shameless summer photo album

Oh, what a roller coaster ride we ride! Life, people. Is what I'm talking about.

It's been roughly a month since I last blogged. Since that fateful day, the roller coaster ride of life has...well, it's stopped halfway up that first hill. I've been taking some vacation time and have spent it sleeping, reading obsessively, perambulating around the backyard and rubbing at the herbs and squeezing at the tomatoes, and trying to think of vegetarian things to cook and then screwing it and grilling chicken or tilapia or ordering Thai take-out (with chicken) or just focusing my energies on dessert instead. All that when I'm not packing things and then unpacking them again, that is.

The following is my summer in pictures, mostly. I thought I could choose a couple pictures to represent each event, but I'm not skilled at self-editing.

Harvest.

Hazelnut-Brown Butter Cake with Brandied Cherries.

Packing & Unpacking Event #1: The annual Burro Creek field school. 
Two weeks of survey and site recording sixty miles northwest of Prescott, Arizona. That happened in June which was a lifetime ago when I was a different person. 


We went. We set up tents. We found things. We drank a lot of beer. 

Questionable outhouse bridge.

Fighting bulls at the entrance to our survey area.

There was even a pinata. All field schools should include pinatas.

Staff tents and elegant paths.

Here we are in the process of survival in a narrow and bouldery canyon.

Prehistoric stone structure at the top of Lower Hill.

The view from Lower Hill Fort site.

Fun with the Polaris.

Prescott, Arizona. Where people go to die.
Or maybe just people who've been at Burro Creek for a week.

The new lab.

Shortly after my return to civilization, Raphael went to replace the broken window in the back room, and all the other windows promptly fell out too. Hence, we now have a beautiful new wall in the back room.

The Wall That Fell Out.

New wall. 

Packing & Unpacking Event #2: Laura and Trevor's wedding. 
After June passed into the mists of time, Raphael and I traveled to Columbus, Ohio, where it was over a hundred degrees, and where we sweated a lot and attended Laura and Trevor's wedding, and I was a bridesmaid, and not one person actually expired even though I personally felt like it on at least two separate occasions. I call that a successful wedding.

We wore fascinators for Laura's bachelorette party.
The bride was the most fascinating of all, of course.

The bridesmaids put together the flowery things
such as the corsages and boutonnieres.

The Fun Bus took the bridal party to the reception. It was, in a word, fun.
Another word for it might be "Lime-a-ritas".  (Note the two large coolers.)

144 plastic wedding rings later...

Flower girl Madeline.

  

Adorable bride.

Bachelorette party aka Laura's Hen Party.

The bridesmaids' gifts were engraved flasks.
One of the bridesmaids may or may not have carried her flask in her cleavage
during the ceremony. (She did.) (It wasn't me.)

Bridesmaids' bouquets. (We made these ourselves! We're crafty!)

The bachelorette party was held in Delaware, Ohio, where I went to Ohio Wesleyan University.
We spent that night at the Delta Zeta house which has no air-conditioning.
(Write that down in case you're considering sleeping there one of these Julys. 
Then write a big red X through it.)

We didn't break in to the DZ house;
several of us were DZs in college so we got permission from the housemother.
(That was the uninspired route, however. I sort of think it would've been more exhilarating
to spend the night in the Tri-Delt house next door.) 

The bridesmaids and the groom.

Wedding Day Schedule.

In addition to surviving the wedding, we also visited my family and engaged in wine-tasting and living-room-warfare, and we ate seafood because for some reason seafood has become a tradition when we go back to Ohio. My people are People of the New English Sea Areas which probably has something to do with it, and frankly the mussels in Ohio were somehow amazing so that also plays into it.

Jack and Raphael turn the tables on Graham utilizing their
super-laser-foam-pellet-shooting-gun-and-the-element-of-surprise-and-also-a-rubber-shark.

The Noyes/ DeJongh/Watson ladies:
June aka Nana, Candy aka Mom, Mara aka Cutest Baby There Is (sorry other babies), Julie aka Julie (also cute in some ways), and Jenny aka me (I'm sorry but I do like me some bunny ears on babies and food items).

We made and wore fascinators for Laura's bachelorette party
and Mara suffered for it. (But I think she looks better in it than I did.)

Nana's hands and Mara's feet.

Seafood. 

Sleepy Mara.

Did I mention we arrived in Ohio on the Fourth of July?
 Naturally there were fireworks and sparklers.

Brayden has mad sparkle-making skillz.

Wine-tasting at my parents' house in Beavercreek. My parents are such instigators these days.

So the first part of July flowed by quickly in a heady and humid swirl of Oasis-blue cotton sateen, sunset-colored roses, babies, and fish, and upon our return to Arizona, we immediately headed to the Sonoita/Elgin region which is only about an hour southeast of Tucson for a day of wine-tasting, thunderstorms, and more wine-tasting.

Did you even know Arizona has a wine country? It's seriously adorable. Also, wine tastes better when it's raining and not eight million degrees outside.

The vines at Hops and Vines winery.

Thunderstorm.

Summer.

At Wilhelm Vamily Vineyards. Family.  I kind of love that typo, though.
I picture them as vampires now:
"You know zat eez not vine, yes...?"

Packing & Unpacking Event #3: Car-camping on Mt. Lemmon. A week later, searching for more rain to soothe our hot souls, we went camping for three days up on Mt. Lemmon which isn't the Chiricahuas like where we wanted to go because for some reason they have closed our favorite campsite there. Mt. Lemmon is a lot shorter of a drive, however, so it has that going for it. It was also beautiful, and the campsite was close to empty. It rained a lot while we were up there, and Lila, who doesn't care for water, reacted to the damp by developing some kind of terrible gastrointestinal thing which has meant that since we've been back, we've spent a little too much time hosing out the rugs and mashing potatoes for the dog. But it was worth it.

Cozily waiting out another thunderstorm in the back of the truck.

The Amazing Truck Mobile.

In between all these activities, I've been struggling to run regularly (I can't get past 2.1 miles, but that's 2.1 more miles than I could run a month ago) and keep the garden alive (goal met. So far), and we've* been building a porch on the east side of the house. The ultimate goal here is a wooden deck-thing with a door opening onto it off the bedroom, but so far we're just up to the porch part which is, frankly, just as awesome.

*When I say "we", I mean, of course, "Raphael". Although I've lifted some things such as a board once and provided support in the form of gasps and little flinching facial expressions when the ladder shifts suddenly or when people are trying to lift a 200-pound beam over their heads, and also I've drilled some screws into some beams which was terrifying.