Keith and Lacey

Remember winter in Spokane?  Lacey’s family arrived from the warm bowels of Texas and three days later it snowed four feet.  BAM!

The big Ford from Washington became our primary, I mean only, mode of transportation.  Fun!

The lil’ Ford from Texas became our primary snow depth gauge. Useful!

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to go skiing because I was on-call for work that week but we did go climbing.  Substitute!

And we went ice skating in 2-degree weather.  Cold!

And of course, built snowmen.  Ok, tried building snowmen in very dry pow-pow.  Longhorns muffler!

Of course I have to end with a picture of my beautiful wife  Ta-Da!

Way back in 2004, Marshall, Shane, and I took a trip of epic proportions in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, climaxing with Mt. Whitney on Day 5 out of 7.  For me, the idea of a seven-day backpacking trip was inspired by reading Lord of the Rings.  One thing you miss in the movies is that a very large portion of the book, especially Part 1, is spent describing Frodo & Company hiking through Middle Earth.  Our journey definitely doesn’t compare to the book but seven days in the wilderness is actually pretty long when you’re used to eating at Applebee’s on a whim or working on a computer all day long.

I just finished moving all the Mt. Whitney photos to Flickr, so check them out.

I think Derek got rid of the Internet just so Sara would be forced not to look at cute kitten pictures anymore. Well, I uploaded a bunch of cute kitten pictures anyway.  Trip to the library?

MartyMol, I think you should dress up Nyah and Ko in some fun costumes.  Our kittens sure loved it, as you can see…

It has been snowing since yesterday morning.  It dumped 21 inches in 24 hours at my house.  We must have 2 feet by now… in hardly over a day.  It’s nuts.

Tessa and Logan, Lacey’s sister and brother, have been staying with us since last Thursday.  Totally fun (but beside the point).  Tessa was supposed to fly out this morning and of course the airlines give no indication that anything will be cancelled until you drive all the way to the airport, check in your bag, and start walking to your terminal.  At least that was Tessa’s experience.  Lacey and I were almost back to our house when she called us with the news.  So we turned around (grabbed some Starbucks first) and headed back to the airport.

I love driving my big blue truck in the snow.  It’s amazing in the snow… invincible.  Well, almost.  On the way back from the airport, about two blocks from our house, I decided to take them on a little alley tour for funsies.  Unfortunately, as we came to the cross street I slowed down to check for traffic and sunk down into the berm right before the street.  Doh!  The best part was that I had literally just finished reassuring Lacey that we couldn’t get stuck in the big blue snowbeast.  After an hour of digging out the tires repeatedly and making progress little by little, a guy stopped and helped me realize I wasn’t using the hub-locks quite right for the four-wheel drive.  I thought you had to lock the hubs after you got it in four-wheel drive.  I had taken it out of 4-High to put it in 4-Low, and had unlocked the hubs in the process.  My thinking was that I then needed to get the truck in 4-Low before locking the hubs.  Wrong.  I was informed that you leave the hubs locked and just move the shifter.  So anyway, once we locked the hubs I went right into 4-Low and drove right off, as I knew I would.  I simply couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t going into four wheel drive!  But I had a lot of fun digging myself out of my neighborhood offroading, it felt like the good times I had with Jeremiah and Becky last winter getting their Jeep out of Rocks of Sharon, a place outside of Spokane we went snowshoeing.  The difference is we had tow ropes and we were in the backcountry, not a city street…  But honestly it kinda feels like the backcountry out there today… I saw someone cross-country skiing down the alley just a few minutes ago so…

This last September I followed Jeremiah and his dad in my Hydrocarbon Powered Eco-Vehicle up to his family’s property outside of Northport, Washington to play lumberjack, destroy the local biome, and get some firewood to heat the house this winter.  It was totally fun and I’d love to do it again.  Splitting a round chunk of wood into halves or quarters is really satisfying.  And watching a tree fall (Jer’s dad, Jon, did the tree felling) is spectacular.

The rest of the lumberjack photos are here.

Back in October, Lacey and I took a trip to Olympia to visit Derek and Sara.  That D&S part of the adventure is recorded on Derek’s BikeRubbish site..  But this blog is to record our adventure in Seattle, which was the first part of the trip.

We went to the famous market.

And down to the piers.

We saw ugly sea creatures at the aquarium.

We ate ugly sea creatures at The Crab Pot.

And we listened to sweet a cappella outside the original Starbucks.

I also took Lacey into Ye Olde Curiosity Shop on Pier 54 to check out the mummies, the shrunken heads, the two-headed calf, and all the other freaky things hanging out in there

Luckily we encountered lots of freaky things in Seattle (including a guy who popped his eyeballs out of his sockets as we walked by) so we were prepared for Derek’s freaky bikes.  Haha.

All the Seattle photos are here.

Less than a week before the wedding, I had our driveway excavated and filled with base rock.

There were two shortcomings in the driveway screaming to be fixed.  First, the part next to the street had a big upside down speed bump.  Second, the cyclone fence blocked about half of the driveway, making it real annoying to drive in to.  But now it’s all fixed and looking great!

More photos are here.

We already adopted some naughty little kittens!  Two brothers, both black, 2 months old, rescued from the Humane Society.  We named them Tex and Washington!  Tex is all black with a touch of smoke on his chest and Washington is black with white paws, white chest hairs, and long white whiskers.

They’re already litter-trained, which is totally sweet, and so far they haven’t even caused too much trouble!  They adapted to our house almost instantly, a little too much of course so we had to plug up a few holes.  Behind the oven, behind the piano.  We’re trying to teach them to stay off the table tops.  They love their little toys we got them, Washington especially loves this big furry thing on a stick, he acts like he’s captured a big bird and runs around with all the feathers sticking out all over.  Haha.  They are very entertaining to watch them pounce on each other and do all the things that naughty kittens do.

More photos are here.

We went to Maui for our honeymoon and had a perfect second week of marriage.

The photos are here.

After our single, separated lives peaked at the wedding, we loaded up Lacey’s life and our wedding gifts into a little 10-foot U-Haul and headed off to Washington.  We took three days to drive the two thousand mile journey through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.  Of course there was no cd player so it was country music on the radio all the way good thing I’ve come around to country music.

Once we got home, we had a couple days to rest up and pack for our honeymoon.  We opened a bunch of sweet wedding gifts, unloaded the U-Haul, received our marriage license, and even organized everything in the house!

A few weeks before the wedding I remembered that our flight to Maui was from Seattle, not Spokane, so I hastily searched for cheap flights to Seattle, but of course cheap didn’t work out.. so we decided to add another leg to our driving journey.  (Is leg supposed to make sense?  I think of a leg extending from a hub, not from an endpoint.  Shane, help me out with this one).  So, exactly a week after our wedding, we jumped in the car (at least not the U-Haul anymore) and drove to Seattle, while intensely listening to a book-on-tape called The Honeymoon by James Patterson.