A New Goal

I have been a bit of a slacker lately, so I decided I needed to stop slacking off. In order to help me be motivated, I decided to run a marathon on April 4th. It is the Yakima River Valley Marathon. It sounds like it will be a good one. I'll be ready for it. It will also help me be ready for the White river 50 in July.

A Cold Swim

Last week when my brothers were here, we decided to go for a little swim in the harbor. The air temperature was about forty degrees and so was the water temperature. We are just a couple of crazy guys doing crazy things. We have done this a few times before. Usually it is done after we celebrate the new year at about 12:30am new years day. The difference of just a few weeks does not really make that much difference. It is still cold. there was no ice floating around though, so I guess it wasn't really that bad. Anyway, enjoy watching us be crazy.



Maybe we should have waited until today. It snowed here last night and today's high is supposed to be about 30 degrees. I had fun playing around with my new video editing software. I think it is nicer than my other one, I just need to learn how to use it. I did manage to find the stretch tool to make a portion of it play in slow motion. I only spent about ten minutes on it, so there is not much to it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

My Dad: August 30, 1943 to November 30, 2008

This past Sunday evening November 30, 2008 at about 8:30pm my dad passed away after fighting a losing battle with Lung Cancer. He fought and fought. He really did not want to give up, but the cancer had taken its toll on his body. Heavenly Father took him and I'm sure has greater plans with him. It was a struggle for all of us especially during his final days and weeks because it was practically impossible to communicate with him. I know he is now in a peaceful place where he can get a good breath of air.

On Sunday morning I decided to go up and see my parents. I am glad I was able to be there and help support my family in this time of struggle. It is very different from the previous death I experienced because we knew it was coming and we had time to plan and prepare for it.

He was born on August 30, 1943.

Here is his sister holding him when he was about two and a half months old. He was a bit late coming, his other siblings were born in the 20's.

Here he is with his dad in 1949.


What a happy kid he was.

Right after high school he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served on the USS Robison.


He was proud to have served in the Navy.

All growing up I remember how much he loved fishing:


and camping: here is his nephew Fred and his friend Ross.


In 1976 he met and married my mom Lois.


He was such a generous man and always willingly gave of his time when he had any. He worked really hard to support us.

I have always looked up to my father in many ways. He was always looking forward to that next big adventure. I remember when he would ride his bicycle from Seattle to Salt Lake City. I am glad I got to share that experience with him twice. He also had ambitions to ride his bicycle around the world. He wanted and planned to hike the entire length of the Pacific Crest Trail. He managed to hike a few hundred miles of it. His most recent big adventure was the Big Ride Across America where he and several others rode their bicycles from Seattle to Washington D.C. in support of the American Lung Association of Washington. They raised $250,000.

I got married on his 60th birthday five years ago. I was happy to share the date of celebration, I hope he was too.


He will be missed by us all. I just know that he is already up in Heaven looking forward to his next big adventure.

Dad, we love you and will miss you.

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.

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.

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.

Old Photos

So, recently I've taken up a project of scanning some of my dad's old photos that he has kept from over the years. I figured they would be much easier to share and preserve if we had an electronic copy of them. Most of them have been from the 60's although there were some from the 50's and some from the 70's. I just came upon some that date back even farther than that to the 20's and 30's. I found an old photo of my grandparents. I really like this photo. My grandfather died before I was born and my grandmother died when I was really young. I never really knew them. I think of my grandparents as old people, but you know what? they were young once too. Who would have thought! Anyway, here is the photo.

It is interesting to me to see them so young. I barely even recognize my grandmother. My grandfather was in the Navy back in the early 20's and served on the USS Arizona. I think it is really interesting.

Here is a photo of just my grandmother. This photo is really interesting because on the front is written Aug 1923 but on the back it is written May 4, 1924. They were married on May 5, 1924. I don't know which date to believe. I guess it really doesn't matter does it?

I thought it would be interesting to see how a quick job in photoshop would treat an old photo like this. Since I don't really know how to use Photoshop, I turned to my expert wife who turned that crummy old photo into this:

It is amazing what five minutes with a photo editing program can do. If you have old photos that need touching up, my wife would love to help you out. For a small fee your old photos could look like new ones.

Okay, enough of the advertising. If you want to see some more of my old photos then take a look at them on my facebook page. You can also just click here, here, or here.

My Daughter Ella

Every once in a while I have trouble sleeping at night. It is usually because I took a nap in the afternoon as is the case here. Well, I got out of bed and this is what I did. I love my daughter Ella. Yes I still love her even though it's two a.m. and she just peed her bed. There is one photo from every month of her life. I feel like it is a pretty good video for having thought it up and finished it in the last hour and a half.

What have I been doing for the last couple of months?

Yeah, I know. I've only posted one blog post on here in the last two and a half months. I've been moving and trying to get settled in up here at our new home in the Northwest. I have some photos to share of me running. I also have some pieces of news. I'll start with the fun photos. While I was in Utah in August and September, I ran quite a bit up in the Mountains. This first photo is on my first mountain run up to an 11,000 foot peak up Little Cottonwood Canyon. I think the name of this lake is Cecret Lake. Yeah, it's spelled really funny.


It was tough running up here because I had been living down at sea level. It was lots of fun though, I saw a couple deer and even a moose.

This next one was from a couple days later on a run up Big Cottonwood Canyon. It is a self portrait.


Great shot right?

While in Utah I also ran up Mount Timpanogus with Thayne. It was a really great run except for the fact that I sprained my ankle pretty bad on the way down. It popped really loud. I thought for a minute that I had broken it. I had to take a couple weeks off. but it's doing better now. Here I am at the top of Timp.


We had to be down from the top to block the wind. It was cold up there. We left at five something in the morning and made it to the top at seven something. It took just less than two hours to get to the top. Here's another one:


And here is a photo I have of Thayne.


If it weren't for him I probably wouldn't have made this run. Thanks for your blog. This photo was taken at the saddle, still a mile or so from the top.



Well, we had fun in Utah, then we made our way up here to the northwest. I started school and on campus I saw signs up that they were wanting runners for their new cross country team. I thought that sounded like fun and I've been running with them now for three weeks. I've already had two races. I took it easy at first because of my ankle, but I think my ankle is pretty much completely healed. It is still slightly swollen, but it doesn't hurt anymore.

Here are a couple photos from my first race. This was on October 4th.


My team is in the middle wearing the black uniforms. I'm the second from the right, in the second row.


And here I am running really fast right after the race started. I'm in front, my teammate following close behind me. He ended up finishing about 30 seconds faster than me. We run 8 Kilometer races. It's a lot different than running a marathon or a 50 miler, but it's still fun. I'm definitely not one of the faster ones.

Other than running, I've been doing a lot. My classes are all pretty easy. I already know most of the information and they are all online right now. Amanda is still doing her scoping work. It's been about a month now that we've been here. We still have a couple of boxes laying around that need unpacking. It will eventually get done. Probably about the time that we are ready to move again.

My parents live about two hours away from here if there is no wait for the ferry. I love going up to visit them. We have been up now three or four times. My dad is dieing of lung and brain cancer and I've been trying to get up to see him as much as I can before he goes. It is nice to sit and talk with him and help him out around the house. I think my mom needs just as much support as he does right now though too.


This is a nice three generation photo of my son, me and my dad. We all love my dad very much and can't stand the thought of loosing him. I hope you enjoyed the video I put together of him in my last post. It is a work in progress.

Well that's about it for now. I'll keep you posted on how my running is going. I only have three more races in this season. I'm not sure what I will do after the last race of the season, probably find a marathon somewhere to run.

A video of my dad

I'll try the video here on my blog and see if it does any better than that other web site. For some reason it was going really slow there.