Christmas in MA and NY!!

We have had such a great time back east with our families (and one short day with our friends, but that's the previous blog). I've included a ton of photos, but there are even more in my (Julie's) Picasa album.

Jay arrived late because of the crazy snow storm that hit the coastal regions. This was actually odd, because he flew into Albany, NY where the storm did not hit at all!! But his flight was still canceled and he ended up spending about 24 hours in Chicago's airport. I would have been a grump, but he managed to pull through with an excellent attitude, as usual. Once he got to NY, we spent the night with my parents and had a fairly lazy morning the next day before driving to the Cape. It was such an awesome drive - because as we got closer and closer to Cape Cod, there was more and more snow. Check out the photo Allison took below of her house (the house that Jay grew up in).

There was a TON of snow and it was beautiful. I miss snow. Now that we live in retirement land in Anacortes, we get no extreme weather. So, it is nice to freeze our bums off and to bundle up for cold and crisp walks outside.

Here I am with Price, the damn cute kitten after one of those crispy walks outside in New England.

This shot is awesome. See the snowball in mid-air headed for Lee (Jay's sister)? There was quite the snowball fight on this walk.

It looks like the snowball fights have stopped at this point....

Here is Jay and Allison (his mom) trudging through the snowy woods back to the house

We spent Christmas Eve with Jay's family and then drove late at night back to NY to be with my family on Christmas Day. Here are the sistahs and the brother chillin' together on Boxing Day. Best present of the day? My parents are flying Christina out to see Jay and me in Anacortes in April!! We can't wait to spoil her rotten and take her out on some great walks, paddles, tulip-viewing, and maybe even skiing because Mt. Baker is still coated in snow then! We will have F.U.N..

We were treated to a visit from my uncle and his family, sans Lynn because she was sick. We had just returned from another crispy cold Upstate NY walk here.

Jackson

Henry

So, the Fredas gave Henry and Jackson some instruments for Christmas. After they left, they missed out because we had a FULL parade through the house, directed by the nuggets themselves.

The Barber-Just family just left today and I've got one more full day left here (sad) before I head back west to Anacortes and Jay (he had to leave earlier to go back to work) and our kitties. Life is good, Henry and Jackson were a riot and fun to hang out with for more than a few hours, and it has been great to spend more time with my family. Hope everyone has had a great holiday so far!!

Babyland!

We spent yesterday buzzing around RI meeting all the new nuggets that have been successfully produced by all our friends! PLUS - we have been able to hang out with a different kind of baby, a kitten! Allison and Jim (Jay's mom and her husband) got a little ball of energy and fluff and Prince, the kitten, is a riot.

Prince (not named after my favorite rock star)

Jay and Zachary Leeming

Mary Sparkles was very missed by Julie and Jay - so in addition to seeing KP and Justin, we were thrilled to meet their new son (Zachary) and give Mr. Mary Sparkles lots of love.

Jay and Justin

Kristina (KP) and Julie

Christine and Julie (and Shadow)

Ryan is almost walking!

Jay, Eric, little microEric (Kai!)and Jane

Now we are on the Cape with Jay's family and playing with Prince the fluff. I have plans to go for a jog in all the snow! The Cape really got dumped on with the big snowstorm and it's fun to see all this snow. We love snow. We head back to NY for 2 days with my family and then Jay is off to WA again. I'll stick around a few more days to spend some time with my sister and her family. Back home to WA on New Years Eve.

Best of Sydney

Well, because we were only in Australia for about 3 full days (while we waited for our flight to Indonesia), we stuck to Sydney for some exploring.
It didn't take me long to go through these photographs. I can't believe it has been 1 1/2 years since we were there, and I'm still trying to find time to go through our bazillion photos!
Anyway - here is a link to the best shots from Sydney.

http://picasaweb.google.com/globalscents/TheBestOfAustralia#

What's this leg coming out of me?

Really cute, I know....

A neat view of the Sydney Opera House with a storm approaching

I head back to the east coast tomorrow and Jay follows me on Saturday. Next post will probably be from a warm house filled with people we love and miss dearly.

If you didn't see the collage we made for our holiday e-card - here it is!! Click on it to see the big version!

The remainder of Banff/Jasper photos - finally!

Well, because my grades are submitted for the community college, you would like to think I have gained my life back. No such luck - with only 5 days left before I leave for NY I have a TON of stuff to do in order to be ready to teach again. But I'm really missing my hobbies, so I am refusing to work for three days. I have finally, after months, finished going through our honeymoon photos and uploaded all of them. You can find the link to these pictures here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jdimond/CanadianRockiesOurHoneymoon#

I have big plans tomorrow and even tonight to go through the wedding photos from our friends Mike and Kelly. Then I'm hoping to actually put together a "best of" album from the wedding, we have nothing up on Picasa yet! This, I suppose, is proof to how much my life has been sucked away by this new job. No time at night to do anything but lectures and grading. Not my cup-o-tea. I'm all about work hard and play hard...but not work hard and work hard. Anyway - here are our Banff photos.... what a place!

View from the parking lot where we started on our sweet little overnight backpacking trip

Campsite on Glacier Lake

Jay got to do some fly-fishing and I got to gape at the gorgeous light

While we were sleeping an INSANE wind and rain storm blew in. If we had not been in the Canadian Rockies, I would have thought that there was a tornado coming. You could hear this gnarly wall of wind coming toward the campsite, we both started thinking about where to go in case trees started coming down! But, this wasn't necessary. Forget sleep though - the noise was intense. And when we woke up in the morning, we had gone from gorgeous blue skies to equally gorgeous dripping clouds blanketing the mountains. Perfect.

Crowfoot Glacier

Now we are in Yoho National Park - we rented a canoe and headed out on a paddle on Emerald Lake.
Neat view of the lake from our canoe

Cross country scraping

We headed up to Mt. Baker yesterday for some x-c skiing. It was a beautiful clear and cold day with great views of the surrounding peaks. After a bit of skiing from the upper parking lot of the Mt. Baker ski area, we went to another spot with these great views. The only problem was that the snow was crustier than month-old stale bread and we made lots of lovely scraping sounds. Just above the scraping, I heard Julie say at one point, "I just love the silence and solitude of x-c skiing". Isn't she wonderful?

Thanksgiving in Anacortes

Well, at the last minute, we ended up hosting a small and super fun Thanksgiving at our house! How exciting! Ralph and Hannah came up from Seattle (via their own fun in Vancouver the night before) for a big turkey dinner. I (Julie the vegetarian) had the day before Thanksgiving off - so I ended up shopping for a turkey. This was entertaining. I could not deal with the butterballs and other big brand name turkeys at all the grocery stores. So, I headed into the town's little local butcher shop. Can you imagine? I pretended like I knew what I was talking about and walked out with a small, free-range, organic, turkey. Ha! The omnivores were happy and Jay dealt with cooking the thing.
Want to know about our food? Once I passed the turkey onto Jay, I turned toward an exciting menu. I had just purchased a 50 lb. bag of local taters from the girls swim team (I got sucked into a swimming fundraiser), so we had mashed potatoes galore! We made teriyaki almonds, phyllo cigars (stuffed with dried cranberries, capers, almonds, and cumin seeds) and a lovely cheese and cracker plate for appetizers. Then the usual turkey, Jay's stuffing from scratch, mashed taters topped with roasted garlic cloves, homemade sourdough rolls with lavender flecks, and brussel sprouts sauteed with a dry Riesling and dried cranberries and shallots. Tasty stuff eh? Oh - I made an apple pie and a cranberry torte topped with a toffee brandy sauce and freshly whipped cream. We were full.

Here is the table pre-food

Here is the table ready for din-din

Jay, Ralph, and Hannah in Deception Pass State Park the day after Thanksgiving

Zeller's boletes we collected

Oyster mushrooms right found along our favorite backyard hike

Hiking in the Chuckanuts

View from the top....

Varied thrush

Birds and windows do not go together. We decided to head out on a paddle in some protected waters because of the gale warning for more open waters. But first we had to stop by Jay's lab to get his boots. We discovered a stunned varied thrush sitting by a huge window at the lab. I was out of the car instantly to see if it was O.K. The spot on the window where it had hit was obvious - feathers and some smeared blood? Why is it that introduced nasty species like starlings never hit windows? Instead, it seems to be the native, lovely songbirds - like this varied thrush - that have to hit windows. A fox sparrow (another gorgeous native songbird) flew into our home window and was killed instantly the other week. This resulted in me printing out a million hawk silhouettes and taping them to our windows. But I'm not sure a big marine lab will do this to their windows or not. In either case, we put some grass into a traffic cone that was around the lab parking lot and placed the thrush into the cone. It was freezing and we were worried that without this little fluff moving, it would get too cold. Then we went for a paddle. When we came back hours later, the bird was still there. But active! When I reached in to try and get it out - it flew away! We are not naive, and we realize it may still die. But at least it flew away to a tree and off the ground so it will not be exposed to ground predators.

Here is the beautiful varied thrush - you can see the spot on its head where it hit the window

Our freezing paddle

Lester gets comfy

Darwin dreams of life without the annoying collar

Darwin and the flicker

Well - our little fatty fluff Darwin had a strange lump on the side of his belly. We just had it removed this Friday. The good or bad news is that it could be cancer, and it might not be cancer. We could pay more money to find out - but the end result of finding out, or not finding out, would be to wait and see if another growth appears. For now, I'm alone this weekend while Jay presents his research at a conference. So, I've got to keep Darwin in his silly collar so he can't lick the stitches and deal with Lester who wants to be by my side every second of the day. But I have to keep the cats separated so Darwin doesn't get bothered too much. This separation resulted in Lester crying all night because he couldn't sleep with me. And Darwin kept me awake all night begging to have the collar taken off. Needless to say, I wish Jay was here.

Something nice did happen yesterday though - I was treated to an excellent view of two northern flickers right in our backyard. They were too close for me to even go outside to take a photo, I would have scared them away. So I took this shot right through our window.

I get to take the collar off of him when I'm around - much more cute eh?

Bolete land

We have entered into the world of mushrooming. Mike and Jennifer gave us an awesome guide to mushrooms for a wedding present, and off into the woods we went! Now, the weekend didn't begin with mushrooms. It began on the night of Jay's birthday in Newport, Oregon.

We were super lucky to not only be hanging out with Mike and Jennifer, but old friends from RI - Erik and Jared. Erik lives in Corvallis, OR and Jared was out visiting Oregon State University to check out a graduate program there. We met up at the Rogue Brewery because we heard that Jay could get free beer there on his birthday. Alas, you had to be a Rogue Nation member and you couldn't sign up the night of your birthday. Lame. We had a bunch of tasty beer anyway and a grand time.

Erik with a king bolete

After a super lazy morning with huge wild mushroom omelettes, we eventually pulled all our rain gear together and headed out for a nice hike. Before we even got to the trail head, we stopped to check out the huge surf from the big storm that pounded Washington and Oregon. The surf was so huge there was a massive amount of sea foam on the beach and in the intertidal. This monumental amount of foam was irresistible to Mike and Jay. I've provided a video, thanks to Erik, of what happened next.

After we pulled ourselves away from the foam, we hit the trail. What a hike! Not only did it rain, it POURED, complete with thunder, lightening, and then, (to make it even more entertaining) hail. But, it didn't matter. We were outside with good friends, relatively dry in our rain gear, and finding mushrooms!

Heceta Head Lighthouse

The next morning Mike and Jennifer broke all the rules of collectors and showed us a hot spot for king boletes. We hit the jackpot! Mushrooming is super fun, especially when you find TONS of these tasty morsels. Here is Mike showing off a biggie.

More photos can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/globalscents/November2009#