Fresh Flavor Sunday - Blackberry Banana Cake

It's been a summer of mood swings here in Portland - we've had very hot, very cool, and very stormy weather, as well as smoke from recent wildfires blanketing the valley.

So I haven't been as on-top of my blackberry picking as I have been in past years. We live near some wonderful walking paths, a lot of them lined with blackberry bushes, so I've been anxious to go out. Well, I finally got to it yesterday with my niece. We were fairly certain we'd get rained on, but this was a rare Pacific Northwest moment where the dark clouds blew away from us!

We had a good time, but didn't find the kind of volume I would have hoped for. A lot of the berries were either unripe, out of reach, or shrivelled on the vine. We hiked through some tall grass in hopes of finding better berries, but only found dried ones - and wound up covered in burrs for our trouble.

Time Travel

...is what I'm going to go with. I was prancing around (what movie was it where the guy said, "I seldom prance?), thinking I was going to blog more regularly when the first book was done, and yet, it's not mid-September and I think we can say no, no that did not happen.

I've started four blogs, but nothing's gotten off the ground in a real and true and meaningful way.

(Okay - I had to Google it. The line is from Aaron Sorkin's The American President. That was bothering me.)

Anywho, we moved...kind of. I don't feel right with a past-tense verb because it's not over. But in early August, we moved our personal belongings and excess stuff into storage and in with a generous family member, leaving the house staged in such a pristine state that I will hold on to those pictures forever.

Little Boxes

I'm writing this from my phone while we drive to Shiloh vet, where he will be thrilled to see some of his favorite people,  and less thrilled to receive a series of vaccines.

This hasn't been his favorite week, since we've been packing up the house. But soon we'll be quasi-settled in our interim housing while we sell our house.

Right now, we're trying to squash a much as we can into our last days in Richland, wishing there was time for more even while wishing we were already in Portland. And while I hate packing up,  I've been culling through a good deal of clutter. It feels good to be clearing things out,  getting ready for the next chapter.

Lots of excitement ahead, though! We'll be headed to Atlanta (specifically Decatur) for my cousin's wedding, and I'll be continuing work on the edits.

My hope is to be able to find a little pocket of time to enjoy some summer weather - Oregon is capable of some glorious Indian summers.

That's what I'm looking forward to  -  what about you?

Confessions of a Perpetual Church Shopper

National Cathedral, Washington D.C.

We don't like church shopping. We don't do it for kicks. But the thing is, we keep moving.

Since we left Eugene, Danny and I have visited or attended nine churches. One of those we left early. Two others we drove by, or parked near before deciding whether or not to enter. We've stalked websites. We've listened to online sermons.

I've even read Yelp reviews.

And now we're in the process of leaving Richland and relocating to Portland. While I'm excited about the move, finding a church home can be emotionally exhausting. But we've done it a lot, so on the subject, I have thoughts.

ECPA Happiness...and Moving

Big, big news in the life of this writer - Simply Sara hit #13 on the prestigious ECPA list. This was sometime last week, or possibly the week before. If I think about it long enough, I remember that it was November 1st, because that's when the list released...but the last couple weeks are a blur. So here's the pertinent information.

1. Simply Sara is #13.

2. You can see it here.

3. It is good. There was rejoicing.

4. We celebrated by packing.

I'd share a picture here, one of Danny lining up all of our DVD cases, except that I don't know where that particular camera is, and I don't know where the connection cord for it is, and I'm not at all motivated to go look.

Just know that it's funny, and it was a lot of DVDs.

Part one of our moving process is over. We've left our apartment for good, the one we moved into after being married for about two weeks. When all of our things were packed up and strewn on the sidewalk outside, I walked to our bedroom, leaned against the door frame and cried. Not that I have a deep affection for that apartment, with its Berber carpet that chewed up the bottoms of my feet, cobweb-prone entryway, and inability to stay heated, but it was our home, and life was changing, and it was changing quickly, and I hadn't quite settled myself out for how I felt about all of the life alterations that were coming at us so quickly.

We moved the bulk of our belongings (and I do mean bulk, and the wonderful people who helped us move would agree) into a storage unit in Portland. The rest of the things are with us, at my cousin's home in Northeast Portland, just a mile from where (conveniently) Danny's job is for the time being.

Things that I thought would fit into our car didn't. Spacial reasoning, I've discovered, is not my thing. We have more packing ahead of us. I'm living pleasantly in denial about it until then.

Memphis is in our future; at this point, it looks like we'll be in Tri-Cities by March-ish, though, which is nice because I wasn't looking forward to trying to pack for a shifty Tennessee springtime.

Until we leave for Memphis, I'm looking forward to exploring Portland for Gemma's sake and tracking down places she'd like. Cacao, Powell's (naturally), Saint Cupcake...all good things, though I'm waiting until tomorrow when I have more energy and don't have to fight the weather quite as much.

Feeling the need to bake something, though I'm not sure what. I've got the Rustic Fruit Desserts book, which has much deliciousness between its pages. The one trickiness is that my cousin's oven is a gas model that requires lighting before use. Now, I'm afraid of ovens as it is, so throw in matches and the manual lighting of gas and it's kind of the trifecta of terror.

That said, I've been lighting the stove successfully (though I tend to jump a foot back once the gas lights) for 24 hours (the lure of tea. You know how it goes) and have yet to die. So logic would hold that I'll be able to conquer the oven soon :-)

Let's see what else...if you're a Portland reader, know that there's a signed copy of Plain Jayne at the Lloyd Center Barnes & Noble.

I'm hoping to be back on track (or, really, on a track at all) for NaNoWriMo. Until then, here's my question for you - how do you pronounce NaNoWriMo?