Grandpa Milo did lots of interesting things in his life. One of them was that he built a half-acre concrete pond on his little farm outside of Newberg, Oregon. It was a filtered pond with a three foot waterfall and a 12 foot waterfall, a Japanese garden, volleyball beach, a cabaña for parties and much, much more. He put in several thousand petunia’s every year along with a lot of other flowers so it was absolutely beautiful. Aunt Julia found the original plan he made on some computer paper and I thought I would put it up here for posterity.
Grandpa sold it to some folks who turned it into a wedding location when he retired. Here is the view from Google maps:
Betty Blonde #288 – 08/25/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
These pictures are the room where we really spent most of our time. You could call it the kitchen, but it was really not just a kitchen. It was a living room/kitchen/breakfast nook with a fireplace and it was (for us) a very big room. There is a formal dining room and a separate, more formal living room where we did a few things, but this is the room where we lived. It belonged more to Lorena and Christian than Kelly and I because they were almost always there. Lorena worked in the kitchen and the laundry room next to it while Christian studied at the bar across from the stove, often with his cat Rubix laying on his arms.
We entertained mostly in this room, too. It was the place where we had the most seating, so people gravitated there. We did not entertain frequently, but when we did, it was usually with a pretty good sized crowd from church or school or both. The formal dining room was too small, so we set up tables that ran from the area in front of the fireplace all the way past the breakfast nook.
It might be at least partially because I am listening to Kelly’s really excellent Enya channel on Pandora, but there are lots of additional reasons to feel melancholy and nostalgia. We just received two very touching emails about some dear friends in their very last days on this earth. The are the same era as Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. They have been good and faithful people all their lives so there is joy in this, too, but we are hearing this kind of news way to often these days. It is hard to lose those who have been an example and an encouragement in all the right ways over the entire course of my life.
We have decided to minimalize our material goods while we wait to see where we will land in the next few years. We have already sold a bunch of stuff. This is a picture of Christian putting a bunch of the rest of the stuff on Craig’s List. It actually feels very, very good. The funny deal is that we are only really intent on keeping mementos, the homeschool and other books we have not already sold, photos and a few pieces of furniture.
