Today I’m debuting a new weekly series, “Photo Finish,” where I’ll share some pictures of my week that might not fit anywhere else. I’m going to slightly cheat this time by starting off with a few from my visit last week to Crater Lake.

As a teenager I had been to Crater Lake, but Steven never had, so last week we went for our wedding anniversary. If you’ve never heard of Crater Lake, it’s a pretty amazing place. It’s in south-central Oregon, about five hours from us, but it’s only accessible for about four months every summer because it gets so much snow.  In fact we drove by plenty of snowbanks that haven’t melted yet, and couldn’t resist stopping by one to have a snowball fight. From looking at it, you might think that the lake was created by a meteor hitting the earth, but a mountain actually erupted and collapsed about 7,700 years ago.

We took a boat ride out to the island in the middle of the lake (Wizard Island), which is actually another volcano that rose up out of the crater left by the first one. After climbing to the top, we had snacks inside that collapsed cinder cone you can see at the top.

The incredibly blue water might look perfect for swimming, but it’s all snow melt, and very deep, so the temperature is only about 45 degrees. Steven braved the cold and jumped in. I was a wimp, and didn’t (though now I wish I had). Don’t worry, there was no danger of hitting bottom here, since it’s 200 feet deep in this spot. Which is nothing compared to the maximum depth of 2000 feet in other parts of the lake.

After we got home it was back to house projects and normal life. A while back I think I mentioned that we painted our office and built shelves, but I haven’t shared photos yet because I’ve been trying to figure out how to style up the shelves so they’re not just entirely covered with books and movies. Here’s an early attempt. This is only about a third of the shelves–they’re huge and take up the whole width of a wall. We built them from reclaimed wood and pipe flanges, and I’m so happy with how they turned out.

It’s a family tradition to make raspberry jam every summer, and this week I helped my mom with a couple of batches. I couldn’t resist breaking open a jar to make sure it meets our quality standards–it’s sooo good.

My parents are fostering two orphan barn kittens, so jam-making was interspersed with kitten-cuddling. This is Quinn, who’s only about 3 weeks old. He’s super tiny and scrawny, and has a funny little purr to match, but my mom is fattening him right up. Isn’t he sweet?

Those are the highlights of my week. We have lots of friends visiting town this weekend, so it should be a fun one. Hope yours is great, too!