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...

Tahoe 2012

As people who don't have the privilege of having to shovel the stuff are wont to do, we blew a not-insignificant amount of money during the girls' spring break to go play in snow for a few days.

It was fun:








And pretty:




We spent an afternoon cross-country skiing with the two little ones in a trailer. Little skied 6K and rocked it majorly, except she was terrified of the downhill segments. It was a phenomenal blast despite more than one fairly spectacular wipeout.









During a downhill segment Little was scared to be left behind, so she made Mommy stay in back of her while she inched down slowly. Mommy, Arizona-type that she is, was not so adept at controlling her descent so carefully. So whenever she threatened to overtake Little she just bailed out into the snow. Over and over and over again. Bloik, bloik, bloik, bloik.


Daddy, the progressive gentleman that he is, graciously allowed Mommy to pull the trailer.

Cross-country skiing is something Daddy has wanted to do since he was a little kid, but this was the first time for everybody. Stupendifferous fun!

The next day we endeavored to create the most majorly RADiculously awesome snow cave ever. And we did.



It was ~20 feet long with a perfectly groomed entrance and exit and a room tall enough for Littler to stand in.










Budsto thought the snow cave was the chiznikkity [it was].








On our last day we struck out on fresh 5-foot-deep snow.


Snow? It's fun.


Budsto just slipped away from us.


About 5 minutes earlier Little made Daddy explain the word "ambitious" to her.


I think this had something to do with snowman-Budsto farting.






And that's it. We apologize for all of the saturated pixels, but we're from Arizona, so you can hardly blame us.