going along the way they normally do – Roxanne and I teamed up against Paul; Paul pouted because he’s soooo competitive; Joshua got stuck in Start for a gazillion turns.

Then it got really good. We all had three of our pieces in home and were fighting to get the last one in. Finally, we had a winner! Congratulations, Roxanne!!

Cookblog release party! and Chickens on the loose!

Ok, it’s slightly less exciting on both counts, but a flashy headline draws you in, doesn’t it?

First, the news: We’re opening the door on the Cookblog. (http://landm-cookblog.blogspot.com/) There’s around 50 recipes in there now, including some provided by Nat & Shannon and Angel. We’ll be posting some other requested recipes soon, for example, the best quiche recipe in the world, with three variations (one of which was requested by Shannon), and the grilled clams that made a seafood lover out of Elizabeth.

Our focus is on recipes that we’ve prepared for you at meals at our house, visits to Idaho, etc. In fact, the genesis of the idea was from a visit to Idaho a few years back, when I think Lauren and my mom and Shannon were talking about compiling family recipes into a family cookbook. Janette and I have always intended to keep good records of what we make when we prepare special meals for quests (and that never got too far, either).

At any rate, I think the on-line blog format is the perfect way to accomplish both ends. And our goal is for it to be useable and useful. While our library of cookbooks will still be a treasured resource for new ideas and for recipes we’ve never made, it will probably (hopefully) eliminate the disorganized stack of pages torn from magazines or printed from epicurious.com. It might also be easier to click back and forth between recipes in the cookblog (or have them open in different windows simultaneously) than to have a few cookbooks strewn across the counter.

Second, the chicken update: The chickens are officially teenagers. They eat whatever they want (not leaving anything behind for anyone else) and they might run off when you aren’t watching. What do they like to eat? Marigolds. Gazania. Pepper plants (just the leaves, not the peppers). They eat them all. Somehow the pepper plants survived and are growing back their leaves (don’t tell the chickens). The marigolds and gazania are struggling a little more.

Where do they run off to? Well, Saturday morning I got up early (before 7) and went outside to check on the chickens. Eerie quiet. They’re nowhere to be found. I walked down the long, empty path along the side of the house to the gate. We’ve never seen them exploring down there, because there’s absolutely nothing of interest for them, but there are indications (i.e., chicken poop) that they may have gone that way. But there are no chickens out front, no chickens down the street. Heading back inside through the front door, I hear some quiet cheeps in the corner of the courtyard. They were hiding in the corner behind a bush. Recognizing that it’s me, they come out and resume scratching. This first video is them in the courtyard.

Clever chickens. They hopped over the obstacles we’d put at the bottom of the gate to the backyard and escaped. Fortunately, they wandered back into the enclosed courtyard rather than down the street (or hanging out in the front yard). I watched them in the courtyard for awhile, figuring that no matter what route we take herding them back to the backyard was not going to take more than one cowboy, er, chickenboy. Janette got up after not too long, and we decided the shortest route to the backyard was through the house. Halfway through, I figured I should record it for posterity. Of course, it’s hard to be a filmmaker and chicken herder at the same time… The clip is in the Chicken Report at the top left of the page.

At any rate, there’s now “poultry fencing” on the gate between the front yard and back yard, so there shall be no further chicken adventuring.

But, as they get more adventuresome, they’re also getting friendlier. They seem to like Janette better than me, they’ll come running to see her (not so much me). But they’ll eat from any hand that’s got food. And that’s our week six chicken update: eating out of our hands.

One more note: I’m excited about the red-hot poker (Kniphofia uvaria) that’s sent up it’s blooms last week and is at peak right now. Ours are “Lola”, which are supposed to be the biggest variety. We have three plants out back and two in front. The three out back, in the rich soil of one of the planting beds, are doing great. The leaves are almost three feet high. Two of those three plants sent up their blooms (two each). The ones in the front landscape seem healthy enough, but their leaves are only 18 inches high, and no blooms this year. Of course, I was expecting these plants to take a couple years to establish themselves before blooming, so this is a treat. I wish we had more, but I bought these from a greenhouse that’s gone out of business, and I’ve never seen them in any other nurseries…

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Alright, I get it, I'm not Brett Favre...!

So I went back to work today on crutches and enjoyed an entire day of the men in my office (right up to the General Manager, by the way) telling me I was no longer a young man.  True enough, and the thought had, indeed, crossed my mind independently...  

But alright already! I'm grudgingly willing to acknowledge that just because Brett Favre is older than me doesn't mean I'm young ( ... and it's true, he's been my hero for exactly that reason).  

On the other hand, my foot is healing fast enough that my armpits hurt more from the crutches than my foot hurts from its injury.  

You know what?... nevermind! Put me in, Coach, I'm ready to play!

An almost perfect day of hiking…

The weather we’ve had has been unprecedented for June in Las Vegas.  Sunshine, a few high scattered clouds.  As perfect as it gets.  Unbelievable!  Reasonable!  Not hot!  It’s rare for there to be days this good in April.

So Sunday morning we went hiking at Red Rock in the 71° not-heat. We did the Icebox Canyon trail.

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It was a great hike. The cholla cactus were blooming, the redbuds have their leaves, there were butterflies flying, songbirds singing, and some kind of thrush or swift, uh, thrushing and swifting.  There were a few native penstemons with a few blooms—scarlet bugler (Penstemon centranthifolius), I’m guessing—but most of them had ripe, dry seeds, which we collected for our garden.

So then the “almost perfect” limitation, the asterisk on the day, comes in. The photo in the center is me on a rock Janette wanted me to climb.  I climbed it, and then jumped back down on the backside, a drop of four feet of so.  I didn’t look like that much… At any rate, I found out that either (a) it was too far, or (b) I’m now too old.  I came down a little funny, a little painfully. It seemed ok, and I hiked the two miles back out with only minor trouble.  It only hurt if I stepped on it a certain way.

Long story short, after the hike was over and I had a couple sedentary hours it began to throb, and I could no longer put any weight on it at all. The x-rays didn’t show anything broken. Just a bad sprain.  I’m guessing I didn’t break any of those little pebbles that made up our footbones, I just scrambled them up pretty good.  So now my armpits hurt from the crutches, and I'm sitting in the recliner with my foot on a stack of pillows.

I wish I could remember if this was the same foot I broke while skateboarding as a kid and then, two or three weeks later at camp, cut the cast off well before my “sentence” was up and the day after ran on it through the woods at a full sprint, being chased by a bear (or, ok… running in fear after having seen a bear that never really gave chase) … ? Nah…

It was a beautiful day for a hike.

Call for recipe requests and submissions

We stared a new blog today. We've often talked with family about collecting family recipes, and Janette and I have long lamented that we haven't kept better records of meals we've prepared and particular recipes that have been kitchen standbys.  This blog will be our solution.  

We're adding our favorite, frequently made recipes, and we're going to try to post all the recipes we use when we have some cooking event, like visits to Idaho or our anniversary dinner last month.

Hopefully it will be easy for us to keep up, easy for us to use, and enjoyable and useful to you as well.

We'll unveil it in a little while, after there's a small library there.  In the meantime, please please please send us meals you remember and would like recipes from.  We'll take requests. And please send recipes!  Send recipes!

Oh, and a chicken update, too.  They're bigger, wandering the yard more adventurously, and more difficult to get a movie of them all together.  You can see from the new movie that they are more mobile and independent.  They're like a gang of young teenagers.

Joshua Turns 14 -- OMG!

I swear it was just the other day that I was holding Joshua as a one-week old baby and realizing that he was the most beautiful baby boy ever born. Well, I don't know how it happened, but he just turned 14 -- he's still beautiful, but a LOT bigger.

We got him an electric guitar so he won't have to play the broom anymore. It'll also give him something new and exciting to do over the summer. He's very musically inclined and I'm looking forward to hearing him play real soon.

Joshua asked his mom for tickets to LOVE - the Beatles-based Cirque du Soleil show at the Mirage - and they took us along. The music was great, the acrobats were phenomenal, and we had a really good time. Happy Birthday, Joshua!

End-of-Spring Blooms and Two-Week Chicken Update

Some of the photos taken last weekend when Mike and Lauren & family were here showed the yellow blooms on the palo verde.  I thought I'd update the garden photos here, and, while I'm at it, show the growth of the chickens.  If I don't catch them weekly, we'll miss it, they're growing so fast.

Through the arch of the courtyard entryway, you can see the blossoms on the palo verde so thick their actually weighing the branches down.  They're thicker this year than the previous two springtimes.  At the foot of the tree are the pink mexican primrose, and the already fallen palo verde blooms edge the walk. The trumpet vine on the left is beginning to flower. The color is most striking from inside, looking out the windows, but I couldn't get a photo that did it justice.

So, below is the back yard, taken from almost the same spot as the photo at the bottom of the page.  Apart from the copious yellow blooms on the palo verde, you can see that the tree itself has grown about a foot in two months.  The early blooming penstemons faded quicker than previous years, and they're mostly gone, except for the one species I can't remember (not firecracker, Parry's, or suberb...) that's just started blooming now.  

The Indian blanket flower (gallardia) has really come on, and the mexican hat has grown almost three feet tall and has lots of "hats."  The mesquite in the corner, though you can't see it, has begun its springtime growth spurt, and has added a foot or two to its limbs.  The lantana is beginning to

 take off, too.

We've picked some more tomatos, our first of the "Better Boy" variety and Romas.  There's blackberries getting black and strawberries getting, er, red out there.  In fact, we picked the first strawberries just tonight.  Ok, though these first ones weren't grocer's quality.

Finally, for the grandkids and nieces and nephews, here's the chicken update.  They've doubled again in size. The best photo to give scale is the one we took Saturday with Roxanne, who was holding El Pollo Loco last weekend in the last post, and who holding her again in this new photo.  That's the same chicken!  A week ago it was a perfect fit in her two cupped palms, and now El Pollo Loco is a relative giant.  You know, that might've been KFC, it's tough to tell from that angle. I think the chicken update this week will be a movie.  They're doing chicken things: scratching, drinking water, eating their feed and the little bugs they like to scratch for.

That's all the news there is (if you call it news).  It's gettin' hot. From now until fall it will be 100 degrees.  Hope it's not that hot where you are.

The Oklahoma Meachams Visit Vegas!

We had a great long weekend with Mike and Lauren and Noah and Will visiting.  They stayed at the Aliante Hotel, just on the other side of the highway from us.  They loved it (hint, hint, for you who haven't visited yet...).  Lauren took this great photo of the boys sleeping poolside at the hotel.  Now that's a Vegas vacation.  They also did awake things like visit the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay.

Then they stayed with us.  They loved that, too (hint, hint, again, for Joshua, Taylor & Natalie, Mom & Dad, in case my first hint wasn't clear enough).  Roxanne and Joshua were staying with us, too, so it was a full house and a lot of fun. We made dinner a couple nights, featuring risotto, a salad with our first attempt to make pan fried goat-cheese cakes, halibut, leek and potato cakes, steaks, and a jasmine custard made with jasmine flowers Roxanne and I picked ourselves from the backyard.

The kids loved the chicks. It really was nice timing for them (the chickens) to arrive early, just in time for them (Noah and Will).  Here's little Will with El Pollo Loco, who he gave nice little kisses to.  Will is a reserved little boy, who was very tired and not feeling well from his travels, and his only smiles for us in the first couple days were actually for the chickens.  He was really pretty excited about them. 

And here's Noah with KFC.  Noah liked to hold the chickens, and he was actually pretty good and still pretty gentle in catching them.  He made sure they all got attention and good holding time.  Speaking of KFC, we've been asked a few times why we would name a pet chicken "KFC."  The answer, which we give in a whisper so no chickens overhear, is so she doesn't find out she's a chicken.  You can recognize KFC by her bandit's mask around her eyes.  You can recognize Noah by his supreme cuteness.

That's Roxanne with El Pollo Loco, who, despite her initial dominance of the pecking order and crazy behavior as a hatchling is now the smallest and meekest of the two-week old chicks.  But she's still the smartest, being the first to figure out new environments and follow her strong chicken instincts in scratching, enjoying dust baths, and other such chicken things.  You can recognize El Pollo Loco from her pretty brown head and back.  Roxanne is easily recognized by her big beautiful smile and intense niceness.  She was great entertaining Noah, and they had a lot of fun at the park around the corner.

Finally, that was Joshua with Chick-Fil-A.  Chick-Fil-A is the easiest to recognize: she's the blonde one (and she's Roxanne's favorite).  Joshua, likewise, is easy to distinguish.  He's the 13-year-old who's almost as tall as me and always looks either sleepy (in the morning) or hungry (the rest of the time).  

There were LOTS of great photos from hiking at Red Rock and such, and I couldn't pick from them to post here.  I set up a shutterfly site so you can download ones you want (I think there's some gems there for you, Mike and Lauren, though my favorite is yours at the pool that I stole for the blog).  Here's a link to our shutterfly site. Here's a link to Lauren's shutterfly site, for good measure.  There's some great photos there.

Postscripts

The chickens grow FAST. Even if they would sit nice and still like they did for the first pictures we took, there's no way all three would fit in my hands.  They have more than doubled in size.  For the kids out there, we'll be posting a chicken update regularly to show their development.

Brotherly coincidence

Michael and Lauren and their little boys left this morning.  We'll post details and photos later.  In the meantime, one bit of intriguing information we learned:  Mike and I both have songs from Miles Davis Kind of Blue as our cellphone ringtones.  He has "Freddy Freeloader" and I have "So What." 

How many of you have Miles Davis ringtones?  I'm guessing, most of the Meacham boys . . .

Big Surprise! Little Chicks!

They're here! They weren't scheduled to arrive until the end of the month, but they're here today!

I had a 9:00am meeting today and turned my phone on silent. After the meeting, I found that the Post Office had left a message saying the chicks were waiting to be picked up - 2 weeks early! I made a mad dash to the Feed Store and picked up supplies then headed off to pick them up. They were chirping all the way home and I couldn't wait to get them out of the box. I was so excited to find that they were each colored differently. It should be pretty easy to tell them apart.

They're living in the small guest bathroom for now and will probably need to stay indoors for the next 3-4 weeks. They need temperatures of around 90-95 degrees so we've set up a heat lamp over the box they're living in. We'll all probably be glad when they can move into the casita, and it should be nice and warm outside a month from now. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to cuddling up to these little fluff balls.

The names?  It's the poll's choice and ours, too.  The dark brown one (who seems to be the one at the top of the pecking order) will go by the name El Pollo Loco.  The blonde one will be Chick-Fil-A.  And the mottled one is KFC.  That's clockwise from the dark little head in the top of the photo below.

7th Anniversary Celebration

April 26, 2009 - Seven Years

It's gone by so fast! Seven fantastic years with so many great experiences. And woven through all those good times are memories of getting together with family and friends for great meals. We decided the best way to celebrate our anniversary would be to cook for the people we love. We were inspired by our trip to Taos and tried our best to recreate the flavors we enjoyed there.

We had such a great time, and everyone was so generous it was almost embarrassing! Paul got a fantastic Mont Blanc pen from Alex and Gloria and he's been using it every day since. He says it writes beautifully. And my jewelry!! I had something new and beautiful to wear at work every day the following week.

Chris and Lena gave us an electronic picture frame that we loaded pictures into the next day. It's such a nice way to display pictures -- so much better than albums of prints. And speaking of pictures, Ryan had two pictures he's taken recently printed on canvas. One is of the ocean at Big Sur (black and white) and the other is a picture of Red Rock with colors so vibrant it looks like a lava flow down the mountain. We took them the next day to have the canvas stretched over frames.

And how about those chickens: bowls with chickens, a wooden puppet-type rooster (sitting on our television now), fluffy little chicks (on the mantle), a chicken made from grape vines (for Paul), rooster candle holders--there would be more, but Joshua told his mom that she could buy NO MORE CHICKENS.

We can't thank you all enough for being part of our lives. We are very grateful to have you.

THE DINNER
We decided to remember the dinner and our guests by photographing groups of people with each course.

Alex and Gloria
Appetizer: Blue Corn Tortillas served with chipotle honey butter, black beans, grilled corn, avocado, pico de gallo, and cotija cheese

We decided to try to make the tortillas we ordered at Grahams Restaurant in Taos. Theirs were definitely better, but Paul's chipotle honey butter was just as good. We served Perrier-Jouet champagne to start.

Chris and Lena

Soup Course: Patricia Quintana's Yucatan Lime and Chicken Soup

It's funny that we chose Chris and Lena for the soup course -- Chris is such a MEAT guy!

Freshly roasted tomatoes were used to make the base of this simple chicken soup. Garnished with cilantro from our garden (which now has a very nice flavor), it had a clean, fresh taste, with some nice richness at the same time. http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/yucatan-lime-and-chicken-soup


Angel and Ryan

Third Course: Green chili and corn risotto served with jicama-orange salad

Risotto is always one of Paul's favorites so we include it in many of our dinners. This one had the authentic flavors of New Mexico. The green chilies and pepper-jack cheese added some nice spice. The raw salad was a nice compliment to the creamy risotto.

Paul and Janette

Main Course: Pork Tenderloin with roasted tomatillo and mushroom sauce

We've made the pork before, but this was the best we've ever done. It was tender and moist and the flavors of the rub were perfect. The roasted tomatillo and mushroom sauce, with a serious kick from chipotle chiles, was HOT but really yummy.

The Kids - Joshua, Roxanne, Cierra, Nataly, and Alex

Dessert: Tres Leches Cake, Fresh Berry Crisp, Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream with Hazelnut Pralines (Yum)

Everyone loves the Tres Leches Cake--especially Lena! It's light and creamy with loads of wonderful fruit throughout. But dessert didn't stop there. We started making a fresh berry crisp years ago and it's always been one of Angel's favorites. Topped with the homemade ice cream, it was so good. Gloria said the ice cream was the best she's ever had. Of course, that was after she'd had some wine, but we'll take the compliment anyway. It's about as rich as it gets (made with seven egg yolks and lots of cream).

The Romantic Finale

Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

Roxanne wanted to make chocolate-covered strawberries for the party. Angel looked high and low for the prettiest strawberries and she said everyone helped with the dipping. They were delicious with the dark chocolate over the juicy berries. Paul ate the leftovers the next day.

It was a great time and we're looking forward to our next get-together. Chris and Lena's anniversary is in September . . .

And looking forward to Mike and Lauren coming this week (we're working up another menu right now).

Be sure to cast your vote on names for the chickens!

A late wintertime: Taos and Santa Fe Vacation

Janette had a work meeting in Taos, so after her work was done we made a vacation of it. I enjoyed meeting her boss and coworkers, and New Mexico was great. Everywhere we ate the food was fantastic.

The event, however, was the weather. We were excited the first morning when wet snow clung to the trees. It was beautiful. Then the second morning brought six inches with a light snowfall continuing through the day. It meant that we couldn't do the hikes we planned; we did a little more touring in the car and visiting shops and restaurants.

And more restaurants. Taos is loaded with great restaurants. Greatest plates?

• We had bacon ice cream—yes! bacon!—at Joseph's Table. (To be precise, I had bacon ice cream; Janette tasted it and let me have the rest. . . she's so generous with me.)
• We had a great green chile posole at Graham's Grill (and the most simple and wonderful tortillas, too).
• Everything was good at Damon's.

We went up the mountain to Taos Ski Valley (the photo above is at the river along the way), and out to the Rio Grande Gorge. When she took this photo at the gorge, Janette kept telling me "just one more step back and one more step to the left..."

The last night in Taos, Janette stubbed her toe bad enough to break it, but she refused to let it stop her from walking all over Sante Fe. Our tour of Santa Fe included the oldest church in the United States (c. 1610) the oldest house in the United States* (c. 1646) conveniently located across the street from the oldest church), a museum or two, at least three rug dealers, and two great restaurants: La Casa Sena, and the Coyote Cafe. Ice cream highlight at the Coyote Cafe, where we had the seven (small) scoops that made up their sampler? Janette might tell you otherwise, but the basil ice cream was the best. The photo here is Janette next to the very very old adobe bricks of the oldest house.

Best souvenirs:

• The handmade, wood-fired pottery tangine from Logan Wannamaker in Taos.
• The three antique prints from Rev. F.O. Morris's Nests and Eggs (1866) that we found in a great antique maps and prints shop in Taos.

We also had a nice half-day in Albuquerque, where Janette showed me the parts of town she's gotten familiar with on her trips for work. I liked it quite a lot, actually.

Nice to get home, though.

*Note: i.e., oldest house built by a European, and probably in third place in that category, too.

Chicken Casita

I am so excited! We have been talking about getting chickens for so long and we've finally done it.

Two big boxes arrived during the week and Paul and I spent Saturday morning putting together the chicken casita (it's too cute to be called a coop). It is really well made and was easy to assemble. It has a slide-out drawer under the perches so cleaning will be a breeze. The nest box has a lift-up lid that makes for easy egg collecting.

Now all we need are the chickens. We've ordered the breed called "Easter Eggers" and they lay blue and green eggs -- and sometimes even pink. We're getting 3 of them and Paul has picked names: Kitty, Doggy, and Fishy. They're scheduled to arrive May 26th as one-day-old chicks. I'll take a couple days off work and Roxanne said she would spend the night with me and help take care of them when they first arrive. We're going to have a great time!