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Yep, we’re workin’ ourselves up to do our next posting here at Samadhisoft.  Don’t go away….

Well, I never intended to stop Blogging that long. I haven’t posted here since August 5th, just as I was about to leave for California.

But, the trip was too jam packed with stuff to Blog along the way and once I returned, my work and post-trip unwinding stuff was piled up so high there was no time for much of anything else.

Leaving for Kansas for a week and then three days later for California for another week has put me way behind the eight ball. And, in a week, Sharon’s leaving for New Zealand for a month so that’s causing a bit of a stir amid all the rest.

Whew.

Thanks so very much to Joel, Gertraude and Alan and Rita who were all my hosts on the California trip. It was a wonderful trip and seeing all of you was very nice. And driving the California coast from San Francisco to Eureka was spectacular as well.

I’ll be posting some photos from the trip soon.

This morning I’m off on a trip to california to visit a friend in the Bay Area. I’ll also be making stops in Vancouver, Washington on the way south and in Eugene, Oregon on the way north to visits friends. I’ll be gone a week and it should be a lot of fun. I’ve got a nice Pontiac G6 rental to speed me on my way.

I may post along the way. It’ll depend on whether I can get access to the Internet easily and if there is time between driving and socializing.

Best wishes to all until I next post.

Here are some photos from Kansas. Most of these are from the trip we just completed but a few are from an earlier visit in 2005. If you hover your mouse over a photo before you click on it, you’ll get a description.

We’ll be leaving in a few hours to journey back to Kansas City, then to Chicago and finally back to Seattle. We can only hope that all will go well with the airlines and our connections.

It’s been a busy and interesting couple of days. To say I’ve enjoyed my time with Sharon’s mother and brothers would be an understatement. They are a family I am very happy to have married into.

On Monday, we discussed the fact that there’s a perception that the taste of the well water on the farm has changed in the last year of two. On Tuesday, Sharon and I drove over to Manhattan, Kansas, to the health department there and got a small sterile bottle to put some of the water in for testing. We ended up seeing a lot of Manhattan before we found the place but I actually enjoyed driving around in a new town. Tuesday night, while everyone sat around, a conversation began about the history of the farm; when it was homesteaded, when parts of it were sold, whether or not the title was in Sharon’s mother’s name as it should be or in her father’s name (who passed away in 1986). There was also a question of whether or not they were paying property taxes on 40 acres when, in fact, the actual area was closer to 30.

That all piqued Sharon and my interests and so on Wednesday, we got up early in Topeka and drove to Westmoreland, Kansas, which is the county seat of Pottawatomie County and went to see the Deeds and Mapping folks there. What a pleasure it was dealing with professional folks in a small county. We had immediate access to the folks who could answer our questions and friendly service. Bonnie, in the Register of Deeds office and Brenda in the GIS office were both especially helpful and knowledgeable.

After an hour and a half, we knew everything we wanted to about the correctness of the current deed (it was right!), the property lines, when the property was home-steaded and a variety of other interesting facts and figures. It was a great treasure trove of stuff to take back to the family that evening.

We also stopped by the Health Department office in Manhattan again and dropped our bottle of well water off for testing. Sharon Wolff here was our contact person and wonderfully helpful and knowledgeable.

I’ve kidded Sharon several times about how easy driving in Kansas is. You just point the car, lock on the cruise-control and wait to arrive as you gaze at the passing scenery. Driving from Topeka and to Manhattan to Westmoreland and then back to St. Marys was like that. We also shared the inevitable jokes about the Flint Hills which Sharon claims are the mountain ranges of Kansas.

In the afternoon, we went to see Judy, Sharon’s childhood friend and her husband, and discussed their plans to travel soon to Belize. We also went out and Sharon looked at some of Judy’s trees which were having a problem. It was hot. 95F and 95% or more humidity. I suppose people get used to it but I was dying standing in the sun as they looked at the trees and discussed remedies.

Last night, we all looked over our loot from our trip up to Westmoreland and watched the TV reporting on the bridge disaster in Minneapolis. We all sat around together until late because we all realized that when Sharon and I left, we were not coming back for awhile. It felt poignant to me.

I took a number of photos yesterday and I’ll be posting them here when I’m at my computer at home tomorrow.

Ps. I joke about the Flint Hills of Kansas with my wife. But, the truth is, they are quite beautiful. A fellow from the Flint Hills area who runs a blog to promote tourism there wrote a comment and passed links to me to two articles about the area:

NY Times article: ➡

National Geographic article: ➡

Flint Hills Blog: ➡

It’s raining in North East Kansas. Flood warnings in several areas near where we are. We hit a major cloud burst coming out from Topeka this morning just like yesterday. The weatherman says it may rain on and off all the time we’re here. That’s great by me – I like this warm rain. I’m just hoping for a big thumderstorm. I like the noise and excitement of it <smile>.

We’ve been having a good time visiting with Sharon’s family here at the family farm. I’ve looked around here and realized how differerent their experiences were from mine growing up. Sharon and her brothers were born here and their lives have always orbited around this land and house that her relatives homesteaded and built back in the late 19th century. I, on the other hand, was born in New York and raised in Southern California and lived in not less that 35 different places from when I was 15 until 1990 when Sharon and I married and moved to Washington State.

I hope to take some pictures later today and post them here of the farm.

I’ve been trying to talk everyone into mounting an expedition over to Manhatten to look for a nursery so we can have a look around at what running a nursery in this part of the country looks like. It’s also fun to go for a ride in a new place.

I’ve been using my spare time to read a book on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and I think I’ve got it – which puts me a lot closer to have total control over the presentation of this blog. I’m also wanting to redo the www.woodscreeknursery.com site which our business uses. it is long overdue for a face-lift.

Cheers from Pottawattamie County in Northeastern Kansas!

We travelled yesterday.   Seattle to Chicago to Kansas City and then took a rental car to Topeka where we have a room for four days.   We’re off in an hour or so for St. Marys, Kansas, where Sharon grew up.   Her mother and two brothers are there at the farm.

Cheers, until tomorrow.

Sharon and I are off in the morning for Kansas to see her family so I’ll be gone until August 2nd.  So, they’ll be no posts during that period.

Yesterday, after an intense day at work getting our irrigation system sorted out (again), we took off and met our friends LA & Gillian in Kent for a ride on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train.

For three and a half hours we rode from the south end of Seattle’s east side to the north and then back again and were served an excellent dinner. We were in an American icon, a dome car, the Mt. Rainier, which was made in 1952 and carried passengers between Washington D.C. and Florida until 1973.

The ride was over at 9:30 PM and the timing was good because I was scheduled for my annual physical this morning at 8:30 AM and I was suppose to fast last night after 10PM. After that big dinner on the train, I was well prepared to fast <smile>.

The physical went well this morning. I’ve had the same doctor for over 15 years since we first moved up to Washington from Southern California and he and I always find a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. But today, a lot of what we talked about were health issues – mine. I’ll be 60 in August and that’s a fact that amazes me. I sure don’t feel old in any significant way.

But, there have been a few glictches this last year with me. Last December, while running in New Zealand, I tore a cartiliage in my right knee. About the same time I hurt my knee, I noticed some swelling in my lower legs in the evenings when I took my socks off. These two situations collided in April when I had an arthroscopy procedure to repair the damage to my knee. The surgery went fine but the recovery was complicated by an excess amount of swelling around the knee.

Since then, the knee has healed well and now I joke that I know it is fully recovered because both knees hurt the same when I do stairs or squats.

But, investigating the lower leg swelling has been a longer adventure. The bottom line is that they’ve done all the tests they have and no one knows. The heart’s 100%, the kidneys are the same, the blood work all looks good and the valves in my veins that are suppose to prevent reverse flow as the blood pumps back up from my feet towards my heart are working correctly. So, nothing’s wrong – and yet the legs are always a bit swollen at the end of the day. ‘Idiopathic‘, my doctor called it. That means ‘we don’t know what it is but we have a big word to describe it.’

Ah well, if that’s the biggest thing I have to complain about, I’m going to keep quiet.

After I came home and told Sharon about my physical, we decided to (1) close the nursery tomorrow because the weather predictions here are for 100 F (records are going to fall) and (2) we decided to go for a motorcycle ride this afternoon just for fun since it was our normal day off and it’s pretty hot out now as well (though not as hot as tomorrow’s suppose to be).

And it was fun. We rode to from Monroe to Lynnwood and went to a business called “Bent Bike” where they have a warehouse full of used motorcycle parts. We bought some new face shields and looked at saddle bags but none, unfortunately, fit my bike.

Then we rode on up Highway 99 as far as Everett and cut over on Highway 2 to Snohomish where we stopped and got scallops, chips and cokes at a place with ourside seating in the shade. Yum.

That was followed by a brief stop to get some Rainier Cherries from a roadside stand (they are in season here and delicious!) and then it was off for home to check on the irrigation and get into our air-conditioned house.

All and all, a nice two days.