Day 1 of Vacation

I couldn't stand it any more, so I finally took off from work and picked up my family. Colleen, Gary, and Hannah all arrived well! Hannah called her family to tell them she was good and told them how the flight went. Apparently she got to go to the cockpit of the plane!! Can you believe it? You'll have to ask Colleen for that picture since its on her computer.

Everyone was hungry, so we went to Piecora's, the best NEW YORK STYLE pizza in Seattle (if you ask Alistair and me).

Then we decided to go to the Aquarium downtown at the docks. Hannah and I took the bus, and Alistair and Colleen and Gary took the car. Hannah was excited to take the bus. It wasn't too busy, so it was kind of cool (or boring). Hannah got to pull the cord a couple of times to get us to the stop down by the water. We stopped to look at the birds and the water before we met everyone at the Aquarium.

Take a look.









We saw Sea Otters playing, and Alistair was showing Hannah the fish that lay in the sand to cover themselves up. They're pretty creepy!






Hannah wanted to touch the star fish, but it was a little scary, so Colleen helped a little. But as you can see here, after that first touch, she got to touching as much as they could!




We ended the day with a CRAZY big octopus in this tank. Good thing Gary was there or we'd be TERRIFIED (everyone involved). This one was SERIOUSLY sucked to the side of the tank!

More on the next day - we went to the market and the zoo!

4th - pretty!

Well, most of the day was spent in preparation for the Comeau/Koehler visitation. That's fancy wording for cleaning - must be ready for my family. But we did have a chance to see some fireworks. Nice thing about our apartment is that we don't have to go very far. . . like our deck for instance. Pretty easy to see the whole city's fireworks (and other cities as well). There were probably about four or five different displays going on from 9:30 until almost 11pm. So, I took a TON of pictures with my tripod and timer. Thought I'd show a few.

If you look really closely, the long lights at the bottom of each picture is the bridge over to Bellevue. If you look at all the pictures I took in succession, you can see the moving. Hope all of you had a great holiday!

lazy day

So, not much got done today. We got up late. There was kind of a view of the only other volcano you can see from our deck. Glacier Peak. There is debate internally whether it's east or north east or whatever. At any rate. Here's a picture. It's not fabulous b/c it's really far away.


Here's MouseMouse. This picture definitely sums up the day - reading and sleeping.

my little sweeties

wanted to show you my cuties. I have three (no - not my kitties, tho they're cute too). I mean my niece and nephews.

Hannah's looking quite nice in her first communion picture, but someone ought tell the priest to behave!!!




Gavin's a clown, or maybe he's the genius - he's doing great things with lnumbers.










Sam is adorable, but looks like a nap might be in order!

much love to them all! hope they see it on-line.

Night bugging

So, apparently Al likes to look for bugs at night. And, he thought it would be a good idea to bring me along. . . It was dark, kind of cold, and we had to wear head lamps as you can see.

But we did learn a couple of things about collecting at night.

• Headlamps attract bugs
  
• Headlamps attract the wrong kinds of bugs
• this park is NOT the best park for beetles
• It is a good park for slugs. . .

It's called Discovery Park and we were at the part called Wolf Trail.

You get the idea, go and look for bugs on trees. Alistair does some crazy stuff by going down in raveens, etc.. . . I stayed out of that stuff.

Then we went and collected his traps. From his cursing right now, I can tell it was a VERY unfruitful visit. He's ranting about taking the trap out. But he did put some rancid pork there this time to see what kind of carian (probably spelled wrong) beetles will come. Here's a picture of is trap(s). He's got one hanging (very useless in this area) and two in the ground - haven't heard anything yet on that, so I'll let you know if anything fabu comes out of it.

It's late (after 1am), so I'm going to take my night bugging butt to bed.

Boy - isn't it exciting to be a Ramsdale?

Pretty boring day. . .

So not much happened today. Well. . . it started pretty interestingly enough. Alistair and I were sleeping rudely awakened by the REALLY REALLY loud fire alarm. Our whole building is linked, so everyone's was going off. I started getting really upset and told Alistair to get the cats and lets get downstairs. He of course was more irritated (that's putting it mildly, by the way) and told me that the building has sprinklers and he would be staying put with the cats. No kidding. . .

At any rate, I ran downstairs to figure out what was going on and lots of people with their cats and dogs (and everyone from Trader Joe's) were outside. The fire truck came, but there wasn't any sirens, so I didn't think it was serious. This was confirmed by the fact that not only did the firemen go in the building (sans suits) WITH the building maintenance guy. So, I went back up stairs.

We decided that we needed to eat, so we left. . . and went to the hurricane (everyone was back in the building by this time, btw). But before we went to breakfast (mind you it is about 2pm), we stopped off to pick up Alistair's books for work. . . He read durning breakfast.
If you look closely enough, you can see the insects on the books. He also got another book (he calls it a very guilty pleasure) about trees. We probably would have gone on an adventure to see some of the biggest trees in Washington, Alistair is against it b/c it's the 4th of July weekend.





He's probably right, but I was still excited. Maybe we'll try it in the next few weeks. Here's the other book.

We had a list to get through today on our errands list. Books, Breakfast, Beads (I had to finish a necklace), cat food, and the pharmacy. So, our next adventure was the bead store. And cool enough, the waitress was a previous employee at several bead stores. She liked my bracelet (that I made), so she gave us some good leads on stores. So, since we had to get cat food (and nip as you can see here), we went to Wallingford to get the caps for my necklace.

The most difficult deal here was to decide what kind of catnip to get. Alistair went through the usual calculations and we got the cheapest stuff to get our cats "happy". It turned out to be a brand that calls itself PREMIUM cat nip.



Other than that, the next stop was that beed shop. So, off we went. I learned a lot and you should see the selection - one could go broke in there. But not to worry, I only spent $5.36.
Before we got to the bead shop, we saw a cute place that sells weird stuff called "not a number". Alistair found some interesting maps. . .
- Alas, they didn't have the map he wanted. He did note that they would get more and we gave them our names and number to give us a call when they came in. Quite a shop - definately left of the line in terms of politics. . .

Then we went to the pharmacy which was pretty boring of course. Then on our way to home where we put away the essentials and Alistair started to read.

I finished my necklace, which I believe needs some work, but it's my first one so give me some slack for sure. It's pretty and I can't wait for it to work out.

Lastly, we had a "family" portrait as I'm setting up my tripod on the deck to get a glimpse of another volcano from out deck. It's called Glacier Peak, but kind of hazy in the day, so I'm going to try to catch it at the dusk hours.

Here's the family picture anyway. Mouse Mouse wanted in and was quite pleased with the attention, I assure you.

Alistair goes bug hunting

Alistair went to Federation Forrest State Park today. He wanted to do some collecting and naturally brought home a bunch of bugs and dirt.


The nice, interesting thing he did this time, though, was to bring home some pictures. Only four, but WOW, they're great!!!! These aren't actually taken in the Federation Forrest State Park, they're taken about 10 miles away (south at about 10K feet). He wanted me to let everyone know that.


They need no other explanation.

The Great White Mountains

Here are some more pictures from our deck. I have a good lense, so we have some close ups!!!



This is a close up of Mount Rainier on a day with a great sunset. It turned the whole mountain pink!











On the same day we got REALLY LUCKY and got to see Mount St. Helens. Its the flat thing in the middle of the picture to the right of the church tower, and to the left of the buildings on the far right side of the picture.

These were taken in February. We haven't seen Mt. St. Helens since. . .

Views from our Deck!

Here's a picture of the Cascades from our
deck. It's looking South East. It's pretty
amazing. During the summer, there isn't
any snow, so this is a cool picture to see -
it's right before spring.














View of the Cascades from our Deck View of Mount Rainier in the size we usually see it.
There are television and radio towers across the street (south) and that's the red
structure.










This is the view when on our deck and you're looking East. The mountains you see are the Cascades. The street is Madison street. The body of water, is Lake Washington! That's Bellevue across the lake. Alistair says it's 27 feet above sea level. It's about 2 miles away (as the crow flies).











And this is looking West out on our deck. On a really clear day, you can see the Sound at the end of the street. We have binoculars to take a look, so when you come to visit, you'll see it for yourself.

This is basically a picture of the downtown area - it's only 17 blocks away here and if you walk, it takes about 40 minutes. The bus takes about 15-20 if it's not a slow day. . . It's mostly down hill, so not too bad. It's coming back that'll kill your legs - it's a buns 'o steel work out for sure!!!!

Starting to share

Hi all,

I've decided to blog about my daily escapade with the crazy Ramsdales (that would be me - kaypea, Alistair, mouse mouse , monkey pants, and captin willard). I'll post pictures and tell you about anything remotely interesting. I'm sure I'll have many things that are completely NOT interesting, but at least you 'll know what's going on.

Tonight is not very eventful. I've been working on the computer and converting pictures, copying my cd's for my ipod, and generally crafting. The almost Dr. is working on the bugs. . . doctoring them up, I guess.

Speaking of the escapade. . . the almost dr. went to Federation Forrest today to do some collecting. He took only four pictures, but they are great. Federation Forrest State Park is only 25 miles from Mount Rainier (the big mountain you always see in the picture). The Park he visited is in the middle of the Baker Snoqualmie National Forrest near the Mount Rainer National Park. From Seattle, you can see Mount Rainer (I'll post that picture too), but it's more than 80 miles away. So, it's pretty cool to see a different perspective of the mountain.

It's been kind of hot here (for Seattle), so we haven't felt like doing anything. We went to Trader Joe's again today. We live above it, so we do most of our shopping there. They have great cheese pizza, orangina (my fav from Europe), and great produce (and cheap wine).

Not much else is going on. Much love!!!!




kaypea