This Old Punk House

See more photos at http://flickr.com/gp/thisoldpunkhouse/E82yUS/

We’re spending the weekend at a cabin in Mazama, to do a little cross country skiing.

Happy New Year everyone!

Read it here!

I spent the last week volunteering at the Rain City Rock Camp for Girls. It was both an exhausting and exhilarating experience.

In the mornings I helped my friend Rebecca with drum lessons – the first class of the day was for 9-10 year olds, and the second class was for 14-16 year olds. It was interesting to see the differences in the two groups – the younger girls hit *much* harder, and weren’t concerned about making mistakes. They actually got further along in the lesson plan during the week than the older girls did! Each class was a class of 3. There were a total of 60 girls at camp, divided into guitar, bass, drums and vocals. From there they were split into 4 age groups, and then the drum lessons got split again since there were no rooms big enough to house 8 drumsets at a time.

After lunch I had a break while the girls did a variety of workshops and crafts, and then later in the afternoon I worked as a “band coach” for 4 girls ages 11-13. During the course of the week, they learn an instrument, form a band and write a song. So I helped guide them through songwriting, as well as dealing with any technical issues they encountered, and a little instrument coaching when needed.

On Saturday afternoon, all the bands performed in a showcase at a local rock club. It was packed, with over 600 people! All the girls were great, but I was quite proud of my girls for smoothly transitioning from part to part (like from verse to chorus). That is a very difficult thing to master when new to an instrument.

Here is a brief article from a local paper, along with several photos. My band isn’t among them, but each of the bands was pretty captivating in their own way: The Stranger

Looking forward to next year!

A few photos from around the yard….

Miss Lady, Trixie and Gamera. See the whole coop and building process here.

Things have been pretty quiet lately what with winter, the holidays, traveling, getting sick, etc., but we’re starting to gear back up again. We’ve been clearing out the vegetable beds for planting (peas have already sprouted!), purchased and planted some new fruit trees and berries and picked up a comfy loveseat for the front porch.

We’re also getting ready for some new additions to the family – chickens! We’ve been wanting to get chickens for years (we eat a LOT of eggs), but with all the work we were doing on the house it wasn’t practical. But now things have settled down and the coop building has begun. I can’t believe how fast it’s going up:

Day One: the floor frame and back wall. Denny picked up some used windows at the recycled building materials store.

Day Two: the front wall.

Day Three: the base of the indoor coop (the rest of the space is a run):

Day Four: the frame for the roof:

Our chickens will be a couple of months old when we get them (hopefully this week) – they are part of a larger chicken order by some friends. We’ll be getting three ladies, and we hope they’ll start laying by fall.

It’s been a week since we got back from Turkey, and we’ve managed to whittle down our photo set to just under 500: http://flickr.com/gp/thisoldpunkhouse/oq6j87

Denny hasn’t had a chance to add to the descriptions yet, so you might want to check the link again in a week to get his insights (usually helpful as my memory is so terrible).

Today we spent the whole afternoon at the amazing ruins of Ephesus. This entire city is said to be the best-preserved of all ancient Roman sites. It was incredible and we’ll post a lot more photos when we return.

Having a good time here in Istanbul, but the weather has been freezing! It’s supposed to wam up tomorrow though, and we’ll also be heading South (to Selcuk).

Denny has been taking most of the photos with his non-Internet camera, so we’ll post that when we get back. But for now here is a photo of me at Taksim Square.