Morton Larson | A Dog Named Christmas

Morton Larson | A Dog Named Christmas

Posted using ShareThis

new digs.

here's a few pics of my new house... maybe later i'll add some pictures of the outside...

anyway... i'm in the upstairs. it's an attic room, well, actually two adjacent rooms. there's a stairwell that goes up into a smaller outer room that i have set up with my desk and school stuff... plus some toys and morton's food and stuff. right now there are some other projects happening so it looks pretty cluttered with small boxes...

then my bedroom is a space where i have my bed, novels, cd's, plus i put a futon/couch up there to watch tv. yes, i bought a tv. hard not to when i have direct TV included in my rent! since the internet here is slow and shotty i decided to make the investment in a tv.

and i hung christmas lights up, which is a fun touch when i'm hanging out. it makes it feel cozy, well, even more cozy. the whole area is pretty cozy to start with--knotty pine paneling throughout and angled ceilings.

i love it! it's a great neighborhood and morton and i enjoy walking down new streets and venturing into new coffee shops, restaurants and stores nearby.

acres.

i had some time a couple weeks ago, so i decided to do something fun for morton that was relatively close to home. i headed east of the city on I-84 to the sandy river delta, where there's a huge off-leash dog area... thousands of acres of woods and trails along the sandy river. morton got to run through the weeds and fields, bathe in the mud-slogged ponds along the trail, and of course, sniff some other dog butts.


while he had fun, i also got a few cool nature photos...






a super great spot when you have a long afternoon to fill...

substitute.

on halloween i stood at the door as the kids were coming to school and told them all that teacher chrissy was sick that day and that "old teacher chrissy" was subbing for the day.

some kids looked at me quizzically, and then gave me a smile. others just looked at my blankly. and a couple could never quite wrap their mind around it the whole day.

i also didn't help them out by admitting that i WAS in fact teacher chrissy. i just kept claiming to be someone else, someone very old and slow. in the middle of the day, during the time when most of the children were busy playing their ghost games & having lego star ship fights, one little girl just continued to probe the subject of who i was: "BUT TEACHER CHRISSY, WHY ARE YOU LYING? WHY WON'T YOU JUST TELL ME THE TRUTH?"

i wrecker her, i'm pretty sure.

oh well.
i pretended not to know anything about the preschool, or anything about the schedule. i claimed i did not know how to play the guitar for the morning songs so i sang "say say oh playmate" instead. i rolled my walker around the whole day... and ended the day by walking everyone up to the church office to recite halloween poetry and get candy.

old teacher chrissy ain't so bad after all.

the elements.

things to do with a three year old when dirt, water, rocks & trees are available:
jump
splash
hide
fish
cook
ring up groceries
get stuck
fall down
run
roll
hold
smell

happy birthday morton!

morton.
tomorrow you will celebrate your 9th birthday.
you started eating cat poop the day i brought you home.
you have never stopped.
it grosses me out,
and it can't be good for you.
but it's been supplementing your diet for nine years now,
and you're still around
running through the forests and barking at dogs at the dog park.

so morton, for your ninth birthday,
i will let go of dragging you away from your fine delicacies.

enjoy little buddy.
and happy birthday.
you are my greatest friend.
love,
chrissy

juice of the gods, part III

this is lee & kathy... they own tuckwilla vinyards just outside of dundee, OR... and this was our 3rd annual grape harvest/wine making extravaganza! (also check out 2007... and 2008) three years... weird. that means i've been here for 3 grape harvests, and that probably means i'm settling into portland.

which i am.

okay, enough nostalgia. let's talk grapes!

is a grape a berry??? the proverbial question.
it is, in fact, a TRUE berry. even more a berry than a strawberry, believe it or not.
well, when we arrived, lee & kathy were super busy gathering their own grapes and were sorting out ones with dry rot in them, so we jumped in and helped them get through their own grape harvest before tackling our own. it's the least we can do, since the grapes are simply given to us each year... mostly in return for a little help, some good company and joe's microbrew.
and then it was off to our own rows of grapes.
lots of buckets involved.

the cool part of this year was seeing how into the harvest the kids were... in all the previous years, they've basically just been wildly running up and down the rows of grapes like banchees. but this year, they were so into being part of the harvest. kaspar asked me for my pruning tool about 2 minutes into it all and i never got it back. eliana worked with anna, and kaspar worked with me... even little 3 year old birch did some cutting of grapes with his dad.

they did great! (with some very intense supervision and reminders of where to hold grapes so as not to clip fingers and hands), but they were very grown up and focused. it was very, very cute.




this year we decided to try a new method of crushing the grapes.

ridley.

okay, it didn't really work so well. but ridley thought he was pretty hott stuff in that big bucket, and the other kids were very sad to find out only babies get to play in the bucket.

after harvesting, there was time to just hang out and chat... or pretend to drive the tractor.
(i wish i had a sound clip to go with kaspar's driving motions... priceless.)
or be monsters for the camera.
(i love this picture.)
or play with sticks...

pose for pictures with the family...
here's joe & missy (and little ridley)
tim & anna...
and birch crackin' himself up over something. i can't remember what it was now.
lee had a ton of table grapes that were ripe too, so we got to pick a bunch of them as well. i actually took a whole shopping bag of them to the preschool and we ate them both days this week for snack! the kids loved that they were eating the grapes teacher chrissy picked the day before! (plus, local, fresh, and organic... our eco-school's dream)

okay, after a couple hours of goofing around, making soup on the cook stove, tapping joe's keg of beer, and playing bus stop in the red wagon, it was time to do the rest of the work...

the stemmer-crusher actually gets the job done much faster than ridley. sorry little guy!




we ended up with about 35-40 gallons of wine again this year...
we haven't bottled last year's yet, it will probably happen soon because we need all the glassware for this year's batch once it's done fermenting in the buckets.

here's missy, anna & acacai ("the girl's picture", acacia called it)
and i loved that tim & kaspar had the exact same cuffed-jeans look.
yay for the harvest!
to celebrate... one of joe's microbrews...
happy harvest season!