Our first task of the evening, weekend, and vacation, was building a snow man. We built a snowman each year in Alaska. I do mean snow man, not snow men. In AK the first snow man lasted all winter. We positioned him at the end of our walk to welcome our guests just before they turned to climb our steps. His name was Edward. We've decided not to name this snow man; chances are he won't make it through the weekend. That's alright though because it adds opportunities to build more than one in a year! The snow also sticks together much better here.Afterward we came inside and had a delicious pumpkin black bean soup, beer bread, and tea. Now we're sitting next to the fire with the cats baking their brains near the flames.
This will be a post of rather random updates, so bear with me as transitioning may be nearly impossible.
Last weekend we went up to Seattle for our nephew's birthday, the annual cookie bake, the jingle bell run, a bit of shopping, and to see Ana, my friend from college. Kyle, our nephew, is a big fan of fire trucks and emergency vehicles generally, so his birthday was at Engine house 9 in Tacoma. Their claim to fame is the large brass fire pole which is the oldest in the northwest. Because of plummeting temperatures and a good amount of snow, we opted not to actually attend the jingle bell run in favor of leaving Lucas' cheeks on his face. Our other option was having frostbite steal them away. We had a wonderful time at the cookie bake. While it was sad that Joe's parents and Christina, Tony, Cameron and Kyle weren't able to attend, we had a wonderful time with Kym, Aaron, Sarah, Kacey, and Lucas at Auntie Marian's house. As always she was an incredibly gracious host and made the most amazing food. The veggie lasagna was by far the best lasagna I've had in my entire life. On Monday we did some quick shopping and met Ana for lunch. It was so good to catch up and I only wish we'd had more time. We could talk for hours and still be going strong. I'm looking forward to when we have the opportunity to really test our conversational stamina.
Okay, I'll leave you with a few photos that we found on a memory card we forgot we had. They are old pictures from Alaska, but I was overjoyed to find them.
This is Luke playing when he was just a wee kitty. Joe and I had thought that we had no pictures of Luke as a kitten, and he was smaller than this when we first got him, but he's still definitely a kitten in this picture and that makes me so happy!
Here's one of Eleanor in Alaska. In the picture she's looking out our front door and standing on her shoe box. She loved to look outside, but wasn't quite tall enough to see out easily. The shoe box was just what she needed.
