Home Times

After arriving home on April 4, I got to jump back into life with little people and their mom. I'm tired of belaboring all my thoughts about that here, so I won't. I'm boiling it down to the phrase, "complicated, but functioning." That's how it's going, and I suspect, will so go for quite a while. We're all doing okay, and that is enough for now.


In the meantime, I've had several wonderful opportunities to reconnect with friends by having lunch, wonderful days together, or just visiting. I'm so glad for opportunities that have come up to be useful to other friends. It makes me so happy and recreates the feeling of belonging and ease I feel when I'm with family.  I've booked a couple of photoshoots, but that is definitely on the back burner at the moment. I'm focused mostly on doing the fashion photography for other knit designers, and trying to keep up on the few commitments I've recently made. On the portrait front, I'm most interested in helping out close friends and family right now.

The weather has been amazing, and I've made some headway catching up in my poor, neglected garden. Back to tending other gardens, I suppose. I've moderated my dreams for this year's garden and am hoping mostly to get the weeds under control and plant a few tomatoes. I need to move two lavender plants that have grown very large. I may plant some herbs, and I'm excited that the rosemary bush survived the winter. No lettuce or spinach this year; instead I'll content myself with the blueberries and strawberries, and try to keep moving flowers around to spruce things up.

This week Eric and I make a rare trip together from start to finish and we will watch our third son and daughter-in-law graduate from BYU in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, respectively, as well as celebrate Jeff completing his Masters in Mechanical Engineering. It will be a good weekend for Nusses. My mom is feeling well enough that she and my dad are driving up for the celebrations, and we'll share a lovely house I found on AirBnB. Love that site.

Beyond that, I'm just doing the usual things. I'm mostly back to my workouts, and am embarking on a project to overhaul my food storage and get through some of the backlog, so I'm doing a lot of pantry cooking. It's something I enjoy--the challenge of coming up with a good meal from what's on hand--and I'm pretty good at it. I bought a bread machine, because food people I trust say it's useful in various ways for making bread. The Automatic cycle works for lots of things, but the dough and custom cycles are apparently brilliant for mixing and rising dough to perfection. We had our first loaf of plain old whole wheat last night and it was super-easy and good. Today I'm going to try Wheat Berry bread with the dough made in the machine, then shaped by hand and baked off in the oven. I'm looking forward to tasting the results.

Here are pics of the last two weeks:

Corinne, the twins and I spent a glorious day
in DC exploring the Renwick, DAR
Constitution Hall, and the WW2 Memorial. 

That night, my friend Jessie stayed with me. She lives in
Nebraska and she's awesome. It was so fun to catch up with
her. 

I missed the daffodils, but the primroses are
making me happy. 

All the gardening. 3-4 hours most days. 

Another day with the twins while Corinne spent time with
family. We had SUCH a fun time. 

All the little people got together for lunch and
this actually happened. 4 under 4 sitting. At the
SAME TIME! 

I work here every Tuesday night and it is a
major time of solace and refreshing. 

I'm trying to have some adventures with my
young housemates, so we discovered the
Robinson Nature Center last week. It's a great place
and I can't wait to go back. 

Last Friday, Jeff defended his thesis and they let Eric and I watch
via video chat. It was so cool to see him, poised and knowledgable,
do his thing. Loved this moment.