Keith and Lacey

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…

Winter photos here.

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.