Random Ramblings...Hello again blog-world!

I realized I haven't posted anything since October, and the Oct post wasn't much to talk about. I don't think life has been that busy...I guess facebook has taken precedence the past few months. So here's a last post for 2008.

Over the last couple weeks we have been receiving super fun Christmas pictures and cards from many friends living in other states, and even some friends living 2 doors down from us! Needless to say it has made us feel slightly guilty that in 7 1/2 years of marriage, we have yet to write and send out a "Christmas letter" - ya know the ones that give a summary of your life during the past year to everyone you haven't had a chance to hang out with in person. Maybe that's because we don't have kids yet and usually that's the main focus of the letters. I don't know. But I'm glad that we have so many friends who are nicer than we are and who do send out those letters and cards - it's so fun to see what you've been up to (or at least see a recent picture!)

I noticed that my blog profile pic is from our Big Bend trip in 2007. And now it's almost 2009. Maybe it's time to find a new one?? We'll see.

In November, Paul and I went to a marriage conference put on by Family Life. I highly recommend it. It's a great check up for your marriage - it has great reminders about principles everyone should hear in pre-marital counseling, and the homework that they give is really fun and definitely something Paul and I needed! I feel like we are more proactive in putting our marriage first now (over work, etc). It's easy to fall into a routine and become more like roommates sharing a house, instead of soulmates sharing and living life together with one purpose. So if you want more info about it, go to Family Life website and look for Weekend to Remember.

We've had fun family visits recently. Paul's mom was in TX for almost a month going back and forth between our house and Philip's house in Austin (Paul's brother). It was a good time to catch up, play games and relax all together. Mom treated us to Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy show in Austin which was really fun. Paul's dad got to come out and join us for about a week of that time and we all had an early Christmas together. It was fun to get to give gifts and see everyone's faces as they opened them. Part of my Christmas gift from Felicia was a pedicure which was super fun. All of us girls went together and either got a pedicure or manicure.

The game of choice was Settlers of Catan, or Cities & Knights (a variation of Settlers of Catan). Any outsider looking in would say we were addicts, and the prevailing comment before starting a game was, "Christianity and Marriages go out the door when this game is played" - we were all ruthless and competition was fierce. To prove our addiction, both Paul and I and Philip & Felicia gave each other the Cities & Knights game for Christmas (we had always borrowed their friend's copy before), so now we have a game at each house so it's always ready to be played. It's a sickness! But so much fun!

After Paul's parents left, my sister Daria came into town to visit - her first trip to Texas! We also had fun going to a different kind of acrobatic show - Golden Dragon Acrobats. It is a smaller production than the Cirque Dreams show, but a lot of similar feats and definitely amazing. It's crazy how people can move their bodies like that and combine such strength, balance and grace all at the same time! Daria also did a mini makeover on me and got me out of my "camp" clothes into a dress and heels! We had fun shopping at the new outlets near Houston, and also got to visit our cousin Stephanie in Houston and her 3 kids (including twins!).

(After she arrived, TX decided to change from the 70 degree weather to 30 degree weather for a few days)

Her friend Lindsey lives in Austin, so we got to hang out for an evening and explore Austin cuisine including Hey Cupcake for dessert.

Of course we also had to teach Daria how to play Settlers of Catan (she won the 1st game). Then we taught her how to play Cities & Knights and she won that one, too. She definitely caught on quickly and dominated. Though playing with 3 people is much different than playing with 5-6 people - strategies change depending on the number of players.

We attempted to make cut-out cookies, too. We did eventually succeed, but it was a 2 day process because we didn't finish rolling out/cutting/baking the cookies til 1am, so we waited to frost the cookies the next morning. They were filmed as part of Paul's Board Report soon to be posted on YouTube for our Board of Directors to watch, so I'm guessing it's the first batch of cut-out cookies to become famous...okay maybe not but I bet no one else posts their Christmas cookies on YouTube. :)

After she went back to Florida, Paul and I had a few days off and we pulled everything out of our bedroom and bathroom and sorted/re-organized/cleaned. It felt good! We had about 4 bags of stuff we trashed and 4 bags of stuff we gave away, and now I feel like we can decorate and eventually paint/put new floors in. The big projects will come later - probably after summer, but for now I'm excited about an organized room without junk we don't need!

This is a picture during the middle of the process when everything was pulled out. Paul thought it looked like a "Where's Waldo" type picture - can you find Flurry, our dog?

The next project will be sorting our home office in the same way, but I think we're both dragging our feet on that one because there is so much stuff in there!

Today we went Geocaching for the first time together. Paul had gone once before with Philip, his Dad, and Corban, but I had never gone. I didn't really get what the attraction to the hobby was, but now I can see that's fun. Basically it's just an untimed scavenger hunt that uses GPS as clues. We set out to find 4 spots in Giddings, and were successful at finding 3 of them. One was pretty tricky. The 4th one that we didn't find - I'm not sure if it still exists, even though it was posted only 1 month ago. But I think it must have blown away or accidentally picked up and thrown away.

Other than that, we've been working and watching Heroes episodes (we're on Season 2 now), playing with the dogs, and enjoying the "quiet" camp season. Summer is just around the corner for us, which I need to learn to embrace instead of fear. I really love summer camps, it's just the "to-do" list that needs to be done before summer camp always seems so long and time seems so short!

Merry Christmas everyone...and if I don't get another post up before 2009, Happy New Year, too.

So you may have noticed that I took the Fireproof Movie ad off my blog header. But if you haven't seen the movie, I would highly recommend it. I loved it, and so did my family and friends, so if you didn't see it in the theaters, go to http://www.fireproofthemovie.com/ to find out how you can see it now.

Videos from our Washington & Oregon Vacation

I haven't figured out how to turn the video on it's side yet, so you'll just have to tilt your head a little. There's a surprise ending, so wait for it. This is at Fairy Falls, along the Columbia gorge.

This is at Pikes Place Market - where they throw the fish. Such good salmon!!!

Adventures in Washington & Oregon!

So last week was our turn to take a vacation to celebrate a successful summer season at camp. Sunday we flew into Seattle, WA and then drove up along the northern route of Hwy 101 around to Olympic National Park. This is crossing over on the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry.

Sunday night we drove to Forks (stopping to enjoy the small towns along the way, and getting fresh plums from a fruit stand (they were super sweet and perfect texture!).

On Monday, we took a small hike on a trail outside the Logging Museum in Forks. We wanted to go into the museum, but they were closed on Mondays, so we just looked at the exhibits outside.
Along the trail, I just kept saying "It's all so big! I feel like a smurf...it's just all so big!!!". Little did I know these were the smaller of the trees we were about to encounter.
These are red alder trees. Apparently they grow well in disturbed areas, and they are nitrogen-fixing (their roots have some kind of bacteria that help to make nitrogen and add it to the soil). So they are natural fertilizers. How cool is that?
I'm glad all the rain in Forks, WA doesn't fall at one time!

After we left Forks, we made our way down to the Hoh Rain Forest. They average about 140 inches of rain each year. The ranger said that they had a dry summer this year and "only got about 10 inches of rain". I was tempted to tell her that our definition of a dry summer was less than 1/2 an inch of rain. The Hoh rain forest usually gets most of its rain from September - April.

This is a Sitka spruce tree (one of the dominant tree types found in the Hoh Rain Forest). It is over 270 feet tall, and they estimate 500-550 years old.
This is sori (pronounced "sore-eye") on the underside of a fern. The ferns were so big and so abudant all over. It was fun to see such a different landscape than Texas.
(more ferns)... The ranger guided us along the Hall of Mosses trail, and this is a close-up of the moss that grows on the trees. Apparently the moss helps the trees by trapping soil and water way up high in the branches, and the trees actually send out roots up in the air toward the moss to collect nutrients. We were told the moss also makes great habitat for spiders, so I didn't hold on to this piece of moss for very long.
Here Rachel (the ranger) is pointing out how "nurse logs" happen in the forest. Basically a big, old tree dies, falls down, and then small seedlings start to grow on the trunk of the dead tree. As it decays, the dead tree provides nutrients to the seedlings, and they are "nursed" through their early years. The roots of the young trees grow around the dead tree, and then eventually when the dead tree decays completely, the new trees have already established their roots in the strange shapes, so you end up with holes that you can see through. And that's also why you'll see many trees growing in a line - they all grew up on the same nurse log.

(trees in a line)

This is the same tree that Paul and I posed in front of above.

More crazy root systems due to nurse logs.

Mushrooms!

This is a view from the road leaving the Hoh Rain Forest.

From there we went to Ruby Beach. It was really cool to see all the drift wood and the black sand and the rock formations.

(Paul running toward the Pacific Ocean).

Aww, I can just hear the romantic music in the background now, as the titles of "Love Songs from the 70s, 80s, and 90s" stream up the TV screen.
I think he was missing his pail and shovel for the sand castle. :)

Paul took this picture and hit it just as the wave crashed on the rocks.
This was neat for us to see. It's a freshwater stream flowing into the Pacific. We had never seen a small stream flowing into the ocean before. We've seen rivers meeting the ocean, but to see the small stream run into the ocean was really cool.
Another shot of the freshwater stream.

After we left Ruby Beach, we raced toward Eco Park Resort (close to Mt. St. Helens) where we would stay in a log cabin with no electricity. It has propane lights and heat, and a propane powered refrigerator, but that was it. The bathroom was outside in a separate building and also had propane heat. They had a solar water pump that fed into the water heater at 50 gal/hour, so we were asked to conserve water. I was surprised at how hot the water was in the shower.
Our bathroom unit.
On Tuesday morning we were able to pick blackberries along a trail near our cabin. They were also very big, and very tasty! From these blackberry bushes, the owner of Eco Park Resort (Mark Smith) makes really good blackberry pie that we had after breakfast. I was glad we indulged in dessert in the morning, because when we came back through for lunch, it was all sold out.
What a beautiful morning sky!!!

Since it was a clear day, we were advised to head up to Mt. St. Helens first thing since it has a tendancy to be visible only 121 days of the year. I guess the steam coming out of the volcano tends to make it's own clouds around the top.

You can still see the mud-flow trails even after 28 years.
Some of the land surrounding Mt. St. Helens was allowed to naturally recover, and so it still looks like this - pretty bare. Other land was manually re-forested by the Weyerhaeuser company and has done really well. There are differing opinions about which approach is best - human intervention or nature.

Here's a shot of the mountain and I think Castle Lake (we're looking at it from the north - at Johnston Ridge Observatory). One tip for anyone going to Mt. St. Helens - the Weyerhaeuser Forest Learning Center has better exhibits about the blast and it's free (the Johnston Ridge Observatory isn't, although I didn't mind supporting the National Park Service since I could tell they are in need of funding!!).

This is a shot of where they clear-cut the forest to harvest the wood. We were told that Douglas Fir like full-sun to grow, so they have to clear-cut the forest, so that when they re-plant the seedlings, they survive without older trees blocking out the sun.

One of the towns we saw along the way to Eco Park Resort. So much wood waiting to be processed! And it's all renewable!

After we read everything we could stand to read about Mt. St. Helens, we drove to Portland, OR and had dinner with my mom's brother & family - Dick, Carol, and Anna (Garret was at college). They served us great Salmon and veggies and rice, and we had fun catching up.

Dick gave us great tips about what roads to take for the best scenic drive, so on Wednesday we set out to see waterfalls along the Columbia Gorge. I think this is Latourell falls.

This might be Wahkeena Falls (all the names kinda run together now that we're home).

I'm pretty sure this is Fairy Falls. I liked this one the best.
For some reason this picture is flipped (it's supposed to be horizontal, not vertical). I think it's a banana slug, but I'm definitely not an expert on that. (The head is at the bottom of the picture).If only I could capture the full beauty of this trail in a picture. I loved this part of the trail!

So if you're still reading, here's a short story. We were hiking along the Wahkeena trail, hoping to reach the top of Multnomah Falls and look down on it from above. However we didn't have this map with us, and we got to a crossroads of trails that had signs listing 4 more miles to different destinations, and since were weren't sure where we were, we decided to turn back and take a shorter side trail to take us back down the mountain. Once we reached the bottom, we realized that we had only been 1 mile away from the top of Multnomah Falls. We were kinda bummed that we turned back early, but we still had a lot of fun on the hike that we took. Needless to say, though, we didn't take the time to hike up to the bridge closer to Multnomah Falls. We just looked at it from the bottom and then went on our way.
Multnomah Falls...the second highest continuous waterfall in the U.S.
Are you still reading! What a committed blog reader - you must be a parent. :)

Okay, after the waterfalls, we went to the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River (operated by the Army Corps of Engineers). The salmon were running from the ocean up to the spawning sites, so that was really neat to see. There's a job that consists of counting the fish by species that go up the fish ladder at the Bonneville dam. The lady watches the fish as they pass by a window and she identifies the fish species and then hits the appropriate button on her fish keyboard. The tricky part is if a fish crosses and then gets lazy and floats backwards past the window, she has to subtract that fish from the count. The people who do this job have 8 hour shifts and get a 10 minute break every hour. I would never be able to do that job. (Sorry, I didn't take any pictures of the salmon).

The dam was built in the 1930s, and was expanded during WWII because they needed more power to build more war equipment, etc. So they actually dug out part of the river bank, created a second dam, and then routed the water to flow through both dams. Pretty crazy undertaking. But now the turbines are needing replacement, so we actually got to see an old turbine being dismantled, and a new one ready to go in its place.

We contemplated driving to Mt. Hood, but it was getting late in the day, and the mountain was covered by all the incoming rain, so we skipped the long drive. We attempted to view it from the vista point, but that didn't work very well. :)
After our trek we met up with Dick & Carol again and got a condensed tour of downtown Portland and then we went out for gourmet pizza. And when I say gourmet, I mean we had a Thai pizza with peanuts and a thai sauce along with 2 other veggie pizzas. It was super good. On Thursday we went to OMSI in Portland ("Oregan Museum of Science and Industry"), mainly so Paul could tour this submarine - the USS Blueback. He just finished a book about how the nuclear submarine program was started in America, so he's been pretty interested in submarines lately. This one was actually a diesel engine sub, but it was still fun to tour.

I'm glad I have more room than this to cook at the camp!!

After spending hours at OMSI, we went to visit my Grami, who I don't get to see very often. Somehow during all of our visits with family I neglected to take pictures, so I don't have any to post. But it was all very fun!

Thursday night we drove back up to Seattle, WA and on Friday morning, we headed to Pike's Place Market for a Savor Seattle culinary tour (very worth it if you're ever in the area!!!). These window washers weren't part of the tour, but I wanted to take their picture anyway.
Look at all the colors!! Everything was so fresh and tasty - after the tour (which consisted of tasting lots of different foods from the market), we spent the afternoon grazing on different produce from many vendors. It all tasted so good!


This is Yori (sp??), who gave us our taste of smoked salmon on the tour. We went back after the tour and bought some to bring home. It was very good. This is where they throw the fish from the ice to behind the counter (to save time/energy). I have a video of our salmon flying through the air, but I'm not sure how to load it yet...I'll try to do it in a separate blog.

Eh, what's up doc? The woman we bought our carrots from said she picked them at 2am that morning. I asked her why so early, and she said that it was raining the day before, and she didn't want to pick in the rain. So she got up early after it stopped raining and picked them to bring that morning. It was probably the sweetest carrot I've ever tasted. (No, mom, I didn't wash it before eating it, but I survived).
Later in the afternoon, we took an Underground Tour of Seattle. It was really fun to hear about the history of Seattle and how it burned down and then was rebuilt on 2 different levels because the business owners couldn't wait for the city officials to rebuild the city on a higher level, so they re-opened their shops on the original level, which became the underground (now abandoned). The tour itself wasn't as great as we expected because the tour group size was so big, and we felt rushed through all the exhibits. But it was still interesting to hear about the original crapper and how toilets would become geysers since the city was originally below sea-level and that doesn't work too well with gravity controlled plumbing.

You can't see the toilet tank because it's mounted about 5 feet higher than the toilet so that the water would flow down when you flushed. The toilet is also built on a platform higher than the ground to try to avoid the toilet water coming back up the toilet when the tide changed directions.

The arches are where old windows used to be...I think.
After the tour, we finished off our Seattle experience with a Crab, Shrimp, Potatoes, & Corn feast.
Yes, I ate it all...all by myself...I only let Paul eat the hard sourdough bread. ;)
This is a picture of Pikes Place Market after it closes for the day. The counter on the right of the picture is where all the flowers used to be. They said that there's a farmer that travels 250 miles ONE WAY to bring their produce from the farm to the market. I don't know if they travel back and forth each day, but that's a lot of driving! And to have to set up and take down each day just seems like a lot of work.

The crazy part of our whole vacation is that we never once got rained on. On Sunday evening it was raining lightly while we were driving to Forks, WA, and I think it might have sprinkled a little while we were inside OMSI, but we never got wet the whole week we were there...not even in the Rain Forest!

Well, if you made it this far, you deserve a medal because it's the longest blog post ever. Hopefully you enjoyed the pictures. If you ever want to visit Seattle or Portland, do it in late September - it was the perfect time to go!