The 8 Month Bathroom

Remember the one week bathroom?  Well, we finally finished the 8 month bathroom!

Just a refresher course for those who may not remember the last 8 months of this blog.  This is what our master bathroom used to look like.

Then we did this to it.

Then we mostly finished it but didn't have a shower.

We now have a shower!  It's sort of hard to get a good picture of it.  But it is amazing!

I know, I know. That wasn't much for building the suspense for the reveal. But... WE'VE GOT A SHOWER! (Well, a second shower. It's not like we didn't shower for 8 months straight.)

Unscheduled Stops

The second day of our Oregon road trip was a visit to Crater Lake. We did made quite a few unscheduled stops along the way, though. First, we saw a river that we knew Norman wouldn't be able to resist.

Boy were we right. He played and splashed and had a big old time. We also stopped here because the sign pointing toward it had a picture of a camera on it.

Once we were on the trail, we had the choice between boulders and falls.

We chose falls, duh.

When we finally got to Crater Lake we were greeted by snow.

There was even a staircase that led only to snow.

Finally some scenic views of Crater Lake and Wizard Island.

Also views of the picturesque lodge (with more snow).

We made just a couple of unscheduled stops the next day on the way home. One to take Eddy's picture in front of Mount Shasta (which he was real excited about for the several hours we could see it from the road).

And one to prove that we drive through Weed, CA.

I think the unscheduled stops were almost as good on this trip as the scheduled stops.

My New Year's Resolution

This year for New Year's I resolved to learn to can foods.  Of late, our freezer has become entirely jammed full of homemade chicken stock and precooked beans and homemade lemon curd (a terrible problem, I know).  I put it off for many months because, well, pressure canning sounded scary!

This beast came in the mail.

It makes a nice addition to all of our millions of stock pots.

I also got some new little accessories and, of course, a couple of flats of jars.

One day I finally got up the gumption to cook up an extra large batch of chicken stock.

I lined up all my little tools,

sanitized all of my new jars,

and got to canning!

Success!

I didn't even explode the whole house!