PDX Pix - December 2012

Yikes!  Over a month late on these!  Here is some of what we were up to in December.

Pre-Christmas in Portland:

Sunset over the park near my office

Powder day in the trees at Meadows (Mt. Hood)

Our "Mars"-themed gingerbread house from the annual Christmukkah party.  If you look closely you can see the martian made of broccoli, the nuclear reactor with blue cooling pool, the satellite dish on the roof, and a rover.  Not visible are the Reeses-powered rockets on the back.

Painting the fireplace!  We figured out we liked the look if we painted the mortar cracks a slightly darker shade than the rock itself - turns out way better than everything a constant color.  This is after having primed everything and painted the cracks the same color as the background wall (darker accent).

We explored a neighborhood known for its good Christmas lights, and this was one of the more curious installations...  any ideas what they were going for here?

Kate enjoying the basically finished living room.  Yes, the curtains are still held up with spare electrical wire, but you can't see that from here.

Ebel Family Christmas in Denver:

At the park swingset near the lake

Cooking with Corinne, Christmas eve.  I got potato-mashing duty.

A beautiful blanket of snow fell to give us a white Christmas!

Catherine and Kate, with Kate rocking the retro-70s shades

Playing King of Tokyo with the nieces and nephews.

Post-Christmas Road Trip, Denver-to-Portland:

     After Christmas our plan was to fly to Florida to visit my family, but due to a perfect storm of illnesses we called that trip off.  We were (and are!) sad to have missed out on a visit but with most everyone in bed not feeling their best it was probably the wise move.  So instead, we drove the Ebel's new-ish VW camper van back from Denver to Portland over 3 days to deliver us and an extra bed of theirs back to our house.  The plan is they wanted to do the road trip in March anyways, and this way they will only have to do it one way and we get a ride home!  We made the most of an impromptu adventure and had some good sights, hikes, food, and fun along the way.

Here's our vehicle, I think parked at a Walmart in Provo, UT.  We drove into the night and used the Walmart lots as our campgrounds for a few hours of sleep here and there.  It was usually around 10 deg at night so we did not pop the top and instead slept on the mattress we were transporting in the back of the van.

Entering Utah - beautiful landscape that could have been the moon or some other planet.

Arches NP off in the waning sunlight

We did a quick hike around North, South, and Tower Arches before we ran out of light.  It happened to be the day that the largest full moon of the year was rising directly through some arches so there were lots of photographers waiting in the cold to get some special shots. I'd love to go back and explore more, what a neat place.

Kate and Tower Arch

Sunset at Arches

After a stop for dinner in Moab and an overnight in Provo, we stopped in Salt Lake City to have breakfast and explore the FLDS-centric downtown plazas and architecture.  It's a nice pedestrian-friendly area and there was still a lot of Christmas-y festiveness in place. 

This is the very odd "Jesus in the cosmos" upper floor chamber in one of the visitor centers.  Very odd.  The pictures don't really capture the full strangeness of it all.

Singing carols in the (completely empty) tabernacle building

A later stop at Twin Falls, ID.  What an impressive set of waterfalls!  The snow on the ground made things pretty too. 

The falls is also a mile or two away from the site where Evel Knievel attempted his famous Snake River Canyon rocket-cycle jump (which failed).  We walked/trudged through the snow to see the launch site, which turned out to be this pile of dirt on the other side of a fence on private land.  Kind of disappointing.  But at least we got a good hike to stretch our legs 2 days into our journey!  

We should have read the wikipedia entry first, I guess: "Twin Falls became the center of national attention in September 1974 thanks to an attempt by Evel Knievel to jump the Snake River Canyon in a specially-modified rocket cycle. Watched by millions on television, the attempt ultimately failed due to high winds and a premature deployment of Knievel's parachute. The foundation of the launch ramp, which lies on private land, can still be seen."

Later that evening we stopped at a hot springs in Thousand Springs, ID.  Turned out to be a big indoor swimming pool that also had somewhat sketchy "rent by the hour" private hot mineral bath tubs.  But it was a nice stop on a cold night!

Nearly ran out of gas, thinking that we could fill up in tiny Durkee, OR.  Turned out the lone gas station there was closed on Sundays so we were VERY lucky to make it the additional 10 miles to the next town to fill up.  I think we put 22.6 gallons into a 20 gallon tank or something like that.  Phew.

Here we are in the van.  Thanks for the loan, Ebels!

Happy 2013 everyone, and stay tuned for January photos soon.

Belize!

Short post to announce that I've put a selection of photos from the first part of our holiday trip to Belize with our good friends Dustin and Cara. We took advantage of Kate's break from teaching to take a trip to Belize to do some adventuring, exploring, relaxing, diving, and whatever else we could come up with while down there.

The first part of our trip was spent inland near the Guatemala border near the town of San Ignacio, where there are lots of Mayan ruins, spectacular caves, and mountain/jungle rivers.  The highlights included lodging at two unique and memorable locations, catching the lunar eclipse on our first night there, a visit to the expansive Mayan city complex of Caracol, the amazing wet cave and Mayan ceremonial site of Actun Tunichil Muknal, a fun canoeing trip down the Macal river (with a stop at the botanical gardens), and an exciting tour called "Black Hole Drop" where we rappelled 300' down into a sinkhole in the middle of the jungle.


(click on the slideshow to go to the larger pictures on my Picasa page)

After a week in the jungle we went to the coast and spent a week in San Pedro on Ambergris Caye, one of the prime scuba diving destinations in the world due to the large and very close to the island barrier reef (2nd largest in the world to Australia's I believe). I'll put photos from that leg up soon too including some good ones of Kate with sharks, along with (if time permits) a post with more details about our adventures!

Happy Christmakah

Four of the greatest Judeo-Christian themed holiday traditions are celebrated each year at Dustin, Cara, and Karen's annual Christmakah party: gingerbread houses, potato latkes, garish displays of Christmas lights, and the game of dreidel.  This year we had a big group and made 5 houses, with only one burn from the scalding molten sugar used to structurally bond the house pieces together (ask Kate to show you her blister).

After building the houses and attaching them to boxes, we spread out about 90,000,000 calories worth of candy on the table and started to decorate.  The 5 boxes took different themes: a gingerbread dog-house, a fashion show runway complete with gingerbread models, a holiday horror-show, a ramp for santa on his sled, and ours, which was a farmhouse theme.  Here's some pictures from the action.

The candy carnage during mid-decoration.  You'll also notice people wearing the festive"yarmuclaus."  And Banjo, who was ever searching for dropped bits.  I think he gained 2 lbs that night.

 

Our house!  Check out Kate's farmer and tractor, and the rooster on the roof!  I also liked Mikey's hay bales.

 Some of Bailey's particularly morbid handiwork, part of the "garden of mutilated gingerbread men."

 The finished products.

The dreidel action, and...

The two winners with their prizes.

A's Game

On Saturday we (Kate) took a break from a busy weekend of schoolwork and headed across the bay to see our first Oakland A's game of the season! The A's took on the American League defending champion Tampa Bay Rays on a beautifully sunny spring afternoon, and it ended with the good guys winning 5-2! Here are some pictures:


Here we are sporting our Matt Holliday replica jerseys, the giveaway of the day


Matt vs. Matt: Holliday shatters his bat on a Garza fastball


A beautiful day at the Coliseum


Ziggy! Everyone's favorite blogger-turned-submariner-closer, sportin' the high socks


You show 'em, Kate.

Birthday Poems

For today I will try something new:
It's fun - see, Jeff did it too!
I hope it won't make you doze,
Soon we'll be back to prose
But 'till then - normal blogging, adieu!

Now I don't want to sound like a preacher,
But that Kate, she really is quite the teacher.
It's physics her students learn,
Maybe to work someday at CERN,
But that's not her only great feature.

Far from it, great qualities she has aplenty.
Of canines, baseball, and cuisine she's a cognoscenti.
I'm so happy we met
And though we've got no Corvette,
Can you name a husband who's content? (Me.)

Now I am off to make birthday cake.
Chocolate hazlenut's the kind that I'll make.
I wonder what she'll wish for...
(Probably for Carolina to swish more)
Wish me luck in my attempts to bake.

So today is my sweetie's big day,
The third day in the month before May.
(Don't tell her I told,
but 29 is how old)
So join in a hip-hip-hooray!

Happy Paczki Day!

Happy Paczki Day everyone! (pronounced pun-shkee)

Makes me wish I was Polish... mmmm...

So, friends and family in places like Toledo, or Buffalo - is this description of Paczki-fever in your towns accurate? Have you had a paczek before?

In Toledo, Ohio, people will start waiting in lines at 4 AM to get fresh paczki for Fat Tuesday. A local Polish grocery store called Stanley's, located on the north end of town, makes them homemade. The same thing happens also in Buffalo, NY, Cleveland or Garfield Heights, Ohio.

I also would like to see (or compete in?) this event:

A cultural phenomenon is the emergence of the "Pączki Challenge", an eating contest in which individuals attempt to race from one side of a room (non-standard) while eating as many pączki as they can before reaching the other side. The person who arrives first and has eaten the most pączki wins. Typically a ratio of 1 pączek for every 10 steps is considered competitive. Amateur competitive eater McKay Johnson holds the record at The Greater Chicago Paczki Challenge. He was able to consume 18 raspberry filled pączki before crossing the room.

Yum, I guess.

Oh Christmas Tree!

Despite the fact that we always travel for the holidays, we still get ourselves a Tom and Kate Christmas tree to enjoy in the weeks before we leave. When we go to pick out the tree, we have only one criteria - how pine-smelly it is. Tom and I always spend a good 20 minutes with our noses buried in all of the reasonably-priced trees until we can agree on which one is best. Because "appearance" doesn't factor into our decision at all, we've ended up with some goofy looking trees in years past. But this year the stars aligned and we got a big, beautiful, smelly tree that had somehow found its way into the discount section. Oh happy day!

We got it home and filled it with lights. Being relatively newly-weds, we still don't have a ton of ornaments, but we love the ones we do have. My aunt Susan gave us a traditional "brides" ornament box for our wedding, which contains a variety of blown glass ornaments designed to represent the different aspects of marriage. These include a heart for love in the home, a house for family shelter, a flower basket for beauty in the home, a fruit basket for plenty, a teapot for hospitality, a bird for confidence, a pinecone for eternity, an animal for peace with nature, a fish for Christ and fertility, a rose for the Virgin Mary, an angel for God, and St. Nicholas for giving. There is also one "groom's" ornament - a blown glass pickle. My aunt claims not to know where the groom's tradition came from, but we have our suspicions...

We also have some ornaments that Tom's mom and I made out of remnants from Tom's grandfather Nichols' mobile-making hobby. Tom's grandfather made wonderful mobiles with glass, rhinestones, and mirrors - they are big, delicate, elegant pieces of art. We love hanging those on the tree and always think about Grandpa when we do.

Tom's Grandpa Hill has also contributed to our beautiful Christmas decorations by giving us a hand-made wooden Noah's Ark. Inside the lift-off lid is a whole boatload of jigsaw critters - camels, alligators, hippos, walruses, snakes, elephants, wildebeest, gorillas, buffalo, giraffes, rhinos, llamas, donkeys, kangaroos, moose, lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!

One thing that we are still missing is a tree-topper, so for the last two years we have made our own with stuff we find around the house. This year we made it into a contest with some friends one night after dinner. There were some creative entries, including some geometric snowflakes (Tom), the baby Jesus in a crib (Kate), a tin foil Angel (Miriam), a large silver question mark (Mikey), and a Nichols-family-topper including tin foil renditions of Kate, Tom, Banjo, and Tom's bike (Cara). They were all so good that we've been rotating which one is on top.

We've only been married a short time, but it definitely feels like our own Tom and Kate brand of holiday traditions is starting to emerge - a little bit old, a little bit new, and a lot borrowed from our families. We hope your holiday is feeling as festive as ours is so far!