I am getting married...

to the most wonderful woman in the world. She is my best friend and will surely keep me on my toes for the rest of my life!

Here's how it all went down. I knew for a long time that I wanted to ask her while camping at her family's favorite camping spot. They have been going there every year for almost 3 decades now and as long as I can remember talking to Rachel she has always described it as her happy place. I thought this would be an ideal location to pop the question. The only person who knew I was going to ask her is her Grandma Trudi, for two reasons, one, I knew she would be absolutely thrilled to be involved, and two, Rachel has always expressed a distaste for fancy, expensive jewelry so I wanted to see if Trudi had anything with more sentimental value that she wished to pass down to Rachel. She found just the thing, Rachel and I are going to wear her grandparents' wedding bands. I am greatly honored by this and think it is perfect for us given our strong connection to our families. So, while were were camping I asked Rachel out for a sunset canoe paddle. We made our way to the mouth of the lagoon at dusk, with the South Sister and Mt. Bachelor watching over us. Something came over her and she decided that she wanted to turn around in the canoe to face me. Lucky thing because I was trying to figure out how to pull this off with her back facing me. Turning around in a canoe is not a graceful maneuver regardless how steady your sea legs are and she nearly dumped us in the cold water. After settling down, she noticed that I was clutching something in my hand as I was paddling the canoe. She asked what it was and I knew it was time. 

I held out my hand, revealing a pretty little pin that her grandma had given to me and said, "your grandmother wanted me to give you this when I asked you to marry me, so, will you marry me?" She was taken completely by surprise as she was sure I was preparing to throw a frog at her. She replied "really?" Since I have been known to pull a fair number of pranks on her over the years, this was not a surprising response. Seeing the sincerity in my eyes, she quickly replied "yes" as her own eyes began to well up with happy tears. We spent a few more minutes in the canoe, just soaking in the moment and then headed back in to camp to break the news. Now Rachel's happy place has one more happy memory and every year when we go to Sparks we will enter the mouth of the lagoon and remember the time when we agreed to spend the rest of our lives together.

Veggie Burgers

We are having veggie burgers at the house tonight. I found some really good ENORMOUS 1/4 pound veggie burgers, not the usual little cardboard disks. We also have fresh avocado, lettuce, pickles, alfalfa sprouts, ketchup and mustard to put on them. A couple of our friends are coming over, we usually try to have people over at least a couple nights a week if we can...I think if it were up to us we'd have everybody just live at our house but apparently some people need a little more space.

My summer in Seattle is sort of winding down to an end. I am working on the Roman Forum presentation I have to give on my third day of my Rome trip. Also, practicing with my new camera, a lot. I take it EVERYWHERE with me. I have had it for a little less than a month and have already taken over 1200 images! Not all of them stick around though, most get deleted, but to get those few good images you really have to take a lot of photos!! It makes me really thankful for the advantages of digital photography. On my budget, I don't think I could afford all the film I would have gone through and practicing would be much less convenient.

Here is a cool image I took at Lena's 4th birthday party on Sunday(Happy birthday Lena!!). She had a local Seattle celebrity come to the party, the Bubbleman. He does a pretty cool show, makes the kids smile and relays his very liberal political messages to the adults, whether they like it or not! Of these messages, one is repeated, "CHEAP TOYS!" Most of the props in his act he found at thrift stores or recycled other discarded items. The reason I like this photo so much is because of the amazing echo of the profile of his cap, face and beard in the outline of the bubble he is creating....very cool.

Seattle puts me under her spell once again...

This city is definitely taking me for a ride. Summer comes every year just when I've had it up to here with grey skies and drizzle, this year it lasted through much of June. Then the sky clears, the forecast reads 75 and sunny as far as the weatherman can predict and the sun sets at ten o' clock every night, giving me a little extra time outside to enjoy it all. I fall in love all over again. Just look at this killer sunset I snapped just five minutes from my house down on Alki beach! Sometimes I feel like I live in a postcard....

Little Sioux

I have been thinking a lot about the times I spent at the Little Sioux campground. Mainly because of the tragedy that happened there last week. I have been having good memories about the place though. I think one of the camping trips I remember the most is our "wilderness survival" trip. The object of this trip was to work on requirements toward the wilderness survival merit badge. Now, as a scout, I do not remember being highly motivated to work towards merit badges or advancement in rank. I mostly just enjoyed camping, hanging out with my dad, farting around the campfire and goofing off with the other scouts. 

I remember working on this merit badge though because one of the requirements was rather intimidating as a kid. It involved sleeping out in the woods overnight by yourself in a shelter that you had constructed. Not so hard by itself I suppose, but we had the added challenge that we were camping in the middle of winter (not sure what month, but it was COLD and the ground was covered in snow) in Nebraska. 

Winters in the midwest can be pretty frigid and this weekend was no exception. Dad might remember better what the actual temperature was because he always had a really hard time getting me to wear a coat, even if it was well below freezing. I would be running around the campsite in sub-freezing weather wearing nothing but a t-shirt and I remember him asking me repeatedly to put on a coat, a reasonable request. What I don't remember is why I was so determined to give him a tough time, I guess it is a mystery only kids know about.  

Anyway, I spent the better part of a Saturday out in the woods constructing my shelter. I think that there was a distance requirement of how far "out in the woods" you had to be, maybe 100 yards from camp or so. I had read in my scout manual about snow shelters and decided that it sounded like fun to make myself an igloo like an eskimo. The scout manual had some basic instructions for igloo construction and said it would be a good insulator to keep me warm at night. The snow was rather deep but had been around for a while because the top layer was ice. It was the kind of snow that is crunchy on top but loosely packed on the bottom. Perfect for making igloo bricks.

I spent a couple hours carving out rectangular bricks of snow, using my hand like a knife to cut the snow. I stacked them in a circle about as wide as I was tall. I continued making and stacking bricks until the shelter was tall enough for me to fit inside. I used a blue tarp to make the roof and I think I had even made a block of snow that I could cover the entry way with to help conserve heat. My shelter was finished, I headed back to camp and the other scouts and I nervously waited until nightfall when we would test our wits and will against mother nature.

The next part of this story is a little unclear in my head, but I will do my best to make it interesting. After dinner, we sat around the campfire, doing what boys do best, seeing how far they can push their dads to the edge of insanity. To the dads' disapproval, we would constantly experiment with new things to throw in the fire, soda cans, insects, magnesium shavings, socks, various food items, each other, rocks, flammable liquids, etc. Another favorite game was to make "torches" either with burning marshmallows or burning sticks and then walk around the campsite until somebody got poked with the hot end of the stick, game over. Then there was the ever-popular past time of melting your brand new pair of snow boots by using the fire-ring as a foot rest, very entertaining to the dads.

After the campfire, we grabbed our flashlights and headed out to our various shelters. I crawled into my igloo, pulled the snow block over the entry way and nestled into my sleeping bag. I remember sitting in the igloo with my flashlight on and watching my breath. It was SO quiet, snow really has a way of muffling sound, and being inside a pile of it, the only thing I heard was my own heartbeat. As far as I can remember, I fell asleep inside my igloo without any issue. I can't recall how long I was in my shelter until something BESIDES the sound of my own heartbeat woke me up. It was the sound of something, rather, several somethings, crunching around in the snow directly outside of my igloo!

The coyotes were very curious about the most recent resident of the woods and his curious snow-shelter. I heard them sniffing all around the edges of the igloo. They started pulling on 

the twine that I had used to tie down the tarp I was using for a roof, making the tarp shake. I knew they were coyotes because they were making the little yip-yip noises that coyotes make and panting a little, like my dog at home. I have no idea how I resolved this situation, dad had always told me that coyotes are not to be feared, they are more scared of me than I am of them and I truly believed in this. I was still pretty much terrified though. I don't know if I shouted at them and made them run away, or if I cried for help and dad came to save the day, or if I just lay there, completely silent until they left. However I dealt with the situation, I just know that I ended up back at camp and slept in the back of our caprice classic station wagon with my dad. All in all, it was a very fun trip and a great memory, however, the wilderness had won this round, sleeping in the back of a station wagon in the woods doesn't exactly count as "wilderness survival."

Burt Street

I was thinking about Burt Street this week, under very unusual circumstances. I'm working with a company that is cleaning up lead-impacted yards in the eastern half of Omaha. One of the properties we are cleaning up right now is across the street from our Burt Street house (remember June's house)?

Most of the lead was deposited as wind-borne "fall-out" from the old Asarco lead smelting plant that was removed in the 90s and replaced by the Lewis & Clark Landing, a "passive" recreation area that covers other buried Asarco hazardous waste with an impermeable clay cap that prevents seepage of these wastes from their burial site.

I'm not aware of any other lead-impacted properties on Burt Street, so that is probably good news for us.

Summertime

It's so close I can taste it! I just received a "Special Weather Statement" on my desktop warning us that the temperature is going to get up above 80 degrees....can you believe it?!? I still follow the weather religiously, though it is not quite as exciting up here as it is in the Midwest. A Special Weather Statement in Omaha likely is followed by instructions on how not to get killed by a tornado!!! Here's our forecast for this week, I'm not sure what those strange yellow spheres are supposed to be on Thursday and Friday...we don't see that one often...

Anyway, last Sunday as supposed to be rainy but Rach and I took our chances and decided to plant a flower bed. While we were out shopping she asked me how I knew the annuals from the perennials. I didn't really know, I suppose all that time landscaping helped. I think I knew one from the other before that though and i think it has to do a lot with the beautiful flower beds mom would plant. The ones I saw her plant every year were the annuals, everything else, a perennial. I can't name a lot of the plants but I can take one look at most and tell you if it will make it through the winter. I remember the marigolds most vividly because of the bright colors and also because they made my fingers smell bad, that smell still reminds me of summertime at our house on Burt street. Also, snapdragons because you can make them talk. And also a plant with red leaves that got these vertical stalks of flowers that I always had to help her pull off. These seemed to be in the flower bed every year. 

The promise of warm weather also reminded me of the awesome kiddy pool we had with safari scenes on the sides. I'm pretty sure that you can still walk into most drug stores in the summertime and buy this same pool. We would fill it up with cold hose water and jump in. Even though it was often 90 plus degrees outside, our lips would turn purple from the frigid water. it was so much fun though, kids don't care! We would swim around and around in circles until we made a "whirlpool." Although, I don't know if this is strictly a childhood thing as I typically buy myself a kiddy pool every year still, though I now refer to it as an "adult lounge pool."

Northern Wisconsin

Boy Scouting was a significant influence in my early years. My Boy Scout troop went camping every month, regardless of weather, and in Wisconsin that's a significant challenge during the winter months. We backpacked into most places we went, carrying our tents, food, warm clothing, etc. There were many memorable camping trips while I was a Scout, but one that was particularly memorable was a week-long canoe trip in northern Wisconsin with our Explorer Post, actually two weeks for me because I went a week early to take Voyageur training so that I could lead the group that I would take out the following week.

Northern Wisconsin has striking natural beauty, which alone made the trip memorable, but what was truly special for me was that my dad was the adult advisor on the trip that I led (left photo, back row, right side).

The trip began in the upper peninsula of Michigan in Thousand Island Lake and ended near Boulder Junction, WI after 8 portages and 2 carry-overs. We saw numerous bald eagles, deer, porcupines, and there were ten times that number that saw us, but we didn't see them. We camped one night at a site on Palmer Lake that had been raided by black bears the night before and there was packaging and food scattered all over the campsite. The trip was physically demanding with breathtaking vistas throughout that made a lasting impression on both Dad and I.

We returned to this area of northern Wisconsin several times in the following years for family vacations, finding several good campsites and fishing spots that we returned to year after year. To this day, loon calls stir the same feelings in me that I experienced on that trip. When Dad retired, he persuaded Mom to move to Vilas County (a move she made out of love for him and not the appeal of northern Wisconsin winters), where they lived until he passed away.

The natural beauty and wildness is what drew Dad to this area, and also to vacations in Colorado where his mom was born in the mountains outside of Eagle in 1895 and where he spent some of his high school years after his family moved back there from Minnesota. Dad left us too early, but I'm thankful that he spent the last years of his life in the Wisconsin northwoods that he loved.