Summer Travels

Some of my summer travels included a trip with my sister to South Carolina to see our brother and sister-in-law and to Florida to attend our niece’s wedding.  Great trip all around.  Such fun being with my siblings and the wedding was, of course, beautiful!  Here is a shot of my handsome brother and my lovely niece, Amie.

DON’T Move the Soap!

Oh my!  Last week’s soapmaking adventure included two batches.  The first was Tall Trees, a pot-swirled soap fragranced with Cedarwood essential oil—very woodsy and crisp-smelling.

Bridesmaids Breakfast Soaps

Wrapped these soaps for a Bridesmaids Breakfast hosted the morning of my niece, Amie’s wedding day.  

I Love Lucy

Awhh . . a puppy.

Fetching dog.

Posing for the camera.

It occurred to me while looking through previous posts that I have shared a couple of pictures of our little critter without properly introducing her.  This is our dog, Lucy.  She just had her 11th birthday, but she’s a pretty spry little lady for her advanced years.  

Soap Box

We received such wonderful thanks last week from a friend who needed soap to take to Belize on a mission trip.  

Soap Shed

Well, Rick is calling it the Soap Shed.  

Origami, Take Two

Last year after watching this Ted Talk, I found an upcoming a Origami exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Our son Sam and family live just south of Sacramento and he likes folding paper as much as I do, so I sent him the exhibit info along with a link to the prospectus, and he replied that we had to come down and see it!

Soapy Days

Thursday and Friday were two soap days in a row for us—60 pounds of River Bars sliced this Sunday morning!  We are replenishing stock after a couple of large orders, a Fourth of July event, and several weekly Wednesday Farmers Market days. Rick says we’ve passed the point of making soap just once a week—and I think he may be right.  I’m thinking quite a few of these summery days will involve soap.

Sandwiched between our soap morning on Thursday and our soap afternoon on Friday, we set out to find a legendary stand of redwoods called the Del Norte Titans.

Yosemite-Sized!

Rick was privileged to use his senior pass for the first time last week—to enter Yosemite National Park! Our Sacramento kids have fallen in love with Yosemite over the past several years and invited us to enjoy a hiking/camping weekend with them this summer. We have never traveled to Yosemite—well, Rick had been there as a little kid but didn’t really have much memory of it—so we were really excited about seeing this place we had only viewed in photographs.

Senior Moments

This week, my husband and I went to our local US Forest Service office and he took advantage of his first “senior benefit” — an America the Beautiful National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass.  This $10 lifetime pass is a great benefit for those who have reached the mellow age of sixty-two.  Some friends who are just ahead of us on this spectrum clued us in to this pass last year, and we didn’t wait long after Rick’s birthday to purchase his.