Monday, August 27, 2012

Summer 2012

This summer has been a bit of a wild one for our family. Here it is in an illustrated nutshell [though Daddy put the camera down for unprecedented amounts of time this summer so photo coverage is spotty]: In June we all bummed around Costa Rica and Nicaragua for a couple weeks. We'll have a post specific to that trip eventually, so no pictures on that. Suffice it to say we had a blast. We learned in the early summer that Stanford would no longer let us live there because we've been there too long. So before heading out on a western-states road trip we had a couple weeks to start packing, get a little work in... and slack-line. A lot:
 

 

 Half of OurDearFriendsTheCanneys visited for a day. Littler got to play with her sweet old friend for a too-short day:

 

OurDearFriendsTheKatzes visited us for a day and we had a typically swell time:

 

 We slack-lined a bit more. Yes we tend to get obsessive about these things.  

 We drove with ODFTKs to their place in Logan and hung for a few days. We had tons of top-secret hooliganiationings. It was a blast. We spent a day up in the mountains:


 


 

 We had a week-long family reunion on Daddy's side just south of Livingston, MT. We spent most of our time trying to manage the logistics of 45 people sharing a small space and trying to go out and do things together. Also, cleaning up lots of barf/diarrhea. But still, it was awesome. Some of the all-time coolest people in the universe were there.  

 In Yellowstone:  

 The whole crew [multiple heads obscured in back]:

Grammy and Grampy, who started it all:  

 We even had a dance party and Little got to show off her super-awesome Mariner's Revenge Song dance [courtesy Aunt Megret]:

 

 There was an almost-epic family basketball game in Livingston... it was windy, raining, getting dark... there was lumber in the court and the court seemed to be made of crudely-crushed rubble. We were like a lightning-strike or broken-limb away from family-legend epicness but it was still super-fun. Daddy spends his life dreaming about playing ball with "Uncle" Nick, Uncle "Chris" and the crew and it happens all too rarely. 

After MT we went back to Logan for a couple days and met up with OurDearFriendsTheArchibalds AND OurDearFriendsTheKatzes at the same time. It was like old times, but totally different. Still awesome. We played Ninja Destruction, which is way cooler than it sounds. Daddy got a little out of control and hurt people; the usual stuff. It was great to be back with this crew again [photo courtesy Boni]:


 We met up with Mommy's sister and her family and drove off to Washington to spend some time on the Olympic peninsula with Aunt Chisnap. We did a variety of cool frontcountry stuff:









 4,600 miles in 3 weeks, 9 states/provinces, 51 family members and about 3,237,743.2 vomits/diarrheas. In the end, we were really excited to get back home and get as much courtyard time as possible with OurDearFriendsTheTalbots. After six years of living there it seemed strange to put so much value on a couple extra days of open courtyard life, but it was very hard to let go. Some last-minute courtyard videos [some of these are quite long...] [Well, here's one. Maybe more to follow]



 EV is a magical place and an inspiration for community design. We want to spend the rest of our lives living with like-minded people around shared space. We haven't completely come to grips with leaving, but I suppose it's inevitable. We had a multi-family send-off party in our courtyard and so many awesome people showed up to wish us goodbye.

We got to spend one last day with OurDearFriendsTheAndrewses, some of our very favorite people ever. Bittersweet times. We packed up and moved to Washington with lots of help from Grammy and Grampy. For loads of boring reasons this ended up being a better option than staying in CA. We had a teary send-off from ODFTTs: OK, perhaps not so teary.



 Bud getting in on the action.

 The most potent combination of personalities on the entire planet:

 Now we're in WA, living near Daddy's parents and nearer Aunt Chisnap, starting to slide back into normal life, etc. Mt. Baker is super-close:



 To all of you we visited: thanks for a stupendous time! And to all the old EV folks...

2 comments:

Martie said...

Tremendous. Sad. Beautiful.

brittney said...

thanks for the pictures and post! miss you guys