Summer Cliff-notes
Hmm, well so much for grand intentions of writing more religiously but this summer was nuts! Great, but nuts. We were busy every single weekend through July, August, and so far into September. So much to do, so little time. I suppose if we were better at writing we wouldn't have to condense our many many fun adventures into a quick cliff notes version. It's much more fun to blab about things when they are fresh, but we're working on it...
The weekend after Grandma Klein's bday party (way back in July) we drove to Moscow to watch Peter perform in the U of I's IRT program. They put on A Comedy of Errors and it was wonderful. Mike and I also went with my mom and dad both Sat and Sun morning to the city pool for "adult swim" time. Hah, we did no swimming, we rode the slides over and over...little kid and line free, it was great. The weather was broiling too so it was great to play in the water and laugh lots!
The last weekend in July was spent in Boise for our friends Scott and Tammy's wedding. More roasting weather but we were able to squish in a leisurely float down the Main Payette with Jeff, Jeanette, and my buddy Leigh while we were there. On the day of the wedding it was really hot and the wedding was outside at 3:00 in the afternoon, but that didn't deter them from having a lovely ceremony and a great reception that lasted into the night. The engineering guys had a blast pulling all sorts of shananigans on the groom's truck -pay back is hell...and he's nearly the last of this group to get hitched!
That Sunday in Boise was Mike's birthday! The end of Mike's 8-week-a-year-I'm-younger-than-you-baloney. (for the 8 weeks our ages differ I get to hear HOW much older I am than HE is...tsk) I spent the day battling with an obnoxious pie crust but in the end succeeded in creating a tasty strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert, Mike's fave. We didn't leave until evening so we had an early birthday dinner and Melinda and Roger and Paula were able to join us to celebrate.
August brought more fun times. We went deep sea fishing with some mountaineering friends off the coast of Westport. Unfortunately our grand plans of catching our limit for salmon didn't come about, and the water was quite rough causing some unhappy moments, ahem, but we did come home with two salmon to enjoy. Webb and Emily were fantabulous friends and offered to both fillet our catch for us and smoke the smaller of the fish for later deliciousness. We for sure shared with them a few weeks later when they came to our house for a belated July-birthday party. (Emily's bday is the day before Mike's). All in all the fishing was a great experience that taught me that I am, without a doubt, a fair-weather fisher. Weather being most the important keeping-the-waves-small aspect of the entire outing. Hah.
The week following the fishing trip, mid-Aug, my dad had to work on a very important article around the clock and needed to do so sans distruptions from anyone --namely Sam the puppy. My mom wasn't hurt by this, no, instead she embraced her banishment and jumped at the chance to venture wherever she wished. We were more than happy to house her for a bit. We got to visit and hang out with her for nearly a week! It was wonderful, she forced me to go shopping for work pants (sadly I haven't had new ones since I began working at Key Bank however many moons ago)and I forced her to try on and buy jeans (which she hasn't purchased new in 6 years!) Whew silly us! But we had fabulous success and boy is getting ready in the morning fun now!
The third weekend in August we finally had the chance to make it up to the San Juans to Mike's Uncle Mike's cabin. We've been talking for years about how Mike and Scott Anderson would be able to go up to Uncle Mike's and dive for a lost mooring buoy. Well finally finally we all had a weekend that matched so we headed north after work, getting into Friday Harbor around 6:30 that night. Uncle Mike was there to meet us and boat us out to John's Island where their cabin is. We almost got to see some Orcas and we did see some harbor porpoises, pretty awesome. Uncle Mike and Mike headed back into Friday Harbor not long after arriving to pick up Scott, Tammy, and all their scuba gear! I stayed at the cabin with Robin and we read our books all cozy in the cabin watching the sun set over the water. Glorious. The weekend was full of fun. The boys dove for the mooring buoys while Tammy and I soaked up sun and chatted and then when they were frozen enough we had lunch and hunted yellow jackets. Mike is the champ and managed to kill 5 with one swat using tuna as bait. (guess you had to be there...) We went crabbing and had ice cream in Roche Harbor that evening and a great big pot of fresh crab for dinner! Divine. Sunday we all hung out, played cards, and then headed into town to get the Anderson's to the ferry. Since the ferry was sold out nearly for the entire day we had to browse in shops, eat more ice cream, and have a quick dinner before seeing them off and heading back to the cabin for the evening. It was tough! Mike, Uncle Mike, Robin, and I all got up and packed and headed into town to catch a ferry ourselves Monday. It was lovely to have the day off and we got home around 4:00 and still had the evening to unwind and get ready for a really short week!
For labor day Mike and I planned to go backpacking. Despite our best intentions to the contrary, we seem to always end up having very few opportunities to get out in the mountains during the summer and backpack. The three day weekend was a perfect time to go. My brothers happened to call and ask us to go camping that same weekend so we ended up convincing them they did in fact want to backpack instead of leisurly fish on the Clearwater with coolers of beer. Backpacking is great but much more minimalist. This trip was a first for both of them. After a little hemming and hawing we all met up in Levinworth with great plans of leaving early and hiking to an little alpine lake. Wow, after all the hustle and bustle and lists of stuff I wrote to my brothers of things not to forget, what do I do? Forget my hiking boots. HellO???? Sheez, so we had to go into town and find a pair for me. They were great but it's never ideal to buy your hiking shoes the day you have to hike in them for a couple hours so I was pretty happy to arrive at the lake! Fishing, hiking, cooking, swimming, hanging out. That about sums it up and I think the Mike and Peter will voluntarily give 'er another whirl next year after all! Boy that real food tasted good when we got back to town!
That was our busy summer in a nutshell. It was a blast but sure went by quickly. Sept. 5th was the first day of school for Dartmoor. Yes we have year-round school but we have a huge influx of full-time students right at the beginning of regular public school in the fall, so we were psyched! It's been a crazy couple of weeks but so far so good and we're off and running. We also just lost one of our full time instructors to another campus. She was so awesome she got promoted! So now we have two new instructors that started just this week. They are great and everything is settling into a pattern. I'm teaching a bunch of language arts classes and so have between 4-6 novels to read from each night in order to keep up! I'm definitely getting caught up on all those school classics I missed in high school! Mike's staying pretty busy at work too. The 7E7 is getting close to deadlines and such things and so everyone is hopping.
The weekend of 9/9 we took a trip down to Boise to see Mike's sister Melinda get married. It was a great weekend of family and a beautiful wedding. Melinda's colors were fall colors and the flowers were gorgeous. I know it's just us girls who will appreciate details like that, but way to go Melinda on the color scheme! Hats of to Jeanette too, who helped plan and plot and get everyone where they needed to be. It all went off without a hitch, or rather just a couple very minor ones that go with any wedding and make it more real. Melinda was gorgeous (Roger sure is a lucky guy), the ceremony lovely, and the couple drove away smiling and married at the end of the night, a success! And no one knows who TPed their car.....
Last weekend the Duekers, Mike's sister and her family from Fresno, came up to our neck of the woods for a visit. Well, they really came cuz Fresno State was playing UW in Seattle, but we like to pretend they came to visit us instead. We also got to hang out with some of their buddies JD and Angie, who, sadly enough live just a mile or two away from us and have - for over a year. This was the first time we'd connected, tsk. We had talked on the phone a couple times and made some plans but they seem to always fall through. JD and Angie hooked us up with names of really wonderful people in New Zealand before we went. It saved our sanity to have someone to touch base with after landing there and feeling lost, and in the end we became pretty close with one of the kiwi couples and are soooo thankful for Angie and JD sharing their friends with us. =+)
The day the Duekers left Mike and I left early in the morning to drive down to Yakima to do a little last of the season river rafting. We took a friend of ours from mountaineering, Pete, and met some friends of mine from work Lisa, Chris, Gary, and Angela and rafted the Tieton River. It was a hoot if a little chilly and we were very glad for our wetsuits, jackets and helmets. The river was narrow and very fast but we rode the rapids without any mishaps and some great laughs. On the way home we tried to detour through Rainier to see the mountain and the park, kind of like we did when he was trying to propose a couple years ago, and whaddya know? It was socked in with fog and rain again! I'm jinxed. But only so far as the mountain is concerned, and that I can live with!
Now it's Monday after the first weekend in months where we didn't do anything but stay home and hang out. It was glorious. We slept in, read books, watched movies, went to Costco, went grocery shopping, went for a bike ride, all manner of relaxing things we thought up at the last minute with no planning at all. Hooray.
Now the idea is to keep on top of this blog and not have to fit a gazillion things into each posting...we'll try honest!
The weekend after Grandma Klein's bday party (way back in July) we drove to Moscow to watch Peter perform in the U of I's IRT program. They put on A Comedy of Errors and it was wonderful. Mike and I also went with my mom and dad both Sat and Sun morning to the city pool for "adult swim" time. Hah, we did no swimming, we rode the slides over and over...little kid and line free, it was great. The weather was broiling too so it was great to play in the water and laugh lots!
The last weekend in July was spent in Boise for our friends Scott and Tammy's wedding. More roasting weather but we were able to squish in a leisurely float down the Main Payette with Jeff, Jeanette, and my buddy Leigh while we were there. On the day of the wedding it was really hot and the wedding was outside at 3:00 in the afternoon, but that didn't deter them from having a lovely ceremony and a great reception that lasted into the night. The engineering guys had a blast pulling all sorts of shananigans on the groom's truck -pay back is hell...and he's nearly the last of this group to get hitched!
That Sunday in Boise was Mike's birthday! The end of Mike's 8-week-a-year-I'm-younger-than-you-baloney. (for the 8 weeks our ages differ I get to hear HOW much older I am than HE is...tsk) I spent the day battling with an obnoxious pie crust but in the end succeeded in creating a tasty strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert, Mike's fave. We didn't leave until evening so we had an early birthday dinner and Melinda and Roger and Paula were able to join us to celebrate.
August brought more fun times. We went deep sea fishing with some mountaineering friends off the coast of Westport. Unfortunately our grand plans of catching our limit for salmon didn't come about, and the water was quite rough causing some unhappy moments, ahem, but we did come home with two salmon to enjoy. Webb and Emily were fantabulous friends and offered to both fillet our catch for us and smoke the smaller of the fish for later deliciousness. We for sure shared with them a few weeks later when they came to our house for a belated July-birthday party. (Emily's bday is the day before Mike's). All in all the fishing was a great experience that taught me that I am, without a doubt, a fair-weather fisher. Weather being most the important keeping-the-waves-small aspect of the entire outing. Hah.
The week following the fishing trip, mid-Aug, my dad had to work on a very important article around the clock and needed to do so sans distruptions from anyone --namely Sam the puppy. My mom wasn't hurt by this, no, instead she embraced her banishment and jumped at the chance to venture wherever she wished. We were more than happy to house her for a bit. We got to visit and hang out with her for nearly a week! It was wonderful, she forced me to go shopping for work pants (sadly I haven't had new ones since I began working at Key Bank however many moons ago)and I forced her to try on and buy jeans (which she hasn't purchased new in 6 years!) Whew silly us! But we had fabulous success and boy is getting ready in the morning fun now!
The third weekend in August we finally had the chance to make it up to the San Juans to Mike's Uncle Mike's cabin. We've been talking for years about how Mike and Scott Anderson would be able to go up to Uncle Mike's and dive for a lost mooring buoy. Well finally finally we all had a weekend that matched so we headed north after work, getting into Friday Harbor around 6:30 that night. Uncle Mike was there to meet us and boat us out to John's Island where their cabin is. We almost got to see some Orcas and we did see some harbor porpoises, pretty awesome. Uncle Mike and Mike headed back into Friday Harbor not long after arriving to pick up Scott, Tammy, and all their scuba gear! I stayed at the cabin with Robin and we read our books all cozy in the cabin watching the sun set over the water. Glorious. The weekend was full of fun. The boys dove for the mooring buoys while Tammy and I soaked up sun and chatted and then when they were frozen enough we had lunch and hunted yellow jackets. Mike is the champ and managed to kill 5 with one swat using tuna as bait. (guess you had to be there...) We went crabbing and had ice cream in Roche Harbor that evening and a great big pot of fresh crab for dinner! Divine. Sunday we all hung out, played cards, and then headed into town to get the Anderson's to the ferry. Since the ferry was sold out nearly for the entire day we had to browse in shops, eat more ice cream, and have a quick dinner before seeing them off and heading back to the cabin for the evening. It was tough! Mike, Uncle Mike, Robin, and I all got up and packed and headed into town to catch a ferry ourselves Monday. It was lovely to have the day off and we got home around 4:00 and still had the evening to unwind and get ready for a really short week!
For labor day Mike and I planned to go backpacking. Despite our best intentions to the contrary, we seem to always end up having very few opportunities to get out in the mountains during the summer and backpack. The three day weekend was a perfect time to go. My brothers happened to call and ask us to go camping that same weekend so we ended up convincing them they did in fact want to backpack instead of leisurly fish on the Clearwater with coolers of beer. Backpacking is great but much more minimalist. This trip was a first for both of them. After a little hemming and hawing we all met up in Levinworth with great plans of leaving early and hiking to an little alpine lake. Wow, after all the hustle and bustle and lists of stuff I wrote to my brothers of things not to forget, what do I do? Forget my hiking boots. HellO???? Sheez, so we had to go into town and find a pair for me. They were great but it's never ideal to buy your hiking shoes the day you have to hike in them for a couple hours so I was pretty happy to arrive at the lake! Fishing, hiking, cooking, swimming, hanging out. That about sums it up and I think the Mike and Peter will voluntarily give 'er another whirl next year after all! Boy that real food tasted good when we got back to town!
That was our busy summer in a nutshell. It was a blast but sure went by quickly. Sept. 5th was the first day of school for Dartmoor. Yes we have year-round school but we have a huge influx of full-time students right at the beginning of regular public school in the fall, so we were psyched! It's been a crazy couple of weeks but so far so good and we're off and running. We also just lost one of our full time instructors to another campus. She was so awesome she got promoted! So now we have two new instructors that started just this week. They are great and everything is settling into a pattern. I'm teaching a bunch of language arts classes and so have between 4-6 novels to read from each night in order to keep up! I'm definitely getting caught up on all those school classics I missed in high school! Mike's staying pretty busy at work too. The 7E7 is getting close to deadlines and such things and so everyone is hopping.
The weekend of 9/9 we took a trip down to Boise to see Mike's sister Melinda get married. It was a great weekend of family and a beautiful wedding. Melinda's colors were fall colors and the flowers were gorgeous. I know it's just us girls who will appreciate details like that, but way to go Melinda on the color scheme! Hats of to Jeanette too, who helped plan and plot and get everyone where they needed to be. It all went off without a hitch, or rather just a couple very minor ones that go with any wedding and make it more real. Melinda was gorgeous (Roger sure is a lucky guy), the ceremony lovely, and the couple drove away smiling and married at the end of the night, a success! And no one knows who TPed their car.....
Last weekend the Duekers, Mike's sister and her family from Fresno, came up to our neck of the woods for a visit. Well, they really came cuz Fresno State was playing UW in Seattle, but we like to pretend they came to visit us instead. We also got to hang out with some of their buddies JD and Angie, who, sadly enough live just a mile or two away from us and have - for over a year. This was the first time we'd connected, tsk. We had talked on the phone a couple times and made some plans but they seem to always fall through. JD and Angie hooked us up with names of really wonderful people in New Zealand before we went. It saved our sanity to have someone to touch base with after landing there and feeling lost, and in the end we became pretty close with one of the kiwi couples and are soooo thankful for Angie and JD sharing their friends with us. =+)
The day the Duekers left Mike and I left early in the morning to drive down to Yakima to do a little last of the season river rafting. We took a friend of ours from mountaineering, Pete, and met some friends of mine from work Lisa, Chris, Gary, and Angela and rafted the Tieton River. It was a hoot if a little chilly and we were very glad for our wetsuits, jackets and helmets. The river was narrow and very fast but we rode the rapids without any mishaps and some great laughs. On the way home we tried to detour through Rainier to see the mountain and the park, kind of like we did when he was trying to propose a couple years ago, and whaddya know? It was socked in with fog and rain again! I'm jinxed. But only so far as the mountain is concerned, and that I can live with!
Now it's Monday after the first weekend in months where we didn't do anything but stay home and hang out. It was glorious. We slept in, read books, watched movies, went to Costco, went grocery shopping, went for a bike ride, all manner of relaxing things we thought up at the last minute with no planning at all. Hooray.
Now the idea is to keep on top of this blog and not have to fit a gazillion things into each posting...we'll try honest!
posted by Meghan at 9:33 PM
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