One of our last sunrises at the 'old' spot was a gorgeous one!
Temperatures dropped to the low 30's at night last week and the mornings appeared crisp and clear ..

On my walks I'm approaching the pond slowly these days since there are a lot of ducks spending the night there to rest during their trip south, and I don't want to disturb them too much.
But when I came upon the pond a couple of days ago I was greeted by a lot of commotion before I was even there. Reason being ...

Wile E. Coyote himself

                                                                      
Someone else had no qualms about disturbing them and was hoping to catch one for breakfast!

    

As soon as he saw me he took off and the ducks calmed down, at least they could stay in the water and didn't have to take off .. yet.

I totally forgot to mention last week that we went to see another play at the Gallery Theater in McMinnville.
After a little bit of a summer-break they've started their performances again and we went there for a matinee show of 'Puffs'.

This hilarious show is the story of the Puffs, a gang of awkward nerds who just happened to be at 'a certain school of Magic and Magic', aka Hogwarts, at the same time as 'a certain boy called Harry'!



If you’ve read or watched the Harry Potter series, what unfolds is a silly retelling of the events which take place over the course of seven years of education, narrated deftly by David Weinraub.
The best thing about the Puffs script is the absurdity of events from the Puffs’ point of view, and this production highlights this particularly well.

Although at times it was a little hard to hear or understand it was a very lively, fast paced and very funny show. Once again we were amazed by the quality and ingenuity of the stage and costumes.
As always .. well done!

We drove out a couple of days to our new RV-site were we've trenched everything for our utilities to go in and started to lay the conduits, one for the electric wires and one for the sewer ...



Unfortunately I had hit the existing pipe of the sewer while trenching (oops), but it was a fairly easy repair and while we had that part of the old pipe open we used that spot to connect it to the pipe that will go to the RV.

We pulled the (very heavy) electric wires from the green barn/shop that sits down the hill up to the red barn halfway, where our (smaller and lighter) electric will be connecting:

                                                      

Slow but sure things are coming along!
We're a little bit in a hurry because we have bad weather coming, but everything really depends on the gravel being delivered before we can move and the guy who is going to do that is dragging his feet a little.
Oh well, nothing to do but wait ..

I've not had much time for a lot of cooking and baking lately although I managed to produce this mighty fine mushroom/spinach and feta quiche .. if I say so myself!


                   

That's it for this week. It's been, and will be, a little crazy with all the work going on, but we're making progress.
I can't wait to move, I'm looking forward to a change of  scenery.
This time we're not just moving around in Newberg but we'll end up in a whole new town.

Fun!

 

This has been the view out of our back window almost every morning this week .. fog, or low hanging clouds .. I love it!

                  

Everything is so calm when the fog surrounds you, there's a sense of peace and quiet ..



                                                                           

Almost overnight these mushrooms appeared in the yard:

And they're not the only ones, all this moisture in the air has brought out a gaggle of mushrooms in all forms, shapes and sizes!

There might even be some edible ones among them but since I don't know much about how to identify them I better not take the risk ..

 
I like this one the best, it's so dainty and pretty:

Also, we all know about 'gorillas in the mist' but how about quail?

Not quite as impressive, I'll admit, but I always love to come across them.
It looks like pretty much all the babies have survived and they're now distinguishable into males and females. A lot of males it looks like!

The fog usually starts to lift around 12am ..



And we've even had a few beautiful sunny, and rather warm (72F!) afternoons, when the sun highlighted the beautiful fall colors around town.
How about these colors I spotted in the street behind the grocery store, of all places?

                  

Or these at Rogers landing, another favorite spot of mine, especially now, in the fall, when there's nobody else around?

                                                          

James is working hard on all the files we got last week.
We've seen them all, and the ones that had a deadline have been taken care of, so he's also busy in the meantime with getting all the logistics for our new site lined up, like our Internet, phone and propane services.

Besides all that he made time to replace our RV batteries, who started to fail and were causing our lights to run dimmer than they should and our hot water to be barely heating up.

It's an easy fix, the only thing hard about it is forking out the money ... $150 a piece, ouch .. not something we wanted to have do right now with all the expenses for the move coming up.
Fortunately we have a big check coming in for all the work we did this month!
We'll make it work .. we usually do .. somehow.

Let's have a piece of banana-bread shall we, something to sweeten the deal .. works for me!
(it's not the most beautiful looking cake, yes, it cracked, but it tastes just fine!)

Boy, did we get busy!
After struggling through a very slow September where we (Hess appraisals) only managed to 'get' 6 appraisals between the 3 (4, if you count me in) of us, we got totally buried last Friday when we got 9 of them in one day!
It was a little hectic all week long but we're making it work and are not complaining, we can definitely use the money with another move coming up soon!

Since we had to measure a lot of houses, some of them rather complicated, I went with James to assist him. I usually get to measure, with a nifty laser 'tape-measurer', and James somehow translates that miraculously (to me) into a readable and correct floor-plan.

We get to see a lot of beautiful houses (as well as incredible crappy ones) like this one which had a beautiful view of the valley and the mountain range in the distance.
It's hard to see in the photo but they can see Mt Hood as well as Mt Jefferson!

Driving around Newberg to find the 'comps' (Comps, or comparables, are used to determine the value of a home by comparing it to similar properties sold in the same neighborhood) we enjoyed the beautiful, rolling hills of the area which are starting to show a little bit of fall-colors ...

That's Mt Hood there, barely visible in the middle of the blue sky.
It already had it's first snow while we've been having a whole week of rain down below here on the valley-floor.

Sometimes the appointments take a little longer than planned and we can't make it home for lunch, but fortunately there's lots of food-carts around these days for a quick bite, like this one called 'The Porch' in the teeny-weeny town of Laurel, where we enjoyed a couple of very nice sandwiches:

                                              

Later that afternoon we found ourselves in a beautiful, remote and forestry area east of Newberg.
I'd love to have a view like this:

Back at the ranch, we got a change in our interior! Our Ikea Poang chairs were starting to get rather tired-looking after 13 years of service and just by chance I came across 2 'as-good-as-new' recliners on Marketplace.
Origanally $500 each, they were bought on sale by the seller last year for $350 each, and were now offered for sale at $300 for the two of them!

 

Needless to say .. we snatched them up!
They can rock, swivel and recline and are very comfortable. I have to get used to the 'pleather' which I'm not too wild about (I might get some covers for them) and they're a little darker than I had intended (maybe a few throw pillows would lighten the look a little) but they're a lot nicer looking and more comfortable than our old ones.
Score!

Other than assisting James I've not had much time to do much else this week. I started a new puzzle which I've made before, it's an 'on-the-farm' scene with lots of animals and a big haystack and the pieces are basically all orangy, yellow and brown looking.
Starting these 1000-piece puzzles can be a little intimidating! Where to begin?

And since the weather is a lot cooler with a lot of rain, I thought it was time to make the first batch of dutch pea-soup of the season ... the first but surely not the last!
It's sooooo good ...

Due to the rain of late the work on our new RV-site has stalled for the time being, and although some parts for the utilities have arrived we're still waiting on a few.
Which is a good thing since we have so much work at the moment!
The weather is supposed to clear somewhere next week so hopefully we'll be able to resume. There's still a lot to do before we can move.

A tentative moving date has been set for the 5th of November .. we'll see ..
"Lor' willin' an' th' crick don' rise!"

Just like last year, the maples are starting to show their amazing fall colors all over town. These are the ones on the road to the golf course. Just stunning!

I've been looking for mushrooms, which usually shoot up immediately in the fall after some rain, but haven't found too many yet .. here's a few I detected on my walk this week:

The Thistles are always at their most decorative in the fall I think:

                                 

And the Snowberries and Rosehips have appeared. Favorite winter-food for Robins .. and bears!
I once had a dog that went nuts for rose-hips, they were a nice incentive for getting her to speed up when she tried to stall our walks, just by picking them at the side of the road and rolling them ahead of us one by one ..

Once again the air around Newberg is filled with dust clouds, not from harvesting grass or corn this time around but for picking up the hazelnuts (filberts) from the orchards where they have fallen from the trees!



They use huge harvesters to sweep and suck them up in one go-through .. very efficient. 
But dusty!

I've found a 'wild' tree on one of the paths I walk and have been picking up a handful every time I pass. I'm drying and storing them in a paper bag. It takes about 6 weeks for them to dry and cure.They're going to be so good in all kind of baking!

A lot of our (mostly James') time this week has been taken up by working on our new RV site.
I took some pictures but forgot to take one from the house up above, where our landlords live, looking down the hill to what's going to be 'our' site, but here's an old picture of a couple of years ago when we visited them ..

The RV is going to be to the right of that silver barn, just down and at the back of that slight slope in between the trees. They probably won't see us from up above.
This is looking back at that slope standing at the site:

And this is looking at the pond just below us (which is hard to see in this pic since it's covered in green algae) towards the other side, which is going to be part of our view out of the side windows:

The back windows will have a distant view of the mountain range, like this ..

James went over to Sheridan by himself for a couple of days to create a pathway to our pad and level it, and I helped a day compressing it all by driving a heavy forklift back and forth for a couple of hours:

That's all the work being done on the path towards the RV in the picture above and this is where our RV is going to be:



And this is a picture after James started to go to town on it ...

We're now waiting for a few rainy days to pass before we'll be able to spread some gravel on top!
There's still a lot more to do, digging trenches for water/sewer and electric, but it's a start!

After a summer's break I'm back to puzzling again. I just finished this beautiful desert scene from CharlesWysocki:

And with some leftover pumpkin puree, from when I made that delicious pumpkin cobbler the week before, I made pumpkin/spice donuts.
These are not fried but baked. Much healthier ... if you forget about the melted butter and sugar they're dunked in when they're done!

                                                 

We had a few beautiful warm days this week with temperatures back in the 80s. Which meant we could still eat outside in October!

                  

The menu was more appropriate for the season .. meatloaf and mashed potatoes ..
yumm!