Carousel Horses!

Our local museum is featuring an exhibit on Carousel horses (and other animals). These are all from the Carousel Restoration Museum in Oregon. We had a guided tour with our homeschool group and it was fantastic. Both the children and I learned so much about carousels.

This beauty is the most valuable horse here. Price $45,000. Deb's personal favorite.

This horse had gilding on his mane.

They had more than just horses. They had quite a few other animals like dragons, tigers, lions, sheep, and even a fish. The chicken below belonged to a carousel that was entirely chickens. Nathan wanted to see that!

This is a European animal and notice the two seats. This was for courting.

They had horses that were in various stages of repairs so that you could see the process required to restore one of these beauties. They also had horses that had been damaged by people who thought they knew how to restore them. The neatest thing is that this carousel restoration museum in Oregon restores these horses so that they can be used in carousels. They want them to be ridden.

Below the children are trying out the eccentric gear used to make the horses go up and down.

Tulip Time

We made our annual trek to see the tulips today. They were in full bloom.

So were most of the azaleas.

The children brought their cameras so it was a lot of "stop, I want to take a picture".

And of course, they wanted to see if they could float a petal down the stream under the bridge.

Here was a lone tulip struggling to live among a bunch of rocks.

I forgot to remind Aaron to bring another memory card so his ran out before he was done taking pictures. I let him use my camera to take the pictures he wanted. Here are two of his pictures below. I thought that they were wonderful compositions.

Violet Jelly

I made the violet jelly today. It turned into a lovely purplish pink. I gave the children a taste and they say that they are willing to go pick another 2 cups of violets so that we can have more violet jelly. I can't say that it really tastes like violets. The violet water smelled more like a newly mowed lawn to me but I guess when you add a bunch of sugar to anything, it tastes good.

New hydrants

We took care of our leaking hydrant problem by taking it out and putting in a new one outside of the shed.

Then, while we had the contractors out here, we had them dig a trench and put another hydrant in the garden. Now we won't have to drape hoses across the yard to water the garden. We also had them pull electrical service out there. We'll power the electric fence from here. The upside down buckets are protecting our asparagus from the contractors.