Tree house goes green; new bumper; grandkids take a hike

By all rights this should be several posts, but my laziness wants to just make it one long post. The Blog apologizes.

Darci drew this picture of The Boy's cat (note the fearsome claws!) and The Boy, wearing an extremely unlikely red Raiders shirt, and sitting on his swivel chair. Her drawings crack me up.

I have lots of pictures from this weekend's walk, but this one proves that summer is here. Mrs Notthat is wearing a tank top and the previously lushly green hillsides are now lushly brown tinderboxes.

The nice weather caused the grandkids to call my bluff about painting the tree house ("we have to wait until it stops raining" I have preached to them all winter). So we attacked it.

Riley was a lousy painter, but was reasonably good about getting most of his paint on the wood. Darci, on the other hand, was an OK painter - especially of herself.

 
Alert readers will note that Darci is wearing a different shirt at this point - the first one was pretty much saturated with green paint.

For some reason, they couldn't wait to paint the floor. I spent a lot of time explaining how they needed to be careful not to paint themselves into a corner, and yet, they did it anyway. (Yes, I know that they are only 5 and 3, but still.)

Finally we were done. As bad as this looks, she actually cleaned up pretty easily. Well, except for the bit she got in her hair.

Riley had his issues too, but at least his hair was paint-free.

This morning I went out and did a lot of touching up and Mrs Notthat and I now consider this finished. Darci and Riley, not so much. Careful viewers will notice the "D" and "R" have a slightly darker green paint on them. Darci wants to paint her "D" pink and Riley wants to paint his "R" either yellow or black (or both). I'm pretty sure I will mysteriously be unable to find pink or yellow or black paint anywhere.

Speaking of painting, this is The Boy's latest gadget for his Jeep. Being bare steel, the first thing he had to do was paint it. Weirdly, he seemed to have no trouble finding black paint.

This is how his Jeep looked with its stock bumper.

And this is The Boy installing the new bumper. It's all set up now for the winch that he is planning on adding as a future gadget.

The grandkids have been dying to go on a hike with us, so we took them to one of our favorite areas from last winter - the boulder infested Castle Rock State Park.

There were a few trees down across the trail. Note the walking sticks that each of them found and used throughout the hike (mostly to whack things).

After going about halfway, I surprised them with "energy pills" disguised as M&Ms. The green ones were the most powerful. (At least until I reluctantly admitted that the brown ones, which I had been saving, were really the most powerful later on, when they were really starting to drag.)

Here we are at a waterfall lookout. I have no idea why my mouth is open like that. Darci probably made a rude noise.

I love all the moss-covered boulders. They loved crawling around on them, dodging poison oak (which was all over the place - they seemed pretty good about staying away from it; we'll see in a few days how that went).

Here we are at the top of a bunch of rocks. The kids loved crawling about on these things and did not want to leave.

In the end, we walked about three miles. There was a bit of kid carrying going on towards the end, but for the most part, they did great.

Thanks in large part to the energy pills.

That's it - move along...