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14 diciembre Snow has fallen.A few inches of snow are on the ground. We trecked up to Everett for my companies annual Santa party for the kids at Imagine Children's museum. It was fun but it's also 50 miles from our house and the weather wasn't exactly prime for driving. Pictures to follow as soon as I can figure out why my computer thinks it needs to reformat my camera's memory card (which I don't want to do while it has pictures on it).
*Update: Grainy camera phone shot attached.
23 noviembre Thanksgiving in CaliforniaIt has been the year for family reunions for us. Last July we were in Bear Lake, UT for a reunion with my Dad's family. For Thanksgiving we are in Granite Bay, CA with my Mom's family. This is a big reunion with about 90 people. It is my Mom's parents and all the kids, grandkids and great grandkids. I haven't seen many of my aunts, uncles and cousins since the last reunion about 10 years ago. We decided to drive down. We are taking our time on the drive though. We packed Monday and made the short drive down to Portland area to stay with my sister and her family. The next day we took advantage of sales tax free Oregon and did some shopping, mainly for Shanda's upcoming birthday. We then mosied our way to Medford for the night.
Wednesday we enjoyed the sight of Mt. Shasta for a good portion of the drive. We arrived in time for dinner with several family members that night. Thursday of course was the big day. The "men" gathered for flag football in the morning. The 2nd play found me sprawled on the ground, dazed but not injured. The game was fun, though now I can barely move as I'm very sore. We all headed back to our temporary residences to clean up and meet at a local church that we had permission to use. Many of my aunts/uncles live in the Sacramento area so they handled the meal. It was a great feast with all the usual fixings. We had a family photo session, pinewood derby race (I forgot to build mine), tribute and birthday celebration for grandma, and in general just enjoyed catching up with everyone.
Today we took are time and relaxed. We had lunch with just my parents and siblings to celebrate my sister's birthday. This evening we are heading back to the church to for dinner with all the family and a talent show. I brought several of my outdoor photographs to display. Tomorrow they have more activities but we will be starting our drive back. Shanda didn't want to do the marathon all day drive. That's alright as I hope to stop in Shasta National Forest for a break.
Families are important and it has been great to spend so much time with them this year.
I've posted pictures of this reunion on Flickr. 24 octubre Uncle BrianI'm officially an uncle now. My sister just gave birth tonight. Ava is 10 pounds 12 ounces! That explains why after hours of labor they had to finally have a c-section. She is 22 inches long and has a full head of hair apparently. We are still waiting on pictures. We'll be heading down to Oregon this weekend to see Trish and Jeremy and to meet our niece. We are all very excited and happy that everything has gone well for them. 07 julio Family Reunion at Bear Lake, UTI've spent the last week with family at Garden City, UT on Bear Lake. Bear Lake is at an elevation of 5,900 feet with 48 miles of shoreline. It stretches across the Utah/Idaho border. It was a family reunion on my Dad's side of the family. Many of the family members I haven't seen for years. We spent a few days on the sandy beaches on the lake. The water is very shallow for quite a ways out and great for playing around in. My uncle brought his jet skis. It was my first time on jet skis and it was great.
A couple of the days my Dad rented 4x4 ATVs. On Friday we went up some pretty rough but fun trails next to Beaver creek in Logan Canyon.
On Tuesday we went up to Bloomington Mountain and hiked back to Bloomington Glacier Lake. This was a beautiful area with a perpetual snow field melting into the lake. The lake was at 8500 feet elevation and pictures can be seen here.
We spent the week in our own condo at the Trendwest timeshares my Dad is a member of. It was a very relaxing week with a lot of great activities. Here's a link to more Bear Lake pictures. 22 marzo Kiera has arrived!Kiera was at 12:20am on 3/22. She is 8 llbs, 3 ounces and 21 inches in length. She is a very healthy little girl with a healthy set of lungs! See full size pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/flyingkayaks/sets/72157594349430699/. 21 marzo Kiera is on her way!Shanda started having contractions every 10 minutes this evening and so we packed up, dropped Kael off at my Mom's and headed to the hospital. The contractions started coming every 3-5 minutes so we had to hurry. We are now checked into the hospital and Shanda has her epidural so she is feeling much better. So now we are just waiting for labor to run its course and deliver this baby! 16 diciembre Windy weather and power outageThe Thursday night winds and Kael's cold ended up keeping us up a good portion of this last Thursday night. I woke up with no power and headed up to Redmond. The MS campus had only backup power for lights but no internet connectivity. A coworker and I ended up heading to one of the data centers to work that day since they have backup systems to keep them running regardless of the power supply. After work it took forever to get home. Our neighborhood still had no power. My parents live only a few miles away and have a generator and a wood pellet stove. My wife and son spent the day there and we ended up spending the night. The power came back on at our house sometime in the early afternoon thankfully. It is now in the 50s inside our house which is better than the 40 degrees it was earlier this morning when we came to check it out. We did not get any damage from the winds though I was keeping a close eye on the large evergreen trees that line our backyard that night but thankfully they all stayed standing.
After some study of a large insulated box that is built against one side of my garage and some wiring into the electrical panel, it was determined that we could easily put in a generator. The box has venting specifically to hook up to a exhaust of a generator so it'll vent outside to allow the generator to stay inside the garage. My parents have two and have offered to give us one of the generators on long term loan so they don't have to store it. We just have to switch a plug around and during the next power outage, we'll be able to power our essentials: the furnace, refrigerator, a few lights and our home entertainment system. Happily, we only lost power at our home for about 37 hours. Next time we'll be prepared.
08 noviembre It's a girl!We just found out today that we are having a girl. My wife is about 20 weeks along and our new daughter is due March 26th. We are very excited. Our son is turning two years old now and it will be great to have a sister for him next March. 10 agosto SeafairWork was again busy. I came home every night with the intention of working some additional hours but it never happened. I'm on call this weekend anyways so why waste the weeknights strapped to my computer, away from my family. Work isn't going anywhere and spending time with my family is important.
Last Saturday we went to Seafair. It was our first time since we moved to Washington. It was a lot of fun but it was pretty pricey. $30 per person to get into the park! And once inside, everything in there cost money too. But we are glad we went. We watched a Coast Gaurd demonstration where a chopper dropped off several men onto a waiting boat. We caught a little of the Patriots air show. The biggest thing we came for was the Blue Angels. They were great. It is amazing what those pilots can do and what the planes can do. I took some half way decent shots of them. They are posted here. We also watched one of the hydroplane racing heats. It was interesting but since I couldn't even tell who was in the lead, I didn't take too much interest. The weather was on the warm side and was great. The place was packed. If we'd known how much it was going to cost when we got there, we probably wouldn't have gone. So I'm glad we didn't know. But it will probably be the last year we watch the Blue Angels from the park. Next year we'll find another vantage point that isn't so pricey and pack a cooler full of refreshments.
03 agosto New Spaces and a fresh start for my siteI haven't touched this site much in a year. It used to contain my political points of view, some tech tidbits and various outings. I moved my political rants over to another blog site and stopped using this site since many of my coworkers see it since we use Windows Live Messenger throughout my place of employment. I'm a vendor at Microsoft in the MSN division which is quickly morphing into the Windows Live division. And as the Live web applications continue to grow, I'm more impressed. So I'm reworking my Spaces site a bit so that it’s a bit more lighthearted. My political blog is still out there and I'll leave it unnamed as I know many of those who see my Spaces through links from Messenger may disagree and I have enough of a load at work to keep things busy without adding the contention of differing viewpoints into the mix.
In family news, we've recently moved into a much larger home just about a mile south of our first home. Our little 940 square foot rambler wasn't cutting it for size anymore. It was a great house and a good investment. With an active little boy who'll turn 2 this November, we needed more space though. And now with a 2nd child on the way and due around March of next year, we have the space we need. We are excited about the new child and the new one. It'll be a little while before we can find out the gender. With my wish already granted of a son as our first, I'm looking forward to find out if Kael is going to get a little brother or sister.
With the new house though we have so much work. Our team at work is a bit short staffed and our work load has increased. This is a good and a bad thing. The good is the extra hours help out with all the various new costs and larger mortgage but it has left me much less time to work on the house and to get out and do the things we enjoy. I've done very little hiking and my one camping trip this year turned into a death march starting at 9pm out of camp due to a really nasty stomach virus I received from my son. It was almost 5 miles back to the parking lot along a cliff side trail in the dark. I haven't had the time to go hiking since then. I finally bought my first sea kayak in March of this year and have only had it out on local lakes a couple of times. I'm still hoping to make up a little for lost time and get out for some hiking and kayaking this summer. We sold our 1st house ourselves which caused us some headaches and took a lot of time. But it saved us a bundle of cash. We moved into our new place at the beginning of July.
I'm looking forward to providing updates and sharing pics of my family and outings with friends and other family members. This site is meant to be family friendly, so while I welcome comments, please keep them clean or they will be deleted. |
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