Skagit Tulip Festival

Skagit County has a month long tulip festival. We spent about half of the day walking around the tulip fields. The colors are amazingly vivid, and we were surprised that some varieties are almost three feet tall. The flowers in the gardens were beautifully arranged with contrasting colors, and light and dark spots. I took a whole lot of pictures because the colors were so amazing. On our way home, we stopped at a street fair in Mt Vernon. It was perfect weather to be out and enjoy the day. You may want to click on the pictures in the set and then chose to view them in a larger size to get the full range of color.

Catherine's Art Class

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Originally uploaded by jlwebuser.

Debbie teaches Catherine's class art. This lesson was on Michelangelo. They did their drawings one paper taped to the bottoms of their desk. I don't think they will forget about Michelangelo painting on his back!

Caroline's Dance

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Originally uploaded by jlwebuser.

The 3'rd graders are studying native Americans. Caroline's class represented the Pacific North Western Indians. Each class did a dance, and formed a human totem pole. Caroline was the dancer for her group. She represented the wind. We were quite proud of her.

McWhirter Park Animals

Caroline and I were out in the Novelty Hill area, so we stopped in so she could see the baby goats. They were really cute playing around. Then we went to swing, and there was a field of spring flowers so we took a few pictures.

Redmond Watershed Preserve

The preserve is just down the road from McWhirter farm. It is an 800 acre wild area that has some really well done trails running through it. Caroline and I walked a couple of miles around looking at the streams and ducks. Its a second growth forest - there are still huge stumps standing after being cut 100 years ago. Reviewing the map we found out that this tract of land stretches all the way up to Caroline's school. This is where they release the salmon hatchlings. I'd like to come back on a mountain bike.

Happy Easter!

We had a nice Easter. We ended up standing through the service at Bellevue Pres because it was so packed, but it was nice. The evening before we went to a night time easter egg hunt at the Redmond senior center - the girls had a good time. They did face painting, played games, and hunted for eggs. The entire weekend was nice.

Trip to the Rockery

We went out east of town to Marenako's rockery to look at some landscapings stones. I wanted to see what we are about to put into our yard. I didn't take a picture of the large field of rocks - just the garden area. They have several large fountain and garden areas that were nicely done. Were not doing a fountain right now, but we got some really good ideas of what we might do in our backyard after we have the other work done.

New Lotus Paddle Wheeler

My great grandfather on my mother's side, Arthur Waterhouse, was a big timber operator at the turn of the 20'th century. He had several mills in the Atchaflaya basin and homes in St. Martinville, Bayou Chene and Krotz Springs. He owned this paddle wheeler for some period of time. My parents have a number of old pictures some with men using cross cut saws to fell huge cypress trees. My grandmother is the little girl in the bonette in the center front of the picture. The chain with spikes is a log chain, it was used to connect logs into a raft to float them to the mill. This one was given to my father by a friend, who retrived it from a location very close to where my grandfather had a mill.

McWhirter Park

This park is a few blocks away from our house. Its an old homestead thats been converted into park and petting zoo. Part of it is heavily wooded with hiking trails, and the other part is a petting zoo. It was logged at the turn of the century, and there are a lot of old growth stumps - some have the cutout for the spring board platform. Many of these stumps are still very solid.