Friday, November 21, 2008

My Son Alex

A few posts back, I posted a video I made of my daughter Ella. I decided that I would do the same for my son Alex. He is really a cutie. He usually love the camera, so there are many good photos of him. He was born in July two and a half years ago. In some ways it seems like such a short amount of time, but in others it was so long ago. He is my favorite son. I can't wait till he grows up just a little more so that I can take him camping and hiking with me in the back country, like I used to do with my dad.

Well, I hope you enjoy this short video. It is only a little more than two minutes. There is nothing fancy about this clip, I started working on it about an hour ago. I just chose the photos, one from each month of his life, plopped them on there, but transitions between photos, added a song and a few words in the middle and voila, a video. I enjoy putting these videos together. Maybe I'll have to do one of our road trip across the country, or all of my running stuff, or something. Maybe though I should focus more on schoolwork. We'll see. Let me know what you think of Alex and this video.

Monday, November 17, 2008

The Local Locks

Well, I guess there are more people out there than I thought that actually read my blog. I had four comments on my last post, that means at least that many read it.

I'll tell you about something that we did a few weeks ago. There are these locks not too far from here that allow boat traffic to travel from the lake down to the ocean. It is like an elevator for boats. I used to go to the locks when I was a kid. The think I remember most about the locks is the fish ladder. This was designed to allow the salmon to swim back up the rivers and spawn. Well, we must have chosen the wrong time to go because we only saw one fish swimming around.


See!

At least it is a pretty area. Just look at these photos.





It was a fun family outing. After we wandered around and saw what there was to see, we grabbed the food from the car and had a picnic in the rain. Yep, it's Washington, so you can't really do anything without rain. The only thing that really irked me was where I parked. There was an oil spill. Luckily in was only on my side of the car. I didn't think it was that bad when I got out, but when I got back in I really had to scrub my feet. I used several baby wipes to clean off the bottom of my shoes, and even then I couldn't really get them clean. I had to put my feet inside plastic bags to keep from spreading the oil. There is only a little stain on the car floor mat. I noticed before I really put my foot down. Maybe we'll try going back some time when there is actually some fish swimming up the ladder.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

October Happenings

Wow, I just realized that it has been nearly a month since my last post. Not that anyone reads this blog anyway, but for the two or three loyal readers I have out there I figured I'd better write something so that you all know I haven't died or something.

It the previous post, I showed you a couple old photos from the 1920's. I've finished that project. I scanned all his photos into jpg format. There are 1159 photos that I scanned. It was fun looking through and seeing my dad in his younger years. These photos will now be easier to preserve and keep. Even if something were to happen to the original photos, we still have digital copies. I plan on making several copies on disks to give to family.

As far as running goes. Last Saturday, the 8th, I finished the cross country season with the college. Our last race was fun because it was in the pouring rain. The course was so muddy. It was lots of fun. I improved my time again, that means that for each of the four races, I got faster. I can still get faster too. My best time this year was slower than my times six years ago when I was running for Everett. I am a lot slower than I was in High school, and that was ten years ago.

I came into this season being trained for a long, slow race. But I was also injured. The injury is gone now, and I think that if I kept working at it I could continue improving. I want to do a 10K in December and then I want to run a couple marathons before next years White River 50 miler.

School is going just fine. All of my classes are pretty easy right now. I am signed up for 20 credits next quarter though, it should be pretty busy and fun. four of the classes should be a relatively easy review, the other two are going to be new information, but fun classes, I hope. only have two more quaters until I will graduate. I might not even need to finish because the FAA might hire me before. I have an application in and I will hear from them soon about taking their test. Once I take the test, depending on how well I do, I could get hired after that. It would be nice to acutally have a job again. My wife is getting pretty stressed out having to worry about making enough money to support us while I am in school.

How about some photos now. This first one is me and Alex. He is such a cutie. We went for a walk at a local state park and couldn't resist the photo opportunity.

This is later that day when we drove up to Mount Rainier. It is nice being so close to such good outdoor activities. I love the mountains.

And here is my cute little boy in front of the Mountain.
After we left here we went and picked a couple pumkins. Here's Ella. She wouldn't look at me and pose, so I just had to get a side shot.

And here is Alex, he was being much more photogenic that day.

Here we are carving some pumpkins at Grandma and Grandpas house. I didn't get very good photos.

Here is my nephew James cleaning out his big pumkin.

Here they all are at the pumkin patch.

This next one is my neice Sherri.

And this last one is at the Trunk-or-Treat


Well, that's all the photos this time.