family, woodworking, photography, K-pop
I know I’ve been MIA lately I have a good excuse: last weekend we packed up the kids and drove to California!
We went to Disneyland and a few other fun places. I’ll sort through my snapshots over the weekend and post some next Monday.
I hope you have a nice weekend and a happy Easter!
On Saturday N and I left the house at 6 am at flew to Seattle. It felt so strange to be flying without any luggage or carry-ons. From the airport we headed straight to the funeral. It was a really lovely service and afterwards there was a lot of catching up with family and swapping funny stories about Grandpa.
After the graveside service and a quick family lunch we headed back to the airport and few back to Salt Lake. Incredibly enough we were back home in time to put E to bed.
It was a surreal day in a lot of ways but I’m so glad we went. It was very comforting to be able to pay our respects to Grandpa.
Hearing people talk about him was really inspiring. He had a lot of good qualities that I want to emulate, especially the ability to find the funny aspect of any situation. Things that would bother most people didn’t annoy him; they amused him. Whomever he spent time with left feeling better about things than they did before.
How awesome would life be if more of us were like that?
I still have some photos from our beach vacations to share–I hope you don’t mind. 🙂 These document the first few times E experienced the wonder that is the s’more. Not surprisingly, he loved them!
Our beach house was just down the road from Tillamook, OR (home of Tillamook Cheese) where there’s an air museum that we toured. Looking at the aircraft was fun but the highlight for me was the WWII blimp hangar the museum is housed in.
The hangar is MASSIVE. Apparently it’s the largest wooden structure in the world. (Interesting fact: there used to be two hangars until 1992 when someone decided that it seemed like a good idea to use one of the world’s largest wooden structures as storage for BALES OF DRY HAY and the whole thing went up in a huge fireball.)
This picture makes me happy since I’ve been feeling a little uninspired with photography lately. I’ve had a passion for photography since I was in high school but sometimes my enthusiasm for it wanes: life get busy and I just don’t have the energy for it. I’m a chronic dabbler–I haven’t met a hobby that doesn’t seem interesting yet–but photography is my main interest (with woodworking a close second) and I think I’ll always come back to it again and again. With this photo I felt that rush of falling in love with taking pictures again.
I also took a few photos of the hangar using film; I’m excited to see if/how they turn out.
Hard to believe that this was the view out our window only a day-and-a-half ago:
It was wonderful to stay on the beach (as in walk-off-the-porch-and-you’re-on-the-beach) for an entire week. We decided at the last minute that driving the 14+ hours home from Rockaway Beach, OR to Salt Lake City with a breast-feeding infant and a toilet-training 3-year-old would be marginally less painful if we drove through the night while both kidlets slept. So we packed the kids into the car around midnight Sunday morning and made it home around 5 o’clock that night.
The plan worked pretty well and we only made stops for food/diaper changes/potty breaks/gas/the search for an open gas station at 3 am. Did you know that most of the gas stations in small Oregon towns close for the night around 10pm but leave their signs and lights on? So if you find yourself in a small town running low on gas at 3 am your search gets rather frustrating when you drive up to yet another well-lit station to find that they are actually closed. I had panicky visions of having to park and wait until a station opened at 7 am but some helpful hotel clerks directed us to the one station in town open at night and everything worked out okay.
But don’t worry, Oregon. Despite your old-fashioned and inconvenient ideas about gasoline we still love you. You are magical and I miss you already. Xoxo.
There have been a few hiccups (mostly due to a teething baby) but so far this vacation has been wonderful. I can’t download the photos from my camera until I get home but here are a few I took with my iPhone using the Hipstmatic app.
Top to bottom: my brother David and his son, E waking up from a nap at our hotel, E tearing around on the beach.
So um, hi there! I kept meaning to post but things were pretty crazy for a while. We were all sick: it really dragged on and on and I was swamped with work at the same time. When I’ve been sick for a while and I’m not sleeping well I lose track of the fact that in general I love my life and suddenly Everything Is Horrible! and It Has Always Been Horrible! and It Will Always Be Horrible! The End. It’s something I need to work on.
To be honest I wasn’t a lot of fun to be around: I was pretty grumpy and kept snapping at N. I wouldn’t blame poor N if he was secretly relieved to ship his grumpy wife and the kids off to my parents’ house for while.
I was nervous about flying by myself with the two kids but Melissa reminded me that you can get a gate ticket for an escort to help you through security. So my sweet mother-in-law helped us to our gate which was a big help.
Except for Mimi having a diaper blowout the flight was pretty uneventful. Even though E hasn’t had an accident in a long time I was a bit nervous about him being in underwear for the flight but he did great. E’s getting to be quite the old hand at flying.
While it’s hard to live out of suitcases (especially with a baby) I’m feeling better and more like myself. Stuffing my face with yummy Korean food, relaxing for an afternoon at the spa, and spending some time catching up with old friends will do that to me every time 🙂 Now I’m just counting down the days until N gets here.
Back in October N and I went to Las Vegas for our first weekend getaway since having kids. It was a blast but over all too soon. Even now it seems more like a lovely dream than something that actually happened.
Anyway, while we were there I took some photos with my Holga. And then last week (a mere five months later) I had the film developed.
I thought I’d be finished posting photos from our trip this week but I still have a few more that I’ll post here and there over the next few weeks. But this is the last photo-intensive post. These are from our second trip to the Jagalchi fish market. The first time we went my camera was acting up and I didn’t get any photos so when we were in the neighborhood again we made another quick visit.
These fish mongers were super nice to E and pulled a live crab and octopus out so he could touch them.
This older gentleman bargained with this vendor for quite a while.
A storekeeper makes a joking pass at kidnapping E. E was somewhat unsure about the situation.We have a lot of stuff going on this weekend. I need to make a batch of cupcakes and wrap presents so we can celebrate E’s 3rd birthday tonight. The three of us usually hang out together on Saturdays but this weekend we’re dividing and conquering: N is attending the BYU-UNLV football game with people from his office and E and I are going to make the trek out to the Overstock.com warehouse store with my mom who’s in town visiting my sister.
Hopefully BYU wins and I find an awesome bargain!
I’ve been craving spicy food lately and I’m really missing the food from our trip. I love the fact that in Korea there are so many little restaurants that you can pop into, each with their own specialty. And for the most part they’re all pretty affordable.
