Happy Mother’s Day to two very special women who have guided, encouraged, and loved us unconditionally.
We love you.
And Happy Mother’s Day to all our mommy and mommy-to-be friends, you women amaze me.
‘General’ Category
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mommy dearest
May 8, 2010 by Katie
Category General | Tags: | 1 Comment
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Spring Whirlwind
May 4, 2010 by Katie
The past month has been full of concerts, shows, dinner parties, work, meetings, church, run here run there, go go go….
Our First Seattle Sounders GameI don’t even know much about soccer futbol, but the atmosphere was electric and we had lots of fun. I can’t wait to go to another game soon (preferably on a warmer night).
We hosted a housewarming party and introduced our new home to our friends. There were some who we haven’t seen in awhile, many who we see quite often, and our awesome realtor—Ray.
There were date night highlights of a John Mayer concert and laughing ridiculously at Conan O’Brien on his comedy tour stop in Seattle (with a surprise performance from Pearl Jam). It was magnificent.
When Todd was involved as a Young Life leader back in Kansas City, he became close to several of the high school students in the group. One of them, Eric, will be interning in Seattle this summer so we had him over for dinner when he was in the area recently for some pre-internship prep.
Spring is (almost) here! The yard is colorful and foliage-filled, but the warmth has yet to arrive.
Stig & Guster are growing everyday, their kitten-ish features slowly fading into looking like adults. Don’t be fooled by their looks though, they’re still extremely active and playful. Even crazy, at times. It just so happens they’re most wild & rambunctious when we’re trying to sleep.
With all that’s going on, I don’t foresee things slowing down anytime soon. We have several events & travels coming up soon, with one BIG trip for me this summer. Can’t wait to tell you more about that later.
But for now, we hope you’re enjoying spring wherever you are. Remember to take a moment to stop and smell the lilacs—I think those purple wonders are God’s most perfect perfume.
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Piroshky Piroshky
April 28, 2010 by Katie
You know how you live somewhere for awhile, but only discover certain places once you have visitors? It’s like a fresh set of eyes looking at the world and observing everything that has become mundane to you.
Perhaps Ben’s favorite thing about Seattle was his discovery of Piroshky, Piroshky— a little Russian pastry shop at Pike Place Market. I’ve been by it hundreds of times, but never made a purchase. There are always really long lines on Saturdays so I’ve always avoided it, but if you go on a weekday there’s no wait for the tasty goodness. And the smell….OH, the smell! MMmmmmm.
We ate our piroshkies at the park, and then headed to Lake Union for a very important appointment.
We booked a seaplane tour for Dad & Ben around the Seattle area. I think these two pilots really enjoyed getting a birdseye view, and somehow convinced the seaplane pilot to fly longer and do some touch-and-gos that he normally doesn’t do for ‘regular’ passengers.
After that, they ran off to the Museum of Flight and the rest of us relaxed in the sun before meeting up for a fish n’ chips dinner at Ivars.
And that was the end of one crazy mild spring break
Thanks for visiting, dear family. It pains me that we don’t live closer (how about y’all move to Seattle? wink wink), but I’m blessed that we have wonderful opportunities like these to spend as a family. Until next time….
Category General, Pictures | Tags: | 1 Comment
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Urban to Suburban
April 7, 2010 by Katie
It’s been awhile since we last ‘talked’. Things have been busy, to say the least. My family came to visit us (that’ll have to wait for another post), and we’ve been in transition mode.
We packed up our 1 bedroom apartment in downtown Seattle…..
….and said goodbye to our beloved urban neighborhood.
Amidst the whirlwind of packing, working, and entertaining visitors, we bid farewell.
“Bye bye” to the city lights, shops, restaurants, traffic, and homeless people of Seattle. It was a blast while we were together, but we’ve moved on to the quieter, peaceful place called Kirkland.
Yep, we dove into the stressful, but exciting adventure of buying our first home.
no, he didn’t carry me over the threshold.
Gone is the cramped lifestyle of apartment living and hustle & bustle of city life.
Now (this was very important to Todd), our car has it’s own garage—not sharing one with hundreds of other cars.
And there’s a backyard (with fruit trees!) to mow and plant a garden (important to me). It’s peaceful out here.
The timing worked out perfectly in that we got the keys while my family was visiting, so they ‘volunteered’ to help with a little cleaning. We’re thankful for being able to share this special moment in our lives with them, plus the house was all ready to move into at the end of the week.
Fortunately, moving wasn’t very difficult for us (aside from packing what seemed like a thousand boxes) since we hired movers to do all the heavy lifting. I highly recommend it. Basically, I stood back and drank my Vivace (okay, we do miss living next to that coffee shop) while they toiled away.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
And the day after we moved in, we adopted these two little brothers.
This is Guster. He’s mine.
Nicknames: Little G. Gussy. He’s very energetic, playful and curious. And gets in trouble a lot.
And this is Todd’s cat, The Stig.
First name, The. Middle name, Stig. (if you’re not sure what that is, go here.)
Nicknames: Stig, Stiggy. He’s the more mellow of the two (which isn’t saying much), but is quite the speed demon. Unlike his namesake, he’s quite the talker and will actually hold a conversation with you.
Their favorite things to do are sleep….
hang out at the local watering hole…..
play with random toys….
work on the computer….
and have sprint races on the wood floors. No pictures of this because it’s always a blur.
This new suburban lifestyle seems to be fitting us nicely.
Category General | Tags: | 5 Comments
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10 Years Later, much the same
February 21, 2010 by Todd
So it’s been a while since we last mentioned Europe. With all of the other things going on, we kind of took a break from blogging about it. If you didn’t read them or want to remind, here’s a list of the postings:
Day 1 : London or Bust (London)
Day 2 : Sight seeing & City Hiking (London)
Day 3 : Falling Down (London)
Day 4 : Motoring Day (London)
Days 5, 6, & 7: An attempt to accelerate this process (London, Cambridge, Paris, & Zurich)
Day 8 : Love at First Sight (Zurich, Chur)
And so that leaves us in Chur (here’s a map).
We woke up in the morning and headed down to catch the train to Arosa. First, however, we wanted to make sure we had some lunch. Because we were on a budget for food — due to the exchange rate as well as having just spent a premium of $150 on a hotel in Zurich a couple of nights before — we headed down to the local grocery store — Coop. I won’t get into the details, but apparently in grocery stores, you’re supposed to weigh & tag your own produce. They won’t do this at the register. Especially don’t do this if there’s only one cashier. Who doesn’t speak English. And who has to run back to the front of the store & do this for you. Causing the single line to get longer.
But I digress.
So we headed down to the train & got on with about sixty or seventy somewhat rowdy German senior citizens. Fortunately we found of the smallest second class sections and were unbothered by them so were able to enjoy the ride through the mountains.
The train stopped at about 4 or 5 little wonderful towns on the way up to Arosa. We didn’t stop as it didn’t look like there was much to do there, but they were enchanting nonetheless. We simply stared in awe and day dreamed about them from our train window.
Note some of the senior citizens departing the train on the car behind ours.
It had been 10 years since I was here last. The last time I was here was in June of 1999 for a choir trip. Now that I think about it, we also had a large contingency of senior citizens with us on our trip — as it was the intergenerational choir trip, with both high school students & senior citizens. Here’s a pic I shamelessly stole from one of my friends on Facebook who posted this.
Our first order of business was to eat, so we walked around the little lake and sat on the bench to have our lunch – which consisted of bagettes, wonderful cheese, grapes, and a couple bottles of water.
And of course, our second order of business was to try to run faster than 30km/h for the local speed sensors. And then plan our hike.
We kept on hiking up through Innerarosa and up to a beautiful chapel overlooking Innerarosa — complete with a majestic cemetery (I don’t use those words together very often).
We stopped to take a quick bathroom break while we had the opportunity (in the cleanest public bathrooms I’d ever seen) and refilled our water bottles and had a drink out of the free water “fountain”. Not sure what’s in the water but it was better than any bottled water I’ve had.
We met some other hikers who spoke enough English to take our picture
At this point, Katie had the high point of her trip. I kid you not. All the places she’d been & things she’d seen so far was nothing compared to what she saw & heard next.
Yep. Cows. (She would say “NOT just cows — COWS WITH BELLS!!!!”). They just wandered throughout the countryside and hills, and we could hear them long after we could make out any of their features of them.
Next was onward and upwards
And up, and up, …
And at this point we had come up far enough, and had to start the descent a different way back.
This is part of a 5-star hotel which, at the cheapest time of the year, if you reserve in bulk, starts at $325 a night (source).
The train home! Thanks Arosa! See you in another 10 years!
Category General, Pictures, Travel | Tags: | 1 Comment
