Forty years ago today, I gave birth to my favorite son, Mark. When Stephanie got married, she made my life easy, by marrying someone with the same birthday!!

You can see that Mark started out as a hunk and has never changed. Mark is a landscape designer in San Francisco. He does remarkable work, always coming up with a design to suit the home and the owners. One of the things I will miss about our home here is all the wonderful work that he has done for us. Mark is a much loved person by everyone who knows him. He is generally happy and loving. Our dog, Maggie, goes nuts every time he comes to visit. He has endured some hard knocks in life – but he always seems to bounce back. Mark, Dad and I love you very much and are looking forward to celebrating with you next week-end.

The reason Mark is not here to celebrate his birthday is that he is with Jack, Stephanie, Mia, Milo and Jaime because he likes to celebrate with his bother-in-law. This is Jack with Steph and Mia, when she was a baby.

We often say that one of the best things about our six years in North Carolina was having Jack come in to our family. He is an architect, fabulous husband to Stephanie and the greatest Dad in the world to Mia and Milo. One thing I love about Jack is his love of puns, puzzles of all kinds and playing Scrabble (and someday, I am going to beat him!) Happy birthday, Jack! We love you, too, and look forward to spending more time with you and the family.

Well, it isn’t really all about the two guys. I wanted to share some wonderful liturgical textiles with you. Today is the first Sunday in Lent and at our church, we celebrated mass in the parish hall with these wonderful liturgical hangings. The images are painted on a burlap type fabric. It really was beautiful and serene.

Today was our last Sunday at Incarnation and it was a bittersweet time. Yesterday, I stayed in bed all day as I caught one of those airline colds. I’m feeling better today and even got a small travel poster art quilt almost finished. It is for the Quilt Art challenge. I know I should be packing, but I needed some creative time. I’ll show it when I get the quilting done.

We are back in California, after a long day. One of the difficult things about living in Sonoma County is the distance from any airport. It took less than two hours to fly from Portland to Oakland, and 2 and a half hours to drive from the airport back to Santa Rosa.

This morning Mia made this drawing of Mr. C and I ready to move to Portland.

I am carrying my purse (of course) and the box of toys from our house. Mr. C has a box of ice cream cones and a box of light bulbs! We thought Mr. C was wearing bunny slippers, but she says they are shoes with ties!

This morning Milo was running around in just his underpants when it was time to get dressed for pre-school and yelled that he didn’t want to get dressed because he is from California. Gave us all a good laugh. I guess he thinks it is really balmy down here.

Of course, I had to do some more drive-by photography.

Here are some views from the San Rafael Bridge:

Here are some scenes on Highway 101, driving from Marin County to Santa Rosa:

I love the California Oaks in the spring:

And here are some vineyards:

Look! A rainbow:

The source of the rainbow, a bright Santa Rosa sunset:

On our plate today were more errands and signing up for services at the new house. Thanks to every for your comments and advice about our missing jacks. We are not ready to go totally wireless, but we have found that you can get a phone system that is partially wireless which will require fewer jacks. In fact we will only need one for the base phone, then you can have additional phones in other parts of the house that only require being plugged in to electricity. So that sounds like a go. The Phone Man is meeting us at the house in the morning to give us an estimate for installing one or more jacks.

I took measurements of windows in the bedroom and bathrooms so that I can whip up some make do curtains until we are ready to commit to something more permanent. I’ll just get some expansion rods to hold them.

Mia requested that I come to pick her up at school today. They were celebrating the 100th day of school and it was all about 100. Each child had brought in a baggie with 100 objects. they did art work using 100 things.

Mr. C and I borrowed Jack’s car and did some driving around our new neck of the woods. He decided that we know just enough about Portland to be dangerous!

Tonight we got take out from a near-by Tex-Mex restaurant. I had an Ahi tuna burrito ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù twas yummy. After dinner, Mia sat on my lap and drew pictures of cute birds and fancy birds. There is a very small zebra, also.

Here are two paintings by Milo that I love:

After we meet with the phone man in the morning, it is off to the airport so that Stephanie can get reorganized for Mark and Jaime to show up for the week-end. Mark and Jack share the same birthday so he likes to come up here and party with Jack. They have rented a "real log cabin" (Mia’s words) at Mt. Hood where they will enjoy the snow.

Here we are in Portland for a few days to check on our new home. Yesterday was amazing. Money from our buyers left Florida in the morning, east coast time. Before we left the house at 9 am to drive to the airport, we got an e-mail that the money had been received and money for our new house was being wired to Portland. Halfway to the airport, our Realtor called to ask if we wanted to close yesterday instead of today. Of course! So by the time we got to Portland, we owned a house and could get the keys and have our way with it!!

We met Cynthia there to get the keys and she had champagne, wine and cheese and balloons:

Today, we went back to start thinking about things we need to do: window coverings, area rugs, cable, phone jacks ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù phone jacks? ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù what do you mean there are no phone jacks. Smoke detectors ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù what do you mean there are no smoke detectors? You see, when you fall in love with something, you don’t notice all those minor little details.

Smoke detectors were delivered to the house for us to install, but the phone jack thing is a BIG mystery. We found where the phone line comes in?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù here in the unfinished basement:

The lines run along the ceiling and appear to go up to various rooms in the house, but there is no evidence of phone jacks upstairs – anyplace!! I am sure someone can take care of this for us – for a price!

Here are some more shots of the studio area. There is a smaller room off the studio with a counter top, storage and a sink. Here are some photos of the area. I am so excited to have a place to keep paints, dyes, etc:

More details: I noticed that the outlets in the studio are all located midway up the wall:

Here is the other room downstairs which we are calling the media room. It also has a fireplace.

M & M came to see the house for the first time today. They thought it was appropriate to run around wildly in the studio while there was no furniture to impede their excitement:

Oh, look, it’s the masked avenger. Maybe he will find the missing phone jacks!

A few details that I was trying to explain to my friends at lunch the other day. Here is the funky art deco window thing that opens into the foyer to let in more light:

From inside the room which was a dining room, but will be Steve’s office:

Here are the cool closet doors handles:

And here is what is blooming in my new yard:

cherry blossoms:

camellias:

mystery plant:

It was a beautiful day in Portland. The sun was shining and it was almost balmy. Tonight we went out for sushi. A great day!