A massive storm ripped through Oregon last week, dumping 74 inches of snow on Mt. Bachelor in 72 hours – and it's still falling. Here in town we had enough snow to cancel school for a day, then rain. Rain, rain, rain. So much rain fell in such a fury that it found every weakness in our weatherstripping, and we've got soak

We Gen X parents are enamored with reading but Generation Z (if my kids are at all representative) is cross-platform. They value books, TV, movies, apps and computers equally – or, to put it another way, they are indifferent to platform. My children will pay to play* Plants vs. Zombies on the iPod, the iPad, the PS3 and t

We've had a long, long dry spell here, such that snowboarding has been – I confess – quietly – not that much fun. (Around here people always follow weather-related complaints with comments like, "But it's better than being at work! At least I'm not stuck in traffic!" As if some cosmic karma would force a compla

Charlotte Freeman's most recent post discusses her intent to focus on letter-writing this year, starting with a letter to her best friend. She sa

Over the holidays each of my family members mentioned my blog at least once (excepting my parents-in-law, who are opting out of the internet thang). I take that to mean I should continue to post, even if the posts are less than exciting.

Cribbed from last year --- a prompt to get me writing again.1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?Snowboarded in the Canadian backcountry at Baldface Lodge. Not only had I never ridden

We had a car to sell so we posted it to Craig's List. A couple people came to look at it. They all seemed vaguely familiar, in the way that Bend people often do, but we only unraveled our relationship with the woman who ultimately bought the car. Turns out she's the sister of my mother-in-law's ex-husband's fifth wife.

The family room being suspiciously quiet, I peeked downstairs to see what my seven-year-old was doing. "Sasha? Everything ok?"Great! she exclaimed, and showed me the iPad screen. The pillow pets commercial, she said, had mentioned that she could browse their full selection online, and look! Look at them all!&nbs

I always write about the outdoors but I spend as much time indoors as any other American. I sit at a computer for eight hours, as a matter of fact, five days a week, pulling information about products out of various databases and displaying it through a browser in an accurate and, let's assume, compelling way. (Actua

Quail are ground birds. (Tracy from Adelaide asked me about them.) They're little and fat with a funny twiggy thing on their heads. They can

Sasha had an awful cough so we kept her in the back of the truck, bundled in a coat and hat and sleeping bag and wrapped all 'round with packing blankets; she had peppermint tea, too, and some chocolate chip cookies and her favorite snow leopard. My husband threw snowballs at her to make her laugh, and then Blake threw snow

Walking to the bus stop in the morning we encounter deer. Sometimes we meet them at the house diagonal to ours, which was unoccupied for awhile. It has a crabapple tree and soft, level grass and a thick juniper hedge separating it from the street. Other times we see the

In scanning through unpublished posts I found this story my daughter had written last year, when she was six. Charming, isn't it?Once wen I was littl I was a tinye maplseed. A prson pict me up and plantid me in his backyord. Evry day he would wottr me. Ovr and ovr. I grow and grow. One day I was a littl sp

So much depends uponA pet rock sitting there doing nothingSo much depends uponA good book sitting there waiting to be readSo much depends uponA fat guinea pig sitting there being cuteSo much depends uponA red hang glider flying through the airSo much de

Line from the movie "Santa Paws". Dude. What the heck.

Once upon a time there was a baby dragon and I will tell you his life. He lived in a darck scary cave that 100 bats lived in. When he was 16 a mean nasty pousin dragon flue rate into his cave. Then it shot 20 pousin darts all over the cave!!! The dragon was ok. He'd never fellt so scard. Ever sins he's never come out of his

Sort broken crayon bits by color.Melt similarly-colored crayon bits in an clean, tin soup can. On the stove. (Turn on fan.) This should take 5-10 minutes.Pour liquid into molds.Cool in freezer 20 minutes.Pop out of mold.Photograph results for the blog.

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I found this sign about 1/2 mile upstream from Benham Falls, near the footbridge, along a historical interpretive trail built by the Boy Scouts. A person could say a lot about this sign, but let's focus on what it's trying to tell us.Jane Austen died 17 years before Wyeth stopped by the Deschutes River.

Near Benham Falls,

At Ecola the only parking lot is on a cliff above the beach. So we deposited the truck there, grabbed as much of our stuff as we could carry, then walked down through a tunnel in thick vegetation. At the base of the cliff is a swath of tumbled, rounded lava r

My husband's o

After the sun set most of the adults clustered around the fire, sitting in chairs or on logs or just right in the sand, while the children (among whom my son was the oldest) raced around the long, wet stretch of beach exposed by the low tide. One parent had brought glow sticks which the children wore as necklaces, and in th

I got stuck in the little house the other day. It was 5:15; I'd finished my last conference call, sent my last email and changed my status on Lync; I'd unplugged my computer and gathered up the dirty dishes.But I couldn't l

"Half an hour later Jennifer and the two pirates were through the turnstiles and inside the circus itself. The pirate with an accordion pretty quickly began to feel more like the pirate who was a gooseberry, so he wandered off to look at an exhibit that claimed to be 'the dog that wore sunglasses,' and left Jennifer and the

My seven-year-old daughter, speaking to me: People call a house a home, but people sell their houses.* So a house isn't a home.Me: That's true, Sasha.Me: I think home is where the family is.Sasha: I think the whole earth is our home.Said she. Spreading her arms wide.