open space

Finally, I had a free weekend to relax with friends and the family as I have finished my essay writing at the moment, so it’s time to catch up on my To Do list! The weekend was absolutely stunning with its sunshine and warmth – not enough to take off your cardigan yet, though! I spent time hanging out down at the park knitting with my friend and the kids created a tree sculpture in the sandpit dedicated to the environment entitled ‘Protect the Trees’. They kept on finding pieces of foliage and rocks and twigs around the park to add to their group installation.

Sunday being our family day we went out for a hike up to Sierra Azul Preserve in Los Gatos. Another hike we haven’t visited in our 10 years of living here. Little did we know what to expect once we started hiking…

Look for the hangar in the centre of the pic, and we find our house

A perfect place for a picnic or to camp – though you would have to haul it up here!

We ended up hiking 4.5 miles up the hill as you can see from the pictures we were looking over the whole valley from where we were from Palo Alto to San Jose. The urban sprawl at its finest on this beautiful and bright day. It was a great hike for exercise walking for miles uphill though the kids constantly wanted to stop!

“This is boring, my legs are tired,” say the kids!

It was too hard for them to walk up and up and up. In the end, we decided to walk to the oak tree on the trail which was 2.25 miles, and from there the kids were a bit annoyed as it really was not that exciting for them to see the oak tree.

The good thing was that once the hike was done and we saw the tree we went back downhill – it is hard on your legs and knees. I would totally recommend this hike for a family who wants a bit more of a workout on a hike as it is all uphill to the top the views are perfect on a bright day, and it is so good to see the valley from up high!!

Oh, and the bonus was that I watched two really wonderful films – Hello my name is Doris and Girl Asleep. Both quirky and a lot of fun. A favourite character was Doris as she was an older lady with such a crazy fashion sense who is cracking onto her co-worker. This leads to some funny scenes and the best being when she joined him for a gig out to see an electro-pop band, that outfit is the best!

Girl Asleep is an Australian film set in the 1970s so I loved the film from the beginning seeing the clothes and the 1970s cars in Australia. My favourite sequence of the film is when Greta had her 15th birthday party and everyone who came danced their way into the room and then it was all on – a scene of dancers at the party, I gave this film 5 stars just for this scene of 1970s dancing!

This is the last post for the year – 52 weeks of being creative and making something every week has been a challenging though worthwhile experience…

A very happy new year to you!

Finally some time to relax and catch up on spring cleaning the house in time for the New Year. That has been one heck of a job with bags of recycling and a trip to Goodwill and boxes and boxes of kids books! Finally working through my last room today – the sewing room has been a good thing with getting everything organised for the New Year. New Year and new projects! Even our garden is cleaned up after the rain and the storms of the weeks past. Amazing what you can do when free time presents itself and you are on a cleaning mission!

This week I made a hat for our friend’s little bubba – who is now 2 months old. We had a sweet time yesterday hanging out with her. This is a little wolf modeling it before we packed it in a care package of a bag with books and Recipe Sacks super easy meal kits for busy families.

A bulky knit hat for a little bubba

Time to cook fun stuff has been wonderful with the free time and a bushel of Meyer lemons a friend gave me from her tree. I made Meyer Limoncello – with the help of this super easy recipe! There will be no Limoncello until the end of January though it will be fun to see the lemons and vodka mix together in our dungeon under the stairs. And I made Meyer Lemon Sables – one of my favorite recipes for cookies! Super easy and once they are rolled they make over 80 tasty little morsels.

Limoncello – I cannot wait to taste you!

Meyer Lemon Sables in their cookie jar

Today as part of our get out of the house and away from the cleaning mode we went hiking up to Los Trancos Open Space Preserve – it was freezing and windy and super cold up there on the mountain but we persisted and warmed up (once we were out of the wind!) We did 3.8 miles over 6 km with the kiddos over terrain with elevation at the end – which can be a bit of a struggle with the kiddos complaining! The mission was to find a power stone and make it back to the car for snacks and a drink – yay!! Initially we were on a .7 mile Fault Trail running parallel with the San Andreas fault line – which made it interesting for the kiddos. We powered up for a snack and wandered down to the Franciscan trail after the Fault Trail and then visited the Lost Creek way down low. Then came the climb up – according to my phone we climbed 26 floors today!

The kids love to climb and we found this lovely little rock collection to climb at the edge of the trail and of course they climbed to the top and what did they find? A buddha hiding in amongst the rocks! What a serendipitous little find with my readings on buddha this year and life as a vegetarian practicing Qi Gong. Qi’s to you all and may 2015 be filled with peace, happiness and harmony.