Happy Number 3 Annie!

In honor of our visit to the zoo, we decided to make Annie a baby elephant birthday cake. Everyone knows that of all zoo animals, elephants provide the most cake meat pound-for-pound. Nathen's family and our family are quite the riot when all gathered up, and we all had a great time showering the Annie with pink and glittery presents that night. Zoe was really bad at being the non-unwrapper, reminding me about the misery of not being the birthday girl. I mean birthday boy. Sibling birthdays are pretty much Christmases wherein Santa Clause couldn't fit down the chimney.

Annie's Zoo Birthday

When Zoe's cousin Annie turned 3, Sara and I took her to Hogle Zoo to visit the Utahn animals. Utah animals are just like other animals, but much more docile. Having grown up in Logan, I only got down to Hogle Zoo once in a little while, but I distinctly remember the lion head drinking fountain. It was cool to share that memory with the Zoe. When I was in fourth grade, I was let out of school for good behaviour and put onto a yellow bus to visit the big city and the zoo therein. Mom and Dad gave me my first camera to take pictures while there, and I thought it was the absolute coolest thing ever. The first picture I ever took was of a great big box turtle at the zoo. Since then, we've taken enough pictures of zoo animals to fill several editions of National Geographic...if the society were to ever stoop low enough to publish many special editions featuring caged African wildlife staring at wagon-mounted toddlers. Annie and Zoe seemed to enjoy the zoo plenty, especially the baby elephant as it walked around its enclosure. Cue the music Mr. Mancini! After our zoo excursion we filled Annie up with sugary slurpee (like we always do) and sent her back home so we could build her a cake. We sure like that Annie!

The emblems of our family

Sara was commisioned by her aunt to make a family crest to be presented at the family reunion. I am always so impressed by my little wife's artictic finesse. She spent hours studying heraldry so she could most accurately capture what her family holds near and dear. I'd say she hit it right on the head. Every line and color has a meaning, and anyone who knows her family would agree that nothing was incorrect or left out. The crest was embroidered onto a flag, and hung up in the lodge. Pretty cool.

Sara's Grandma Ranae and Granpa Glen are pretty much the best grandparents around. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Sara's Grandpa. When we were just beginning to date Sara and I were up in Idaho visiting, and when I held the car door open for Sara, Glen came over to her and told her that she ought to keep me around. That same trip I figured out that I most certainly did want to stick around, because I'd be gaining such great grandparents by marrying Sara. I gave them my immediate seal of approval when, even though we didn't get to their house until after 10:00 p.m., Ranae still got out the ice cream. Anyone who gives me ice cream late at night forges an unbreakable bond. Since then, I've been adopted as an honorary grandson, with all rights and priviledges bestowed upon me, including make up time at Grandma's fishing pond during the family reunions. My mom's mom died when I was only 12 and dad's mom passed away about 10 years ago. My grandma gap has been very well filled by Grandma Ranae, and I'll never be able to thank her enough for it. After the kids went to bed, Sara and I spent hours talking to Glen and Ranae at the reunion, and their stories taught me a huge lesson. In the sunset of your life you don't look back on the jobs or the money. Instead, you talk about the car rides with the kids, and the great friends from next door. Grandparents spend reunion time observing their own lives as reflected in the surrounding grandkids and great grandkids. Surely getting married and having kids early was a better choice than getting a head start on the CEO trail. I hope I can be more like my grandparents and enjoy those golden years starting now. Thanks for everything Grandpa and Grandma Glen and Ranae!

My nature's preittier than your nature.

So nature is really pretty, and there sure is a lot of it out there. I grew up in Cache Valley, Utah, where all the locals are 100% convinced that they've homesteaded on the world's best looking land. Now that I've been around the country quite a bit, I've been humbled enough to shun my haughty upbringing. Ends up that there are even prettier places out there! As you can tell from these pictures, one of those places is rural Idaho (rural Idaho represents about 98% of the state). During the annual reunion up at Little Piney I'm always in the thick of actuarial exam study time, so I've gotten into the habit of waking up early and hitting the books before everyone else is around to distract me. During this particular trip, I watched the sun come up over all the trees on the mountainside and it was so pretty I almost wanted to become a perma-camper. I recovered from this mind set quickly when I remembered that I'd have to trade my plumbing and my microwave in order to make this happen. I think a few times a year is enough to fill my nature canteen. Besides, I live in western Washington now, where if you stand still long enough outside you find that there's green slimy nature growing on your skin, so I've got plenty to look at.

Zoe and her cousin/best friend in the whole wide world, Annie, spent a lot of their outdoors time throwing stuff into the river. Sara's uncle Dennis brought a really cool PVC pipe rocket launcher and Zoe couldn't stop launching stuff up into the air. Grandma provided the annual fishing pond (thanks Grandma) and all the kids ate more than their weight of cookies and chips. Add the slide and baseball diamond to the mix, and you've got a great big steaming hot pot of summertime fun. Looking at these pictures make me long for the warm summer sun. Here in Puyallup we haven't seen a sunny day in about two weeks. I guess that's what we signed up for. Hey Mr. Golden Sun, please shine down on me!

Lodge Cooked Sliders

When Summer nights are starting to get a little colder than you want them to be, and the mountain lions start looking for food at lower elevations, its time to go camping in the woods! I'm not really sure you can call the annual family reunion camping, seeing how we stay in the gigantic lodge and eat all sorts of home cooked (lodge cooked) meals. Actually one year we did sleep in a tent during the reunion and it was delightful...when the sun finally came up! Sara's extended family on her mom's side are very rugged and tough outdoorsmen. People on my side of the family are better described as squishy and reclined basement dwellers. If you really think about it though, the latter lifestyle is preferable as mountain lions rarely infest a basement, but if they did, imagine how happy they'd be when they discovered the squishy people reclined down there. Despite our differences, Sara and I both absolutely love the family renion, probably because her family are the nicest folks to ever reunite. Beyond eating, there are other generators of family fun at Little Piney Campground such as the ginormo slide that goes from the lodge all the way down to the swing set and baseball diamond. What is that, like half a mile of pure terror? Those stairs are a new luxory to sliders, we used to have to climb all the way back up the mountain using our bare hands. Zoe thought it was the neatest thing since Elmo met Big Bird. We must have hiked up those stairs 20 times, that comes to 10 total miles. A few years back, on my first time down the chute of death, I made the horrible error of putting my shod feet out. The rubber on my shoes stopped, but I kept going...over the slide side and down the hill. Like the true man I am, I walked it off. Since then I know, as taught by Sara's 6-year-old cousins, that one must use the supplied carpet samples when sliding and keep the feet safely tucked away.

Sound advice found in a Heber City burger joint.

The Housing Battle in Seattle

Have any of you ever had only two days in a foreign state to find a suitable dwelling? Its not a whole lot of fun because in the back of your mind you wonder if the best thing you'll be able to find is that nasty basement rental on Beacon Hill with the spider-infested bathroom and the police on speed dial. We had spent hours and hours on the internet before our trip making appointments with would-be landlords to check out their offerings. It ends up that this is not the best way to find a dwelling because internet ads are often less than truthful. Some cyber landlords were very confident that we'd like their properties, so much so that they offered us the keys to the house sight unseen as soon as the deposit money and first month's rent was wired to their off-shore accounts. We didn't take the bait.

The first day in hot pursuit of a Seattle domicile was just awful. We must have been through over ten houses, each of them scarier than the ones before them. My personal favorite among the blighted was the upstairs floor offered to us by Eric the Red. He actually said to us, "I hope you guys don't have any pets because there's been raccoons eattin' cats 'round here." His only redeeming quality was his skills in math, which he displayed by dividing the utility bills into fourths, "That's one fourth for me and one fourth for the three of you". I guess the raccoons aren't willing to pay their share, even though Zoe is (or should be). Needless to say, we were very unhappy in the hotel that night.

Everything turned around the next day when we met up with a real estate agent reference from the guy that helped Nathen and Jennifer find their house. Within one day she'd found us a cute little brand new yellow house to rent up in Lynnwood. I guess sometimes you have to turn to the professionals. Thanks to her help, we were able to do a little bit of site seeing that last day in Seattle, and we snapped a few vintage Space Needle tourist pictures. This was before it had been dubbed the Space Noodle by our creative little daughter. On the other side of the monorail line we found my new work building. She's the taller one on the right. Surely we'll have a better picture for you in the future. The cylinder towers across the street from my office are the Westin hotel. Sometimes the less private hotel goers give my coworkers and I quite the show as we go to the printers and back. Strange how only the unattractive get dressed on their balconies.

Fishing with Nathen

Our brother-in-law Nathen is a super outdoor woodsman sort of guy. If there were ever a freshly eaten grandmother in the forest somewhere, he'd be the kinda guy that wouldn't even think twice before volunteering to cut her out of the big bad wolf. Back in August he invited us to go "up the canyon" with him to do some fishing. For those of you who didn't grow up in a mountainous region, "going up the canyon" is a local term, which loosely interpreted means to pile into a truck, go on a two hour drive through windy rock-ridden roads, and get really dirty and sweaty. The Nathen fishing trip was no exception. I learned that going up the canyon with your wife is a lot more fun than it ever was with the Boy Scouts. Here's why:Sara is a closet camper. There's no way she'll agree with me, but I think she really likes to go out of doors and enjoy the wilderness, regardless of her frequent tirades to the contrary. If it weren't for the dirt, wild animals, lack of toilet paper, and e-coli, I think she'd be a mountain man woman. Observe the picture above. That's not an "eeeew" face, it's an "I'm so proud of myself" face. In the middle of a long silent spell during our drive to the lake Sara exclaimed, "Are we there yet, I really want to kill a fish". This is the girl I married. Here's a picture of what Nathen did the entire time we were extracting fish from the lake. None of us were any good at tying the line, casting, hook removal, or sharing, so he ended up spending all three hours going from one hopeless fishing novice to the next fixing our mistakes. The less queasy among us (me) even got a fish gutting lesson from Nathen, which ended up being really cool. I had no idea that fish came pre-equipped with handles for facilitating disembowelment. Nathen's a great guy. I wonder why he hasn't invited us back to the lake? It probably has something to do with our moving to Seattle.
We each succeeded in fish catching at least once. The one I got was a funky looking albino freak, so I was forced to return it to the white demons that spawned it. Nathen instructed me to throw it back, which I did by way of a very manly overhanded football pitch. I was then ridiculed by my family members for not knowing that "throw it back" is fishing lingo for "gently release into the water". I'm not sorry for the maltreatment of the albino mutant, he was probably one of those weird roller-coaster loving fish anyway and I provided for him the thrill of his aquatic life. That's the kind of nature lover that I am.

Bridging the Transcontinental Gap

I've got a few more pictures of the Golden Spike National Monument in my holster so I figured I'd pull 'em out, and throw them into the massive sea of internet imagery. This is Sara and the Zoe and I in front of one of the cool new old trains. One of these days I'll find myself at the monument again when they actually fire one of these babies up and move it up and down the track. I remember that being really cool when I saw it as a Boy Scout.

This first picture here is Zoe and I in front of the original plaque that was put up in 1943 before all the visitor centerage and replicary was installed. I really like how the plaque says it was at this spot that the country was bound together by iron rail. That's pretty cool. Not to ruin the magic, but like I previewed in the prior posting, even though the driving of the golden spike marked the ending of the rail line from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco. There was no railroad bridge over the Missouri river until March of 1873. Until then, transcontinental passengers had to hop off the train in Council Bluffs, Iowa, cross the river by boat, and board a new train in Omaha. In 1939 a 56 foot upside down golden spike replica was installed at the 0.0 milepost of the original transcontinental railroad in Council Bluffs. Curse us for not stopping to get a picture with it when we traveled through that area a bazillion times back in the Wisconsin to Utah driving days (I done stole this picture from the world wide web). That's a really cool giant upside down spike.

Like all other Utahns with a speck of class, I was relieved when it was announced that the "Crossroads of the West" design was successfully voted upon as the Utah state quarter. That's waaaaaay better than that dorky snowboard one. What was the motto that went with that one? Something like "Utah: Old Conservatives Trying to Be Extreme". I didn't hate the beehive one though, mostly because I really like honey. Did you hear that the US Mint is starting to put National Parks on the backs of the quarters now? That'll be sort of fun. I think the reasoning behind this is that its the only way that the government can force we spend-happy Americans to actually save money. Honestly, how many of us have a stash of state quarters in our top drawers worth a total of $12.50? I do, and I'm proud of it.