July

Man alive, this month has gone by fast.  Starting with our fun 4th of July trip to Colorado and then continuing the fun back here at home in California.  And before the month is over the girls and I are heading to Utah for one last quick summer get-away before Clara starts Kindergarten in mid-August.  Which I'm trying hard to ignore for the moment because I cannot believe she will be a KINDERGARTENER!

Anyhow, we made it back to the beach last week with friends from our old ward.  Or actually, practically the entire old ward, it felt like, since a huge group of them get campsites together and do a week of beach camping each July.  I keep wanting to go but always chickening out since Paul can never come.  But maybe next year I will be brave and go for it.  

We had a great time for just the day anyway except that the drive home took two hours and the girls fell asleep in the car around 6:15, just before getting home, which meant a miserable bedtime routine and night of sleep for very confused and very tired girls (including myself).  But it was worth it and the girls played their hearts out in the sand, digging and chasing waves and being buried by mom.  And I had so much fun catching up with friends who I do not get to see nearly enough.  I would LOVE to move back to San Jose if we could figure out a feasible commute situation for Paul, but alas, the commute from SJ to SF is brutal so it's not happening any time soon.

I have been keeping very busy with two new personal projects.  The first is probably not news to most people who might read this blog.  I started a separate food blog to post recipes and stories and serve as an outlet for my food photography (which I am loving since my subjects don't tend to run away from me like two speedy little girls).  In truth, I'm hoping to make something of my little food blog and eventually earn a little side income from it - nothing to brag about, but maybe enough to cover expenses and afford some fun travel.  Either way, I have been enjoying combining my favorite hobbies of food, photography and writing, and have been spending too much time over at House of Nash Eats (which, if you haven't checked it out, please do!  And feel free to go like the Facebook page for House of Nash Eats or the Instagram page or join the subscribe list or something so that you can get updates.)  Gosh, I even set up a Twitter account for it, which is so weird for me because I definitely do not do twitter.  Like I said, I would like to monetize it eventually and a good way to do that is through sponsored posts with brands that pay bloggers to mention them in a recipe post, but to land those you need a bit of traffic and a following.  I would do the blog regardless of making money off of it, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings if someone wanted to compensate my hobby, so...  We'll see where things go.

My other personal project is learning videography.  I'm currently taking a videography class that I was super excited to get into (there were limited spots and loads of people on a FB group I am a part of who were all trying to get one of those spots - we sat and refreshed our screens and all the seats were gone in about 3 minutes.  I was lucky enough to snag one).  It has been so much fun and a lot to learn, which is why I think I like it.  I just love learning new things!  It makes me feel more...me, I guess?  Maybe it's my BYU education with the whole "lifelong learning..." thing but it just lights a fire in me.  We are still early into the course and haven't covered more than basic editing and haven't touched on color grading, audio, music, or anything like that, but I had to put together a little technical assignment with a bunch of different shots that we are practicing and even my silly little technical assignment makes me feel inordinately proud.  You can see it below, although some of this footage may go into my final project, which will be a fully edited video with music and everything (and will definitely be posted when the class is over).

Amy Nash - Technical Assignment from Amy Nash on Vimeo.

We have been doing our typical summery stuff - having friends over for dessert on Sundays, working on house projects (oh man are we working on house projects - it is a full exterior overhaul with retaining walls, landscaping, painting the house, etc. and it is going to take us months to finish, if we even get to all of it this year which seems unlikely), swimming and going to concerts in the park.  I sure love those little concerts and look forward to them every year.  It is such a fun scene.  One thing I need to start being better about is taking still photos because I have been so focused on food photography and videography that I am letting my regular photography slide a bit.

But that has been our July!  August is going to be a big month with a lot of change for us!

Point Reyes National Seashore on Memorial Day

On Memorial Day this year, we did a day-trip over to Point Reyes National Seashore.  It has been on my list of California places to see for years now and it's not even that far away.  The drive was just gorgeous with beautiful trees and fields filled with cows grazing on wildflowers and tall early summer grasses.  We stopped to stretch our legs at Inverness in Tomales Bay when we saw this interesting old boat that had been abandoned on the shore.  Turns out it is a bit of a local landmark that has been around for decades and just this past February somebody set off fireworks in the back of the boat and it caught fire, nearly destroying it.  The front still looks good but the backside is all burnt out now.  The girls enjoyed walking across a "balance beam" (log laid across that little stream in front of the boat) and then searching for tiny hermit crabs in the sand on the other side where the tide was going out.  

As we got closer to the coast, it got overcast and cooler, which was just right for the little hike we wanted to do down to the Point Reyes Lighthouse, which operated for 105 years from 1870-ish (I'm just going off what I overheard a ranger mentioning) to 1975 before being replaced by an electric version.  The ranger said that it was always hard to keep lighthouse keepers because of how remote and desolate the area is and how demanding the job was.  They had to crank the operating mechanism on the light every 2 hours to keep it going and in bad weather they had to shovel 140 pounds of coal an hour to keep the foghorn blasting.   The longest they ever kept a lightkeeper was something like 12 years and many people only lasted a week before quitting.  And interestingly, we learned that the lighthouse at Point Reyes has a 5-second flash, which is a signature so that sailors know which lighthouse they are at - the lighthouses above and below along the coast have different flashes like a 3-second flash, etc. 

Clara was picking wildflowers along our way from the car to the lighthouse.  A park ranger ended up confiscating her bouquet, which was very sad.  I mean, I get it that if everybody picked the flowers there wouldn't be any left for others to enjoy and we talk to Clara about that all the time (oh my gosh, seriously enough to drive a parent crazy!) but there is just something about little girls and flower bouquets.  Clara finally understands that at home, she is only allowed to pick dandelions and not our neighbors flowers but out in the wild, it just feels wrong to tell her she's not allowed to touch. 

We went through this tunnel of cyprus trees.  I find cypruses to be absolutely beautiful and fascinating trees, the way they get all bent and curvy to hug the land near the sea from being blown by the ocean winds for their whole lives.

There are something like 300 stairs down to the lighthouse and both girls did them on their own on the way down and back up, even though Rose especially had to be coaxed along on the return portion.  I think during winter you can often spot whales from here so we will have to plan another trip in for January because wouldn't it be just amazing to see a humpback whale spouting just off the coast from this perch?

 After visiting the lighthouse, we stopped at Drakes Beach, which was super overcast and gloomy but still a nice place to have a snack and let the girls play in the sand.  Clara found a bunch of large, smooth rocks and gathered them up, calling them "dinosaur eggs" and burying them in the sand to hatch.

We read about Sir Francis Drake (the first person to sail around the world) and how he made it to the bay here and stopped for over a month to gather supplies and repair their ship.  They had come from England sometime around 1579 and gone all the way around the south tip of South America and then back up the coast, losing 4 other ships along the way and collecting gold and treasures from Spanish ships (Sir Francis Drake was a privateer for Queen Elizabeth I - so basically a pirate sanctioned by the English government).  Their whole trip took them 3 years and the sailors were homesick and thought the cliffs here looked like the white cliffs from their homeland.  The Miwok Native Americans who inhabited the area had never before seen white men.

We put a movie on for the girls on the drive home and Paul and I talked about camping this summer and when and where to go.  It's nuts that it is June now!  April and May feel lost in the abyss of pain and recovery from my surgery but I'm so glad to be better and able to start planning and doing fun things like this again - just in time for summer!

Last of Thailand - Ao Nang & Tub Kaek Beaches, Krabi

On our last full day in Thailand, we took a taxi into Ao Nang, which is a little beach town with restaurants, shops, hostels, and tour operators vying to take people out on the water for the day.  We walked around for a bit, looking into shops for souvenirs but not seeing anything we hadn't already seen.  But the girls were antsy to go across the street to the beach so we ended up spending most of our morning on the sand in the shade of palm trees nursing our sunburns while watching the girls splash in the shallow water with their waterwings.  Since Ao Nang is a really popular area with lots of people, there were locals walking up and down the beach with coolers full of cold drinks or little grills full of coals and buckets of fresh corn that they would grill for you right there while you watched.  We got some orange Fantas and corn for a snack and then grabbed a tuk-tuk back to our resort around naptime. 

While the girls napped, I did another cooking class, this time through the resort where we were staying.  It was actually just me and the head sous chef for the hotel's restaurant, which was kind of cool.  He actually didn't speak a ton of English but we managed to get by pretty well and I got to learn to make some amazing spring rolls, another soup called Tom Yam Goong (soooo yummy), and a red curry.  

Once the girls woke up, we went down to Tub Kaek beach to hunt for hermit crabs and seashells, which is what we did every night we were in Krabi.  The beach had the most spectacular sunset views of the islands and the tide was low each night so we had plenty of beach to stroll on.  We found living sand dollars at the end of cool trails that they made through the wet sand and Clara filled her pockets and our hands with seashells that she gathered.  The rest of these photos are from three different evenings but since they are all the same thing I just grouped my favorites together.  

Those little pearls of sand on top of the smooth sand that you can see in the photos below were made by crabs digging themselves up out of the sand once the tide went out.  They made these cool patterns and we thought they were fascinating.  You can see tiny holes at the center of each pattern from where the crab burrowed itself out.

There was also a rocky outcrop sort of area that was fun to explore and each evening we were there a local fishermen was out checking his nets.

That's the fisherman that Rose is watching in the photo below.

Clara has been obsessed with practicing her cartwheels lately (and is improving quite a bit because of it) and she did cartwheel after cartwheel on the soft white sand.

On our very last night, we ended up sitting at the outdoor tables right next to the sand, ordering tropical drinks to sip long after the sun went down.  The girls went absolutely wild for the pina coladas and tropical mango punch mocktails and we wished we had done it every night instead of just the last one.  Instead of blending the pina colada, like we have had other times, it was more like a juice poured over ice and wow, it was scrumptious.  I finally had the thought to take a picture of the resort.  It was built on a side of the hill and kind of stepped down toward the beach with pools on each level.  

This picture was taken with the camera just sitting on the table where we were sipping our drinks and watching the girls run around between sips.

Ah, it was such a wonderful trip.  Clara keeps asking when we are going to go back.  I certainly hope we make it there again someday.