The Furniture Wedding Anniversary

Dear Husband and I have just celebrated 17 years of marriage. Did you know that on the 17th anniversary you are supposed to buy each other furniture? That means we've celebrated many times over since we moved into our new house in late March! God blessed us with beautiful weather to have some church friends over for a cookout/potluck on our anniversary this year. Beforehand, I went through the memory boxes in the attic to pull out items to show them.

I found the Feng Shui for the perfect wedding book that my maid of honor got us!

(We got married on the auspicious date of 8/6.)

I still had an old Baltimore Sun Travel article on Denver, and the whole issue from August 8, which is the day we left for our honeymoon. (Why? I don't know anymore and recycled them both.)

This was our invitation set; the seashell stands out better

on the stone engraving one of his relatives got us as a creative gift.

I consider this beautiful blue buffet our anniversary gift to each other.

Here is a page from our wedding album and handwritten

"Sweet Memories" of our engagement on July 19, 2004, at the Outer Banks.

We still have a copy of the wedding program in Howard Nash's inimitable style.

We were even in the newspaper! DH's mother put an announcement in their local paper

and laminated a couple copies for posterity.

I still have several dozen custom party favors: a paper with our names and the name with the edges cut like driftwood, a seashell, some paper "bear grass," real baby's breath, and a loop of ribbon. Thank goodness for SH's design and hot glue-gun skills! I encouraged our guests to take one.

At the last minute, I grabbed my wedding dress and draped it over the bed. The only thing that got a better response all night was opening the door to the full-sized cedar closet!

My bridesmaids decorated the door of our hotel room in the middle of the night! 

I found it stashed at the bottom of a box and put it on the front door of the house.

We honeymooned in Denver and Estes Park, Colorado. DH had wanted to travel to Spain, and I wanted to visit Italy, but we didn't have time to cross the Atlantic and still get back to pick up the keys to our apartment, so we chose Denver in order to "collect" Coors Field, where the Rockies play baseball. This trip started the tradition of visiting a botanical garden and an art museum on vacation. We also toured the State Capitol, Mile High Stadium (we touched the grass!), and the aquarium.

This is the photo collage my grandmother made that hung in her house until we bought our own.

No one who celebrated with us knew us back then, so it was really wonderful to share this part of our lives with them. Just like it took a small army to put on the wedding and its associated events, so these are "our people" now. We had a lovely time grilling, sharing salads, and finishing DH's birthday ice cream cake with them.

Anatomical artwork

Of all the organs I have stitched so far, the lungs may be my favorite. Being asymmetrical, the pattern was tricky, and I got off on the wrong foot by incorrectly counting the stitches for the vasculature in the left lung. This meant that toward the end of the process, I had to make up some of the design, in order to make up for misplaced or excess stitches. Thankfully, the asymmetry means that it's not noticeable!

The uterus was an even more difficult pattern than the lungs, due to the fact that it called for about 2 dozen colors of floss, most of them variations on pink or red. I tried my best to match the required colors, but changing out my needle and thread for 5 stitches, and 1 stitch there proved to be very difficult. Sometimes I gave up, and I don't think you can notice the difference.

For fabric I used a piece of canvas that had once belonged to an elderly neighbor, now passed away. She had stitched a while flower with a yellow center and a purple butterfly. The flower is a little smudged, which might be why she abandoned the project. I decided its imperfections were part of its charm and added flowers, a heart, a ribbon, and confetti to enliven the design.

Both pieces have gone to live with friends or friends of friends in exchange for donations to the Birmingham Free Clinic. I have patterns for a brain and for various bacterial pathogens that should keep me busy over the next academic year.

When in Ohiopyle...

Day 1 of family vacation in Ohiopyle; Day 2 of "fun" in the sun

The third day of vacation dawned cooler than the other two. Not only were there wreaths of fog on the river when we put in our kayaks, but there was mist over some sections of small rapids as we traversed them midday. This was the view downriver from the launch beach.

Having gotten a leg workout the day before by bicycling, I figured we could exercise our arms the next day. Although it was overcast and cooler, and in some ways it would have been easier just to sit at home on our laptops, it seemed like the thing to do while in Ohiopyle was to participate in outdoor sports, so I found us a couple of single inflatable kayaks to rent from White Water Adventurers. We packed water and a few snacks and planned to be home for lunch.

The shop was disorganized, so the shuttle left half an hour late, humpity-bumpity up the road to a little south of Confluence. We put in at 9:30am with another couple, who had brought their own hard-sided tandem kayak. It was the third time they had traveled this section of the river ("the Middle Yough") but our first.

We had never paddled this kind of kayak before, so it was definitely a learning experience. These little sit-in kayaks were definitely better suited to running the rapids at the start and end than traversing the deep quiet water in the middle, when both of us wished for a canoe with a proper paddle for deep strokes.

We encountered class I-II rapids. The interesting thing about the class I rapids was that if the field of rocks was big enough, they created a soft roar, even though the water wasn't deep at all. I enjoyed running the class II rapids, as there was only one place that threatened to tip us over. Thankfully, everyone (and the gear!) stayed in the boats.

The views were beautiful, although I wished for either sunshine or 5 more degrees of warmth to make the constant wet-butt sensation a little more bearable. We only had to get out and portage once, when I chose a channel that was too shallow. (Should have followed the other couple...) Otherwise, we made great time, with both groups getting out at the same time, and the guy at the equipment shop told us our 3 hours exactly was the best time all season! Honestly, there wasn't anywhere good to stop, and most of the food was at home, so you know I was motivated to keeping paddling. I think Dear Husband was just glad to be back on solid, dry land.

After the folks finished their fly-fishing lessons, we all had some quiet time in the afternoon before heading out to the Historic Summit Inn for dinner. We had hoped to enjoy the view from the veranda, but it was closed due to the threat of inclement weather, so we had to enjoy our steak and lamb inside.

The inn opened in 1907 for wealthy vacationers and currently offers 94 rooms open April through November, a 36-par 9-hole golf course, reception rooms, indoor and outdoor pools, and partnerships with various local attractions like the Frank Lloyd Wright sites, Fort Necessity Battlefield Park, and bicycling trips. There was a bridle shower while we visited.

The lobby is done in dark woods with Tiffany-style lamps and Craftsman furniture. In 1907, the American flag had 45 stars (Oklahoma made it 46 in November 1907). This one hangs over a square Steinway piano from the second half of the 19th century.

It's said that if you look west from Chestnut Ridge, there is nothing higher across the plains until you reach the Rocky Mountains.

Back at the cabin we made old-fashioned popcorn on the stove and then tried to teach ourselves how to play Texas 42, a domino game. If you are familiar with it, we would love to learn strategy and scoring with you.

And of course, the National Parks puzzle was finished!

"Fun" in the Sun at Ohiopyle, PA

Click here for Day 1. Click here for Day 3.

Day 2 of our Ohiopyle trip dawned cool, and if Dear Husband and I had set out for our bike ride earlier, it would have been (even) more enjoyable. However, in the spirit of vacation, we had not set an alarm, so after a leisurely breakfast, we went to town to rent bicycles. It was delightful to listen to the Youghiogheny River to one side, but the verdant canopy of the ferny forest was not enough to beat back the summer heat. After an hour of pedaling and a little short of Confluence, we stopped to eat a snack and then headed back to the shop. 

We took a brief detour to Ferncliff Peninsula to look over the high bridge to the rafters far below. 

This park sign reads: "Ohiopyle State Park. This state park was made possible through the vision and generosity of members and donors of Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. The evolution of this state park began in 1951 when WPC bought Ferncliff Peninsula to protect the globally threatened plant species there, documented by botanist Otto E. Jennings. In 1971, the Conservancy conveyed almost 10,000 acres it had purchased to the Commonwealth, and negotiated the purchase of the remainder of the initial 18,000-acre park. Saving the Places We Care About" DH and I are members of the WPC.

After lunch, we mucked about on our computers until My Awesome Parents finished their fly-fishing lessons, and we met up back at the river bank to wade (58 degrees--so cold!) and sit in the sun while talking.

The day ended with s'mores, chicken dinner, jigsaw puzzling, and watching Major League (1989), with Dear Husband giving Cleveland-based commentary.

Family vacation in Ohiopyle, PA

Dear Husband and I joined My Awesome Parents in Ohiopyle, PA, for a long weekend of vacation. We rented a house on the other side of Ohiopyle State Park from the town that the owner's grandfather built in the 20th century. He is in the process of renovating it, so not all the surfaces are finished, but it has a modern kitchen, 1.5 baths, a sizeable master bedroom, and two small bedrooms with bunkbeds. The stone patio on one side is nice with its string of lights , and when the wooden deck on the other is finished, there will be plenty of space close to all the touristy things to do, yet set in the countryside.

"How rural?" you might ask. The signs on either end of the little country road say "No GPS route." Google Maps pinged at the location of the house on the right side of the road but up a bank and behind a wall of trees; my father's pinged on the left side of the road for the mailbox, and after turning around, we finally found the long driveway.

Photos in the kitchen of the house and surroundings.

Unfinished drywall in the sunny extension of the living room that will one day have a back deck.

View from the hilltop above the house.

Alas, the trip did not have an auspicious start. I needed to go into work to cover my in-box and finish some patient-related paperwork, so DH started packing the car half an hour later than scheduled. On top of that, Google Maps had extended the anticipated drive time from 60 minutes to 90, so rather than converging for lunch together at noon, we weren't going to arrive until 1pm. As DH pulled out of the driveway, I texted my father, "If we don't have it packed, it must not be important!"--something we say in the family to assuage the anxiety of underpacking. After all, if you forget your toothbrush, almost anywhere you're going they will have a convenience store where you can buy a replacement.

Reader, it was important. When we finally arrived and I looked around for the bottle of water to wash down the granola bar I had just eaten to try to stop the sour stomach that was developing due to lunch being late...I realized that we had forgotten to put the red-sided cooler full of perishable food in the car. Worse, when we reached the neighbor who is looking after Rosamunda, she told us we had left the front door open! Thank goodness she was able to put all the food back in the fridge or freezer, and they have grocery stores in Ohiopyle.

First, though, we ate sandwiches from one of the establishments on the main drag, in the shade at the river's edge. Then we went for a short but increasingly difficult hike along the Youghiogheny River and through "a mature hemlock forest," per the state park guidebook, to Cucumber Falls. 

I'm not a fan of the phrase "it could be worse," because I think it cheapens whatever distress the person it experiencing, but in this case it could have been worse for us, as at one point we encountered ~40 Amish people pushing a baby buggy who hadn't counted on what started as an easy trail becoming rocks that needed to be scrambled over.

We ended up shopping in nearby Confluence, because MAP had left the chicken and teriyaki sauce in their fridge that was supposed to be for Friday dinner. We picked up a few provisions, walked around the little town and the bridge over the shallow but fast-moving Yough ("Yock"), and then enjoyed a nice meal at River's Edge Cafe / Bed & Breakfast, and 1890 Victorian house with a veranda for river/people watching.

When we got home there was time to start a "new" puzzle I had picked up from someone on my local "buy-nothing" group, a 1,000-piece puzzle of the National Parks. We did the edges and the lettering and very slowly worked along the grid lines and identifiable features (cacti, buffalo) before having to wait until daylight to work on the abstract pieces. It was really nice to contemplate these beautiful, and fantastically colored images. These are the parks represented:

North Cascades, Crater Lake, Sequoia, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Death Valley, Bryce Canyon, Denali, Joshua Tree, Badlands, Zion, Yellowstone, Saguaro, Great Smoky Mountains, Glacier, Olympic, Shenandoah, Rocky Mountains, Pinnacles, Arches, Mount Rainier, Hawai'i Volcanoes, Everglades, and Acadia. 

I've been to 7 of them. How about you?

Click here for Day 2. Click here for Day 3.

Operation Green Thumb

The UPMC Division of General Internal Medicine Antiracism Team put together a community gardening event, in which a bunch of us and our kids gathered at the Garden on Gearing in the neighborhood of Beltzhoover to pull weeds, turn over soil, pick up trash, and plant a variety of seeds and seedlings. 

In the first picture you can see Mel, who is on the neighborhood committee. In the second picture is Gordon, who farms this plot and sells or donates the fruits and veggies.

We were visited by some of the local humans, 2 tiny snakes, and a young deer who looked ready to help himself to everything we had just put in the ground!

 It turns out there are a number of experienced gardeners who came with tools, and the rest of us brought enthusiasm for being outside on a gorgeous Saturday. It was nice to meet colleagues in person with whom we had only interacted over email or a Teams meeting wit our video cameras off. 

Those who could stick around enjoyed jerk chicken, curried goat, and plantains from Leon's Caribbean Restaurant, a local institution in nearby Allentown. Gordon says we should come back in the fall to help him harvest the fruits of our labors.