A Christmas wrap

 

The weeks leading up the Christmas holiday are always a flurry.  We met the clans back in EC the preceding week and headed to TR for the holiday proper.  Sophia made it back to our house for Christmas morning and the Christmas eve traditions of pull tabs, pool and homemade spaghetti.  She was awaiting a pcr test results, but the bioassay said negative and the pcr would confirm this in time too. The logistics of getting cut out cookies decorate should get easier as they get older but one 'kid' activity simply replaces another, but in the end we found time to get them cut out an everyone was together for some decorating as well.  The gifts were unwrapped and then we proceeded to chill.  The week betwen the holiday was a celebration of sloth and glutton as everyone took the idea of hygge recharges to heart.  The break seemed short, but well needed by all.  With the big season over we change gears to a milder new years.  Grace had a friend over to watch movies and continue the RnR vibe.

Buckets and Bands...

 The first basketball season has ended and the tourney team will soon start.  Grace is getting plenty of playing time and is a defensive animal.  She also wrapped up her middle school band career for holiday concerts, the program took a noticeable hit with participants but sounded great.  We worked out her schedule to include an early morning gym class for next year so she can continue to play in high school. The braces had just came off, but it didn't impact her playing at all.  Ella also finished off her holiday concert career but for high school.  The even was held on the big stage of the Widener and involved the band, orchestra and choir.  It was a great show in a wonderful venue.

Decking halls and colored balls

Two trees again this year.  The front room tree has become the mature girl tree decked out in Victorian style with reds and golds. And we scored a sweet unsheared natural looking tree for the main room from a family lot near the house.  The unsheared tree was decorated in memories and adorned with ornaments of past years.  Each ornament of a time in the kids life or new adventure.  Hazel just lazed on the couch but strangely Oliver was only content when he was right in the mix.  Each passing year means fewer ornaments broken by the kids during decorating and sadly more found broken in the storage boxes.  Grace has taken over full duty of Herbie and plans to hide him in mischief each night for us to find.  Still a few items to put out of the season, the garland and the village. But having the trees up makes it feel like the season is closing in upon us.

Something for everyone....

 Merrick and I hit the woods early on Friday morning for the opening of gun season.  The tent was set up and the wood stove was stoked as we laughed with the gang and told the stories of old while we made hay for the stories of the years to come. We saw a buck on opening morning and two more sneaked in before sunrise of the second day. There were no deer to take home, but plenty of memories were made and enough day dreams to get us to the next season.  Grace skipped school too to spendFriday hanging out with her Grammy and ended the weekend with a massive pep rally for the basketball program.  Ella of course had to support the festivities and keep everyone singing along to all the pep band songs

Rites of passage....

The first snows have arrived but most of our excitement has been indoors as of late.  While it is still officially autumn Grace has started the Basketball season and played a 3-game round robin tournament over the weekend.  Some new rules for a new age bracket including full press, so there was plenty of running.  Combining all the running with the first time back on the boards and it made for a tiring day of play for her.  She played strong and put up some points as her team works out its new chemistry.  Ella added another milestone to her teenage years and received offers from two universities this week.  Now it is time for her to start to 'interview' them and see what the best option is for her next four years and beyond.  Merrick had his braces pulled off today and made him look just a little bit older and happy to chew gum yet again.

Grace beats the Devil

 

Grace loves a road trip, even if it means a start time of 5 am.  Amy, Grace and I hit the road long before a post-7 sunrise to make hike part of the IAT around Devil's Lake.  The red quartzite trails and outcrops never disappoint and are made all the more enjoyable with the maple/beech forest at its peak coloration.  The initial temperatures were near freezing but our climb raised our internal mercury to a point of quickly stripping some layers. We debated if it had been one or two years since we had did the hike, although we selected the ridge trail this time rather than tumbled rock.  The trails are always busy at this popular park, but our early started seemed to mitigate some of the trail congestion in the areas we traversed. We completed the loop at an easy pace, taking in balanced rock and resting for awhile at Devil's doorway, long enough for me to have a sandwich and Grace some Cheese-its before taking the slow descent through the east bluff woodland trail.  Tumbled rock pub/grill served us a great lunch and the ladies napped as I drove back towards home.

Basically a boys weekend

 

Ella had her senior night for the marching band (I forgot my camera).  It was the last march at the last home football game before she turns her attention to the pep band Friday nights.  Grace was running around the stadium with her friends as the team slaughtered a cross town rival.  Ella and Amy hit the road early on Saturday morning to make a Lacrosse tournament south of the Twin Cities, pounding out the miles in the predawn darkness and leaving Merrick, Grace and I home alone for the weekend.  Grace had plans to hang out with a friend most of the time, with a sleep over, bowling and Sunday corn maze so it our pack was quickly down to Merrick, the dogs and I.  Merrick and I laughed a bit about the idea that it was only the second time that this particular combination had occurred, they last time also involved all the girls in the Twin Cities.  He and I hit a burger place were for dinner and then played the strings a little bit when we got home.  He had been picking up the guitar in the basement and I gave him a brief instruction in tab reading...thus bestowing all of my guitar knowledge on him.  We shared the couch and watched some Peaky Blinders before I called it a night.  Sunday morning(ish) we grabbed the dogs and headed to Oconto to scout around for plan B deer stands and hoped to see a squirrel or grouse.  Hazel ran off, but eventually came back and we decided not to push our luck in the dense woods that wasn't going to yield a good deer stand any ways.  The Packers were playing on the radio as we made our way south for a quick dog wash and a malt/fry combo.  All in all a pretty good weekend.

A hunt

 

Merrick and I headed to the Oconto county forest for the WI youth gun hunt.  After last springs trip to Stanley he said he wanted to give deer hunting another try.  The weather was great, even plenty of mosquitos but the thermacell helped cut those down to size...or as Merrick continued to call it 'the incense burner'.  We left the house about 5 am and made the drive to arrive at the stand about 30 minutes before the light started to creep into the woods.  There was another Father/son team at the trial head where we parked, but that was a good example of how to hunt public woods. Introduce yourself, share your locations for safety and be polite.  The ground blind I built last April fit us both comfortably, the seats we had were not up for the task and the screw in tree steps slowly bent through out the day under our weight.  It lead to a constant battle to find comfort.  Merrick had a his head in his lap by 7:08...I took a picture of him and he busted me, smiled and figured he should check his phone too.  I then heard the characteristic double bound of a deer.  "Was that a deer?" I whispered to him as he smiled and shook his head at our foolishness  'Yup".  The deer had tiptoed in behind us and to Merrick's left, he only saw the white flash of the tail bounding away through the woods.  It was still great that we saw a deer, it would be the only one all day, but it if gave Merrick enough focus to hunt until sunset.  We headed back to the truck for an early lunch and chatted about hunting, school and the Nov. deer camp.  I pulled out the poem book and read a few to give him an idea about that aspect too.  He said he had a working title already "greenhorn' but no verses to go with it.  We walk/stalked around the woods for about an hour after lunch before making our way back to the stand.  He was great in the woods, had a good sense of the layout and found the stand on his own when we came in from a different direction and having only been there once in the dark.  He was safe with the gun and all around a great hunter.  In the end we didn't get a deer or even see another one, but both agreed that it was a great way to spend the day.  On the way home we made plans for how we would hunt on the second day.  I was impressed at his desire to go back out at 5 am...once home with a shower, dinner and on the couch he decided that not hunting and sleeping until noon would be more relaxing.  It was fine with me, with temperatures in the mid sixties it was a little hot to hunt anyways and the important parts of the hunt were already instilled.

HoCo season

Homecoming is a new event for us.  It has been on hiatus for about 30 years due to a few hooligans, but this year they brought it back.  With two in High School we dipped our feet into the celebration.  Grace was able to go to the red bird rally on Friday to show her support as well as the football game and then continued the night with a sleep over.  Ella marched in her first and last homecoming game and the sense of "seniorness" is setting in a little as this was the first of her lasts.  Her night ended with  friends and a campfire before starting all over on Saturday to get ready for the big dance.  Her and Merrick both dressed up in their finest casuals and headed to the school gym for the dance.  Ella left early because she and her friends were bored seniors, Merrick stayed until the final song and came home all sweated up from dancing...it is fun to have them at both ends of the high school age spectrum.  Around all of this we celebrated Amy's Birthday too with a family brunch and one of Grace's homemade cakes.

The Return to Routine

Routines are back.  The weather says that summer is at its best but the calendar reminds us that School in now in full swing and we are falling back into the routines of the school year.  Still time for evening campfires and even the occasionally coerced Kubb competition but the days fill up and the evenings are getting shorter.  We did get Sophia dropped off at college, unpacked and starting her own adventures.  We made the drive back to LaX the next weekend for Ella to get an official tour.  The longest college tour we have had at almost 3 hours. She liked it and is weighing her options. I assume our stroll through Riverside park and the Woodstock festival will help a bit. Merrick and Grace are meeting friends at some of the Football games and finding their way back into socializing postish..pandemic.  Grace did join Amy and I downtown for an art fest.  We were caught in the rain the first day but made it back the following day to check out the completed and impressive murals that were painted. We also headed to TR for our first krautfest experience which did not disappoint and brought home about 50 pounds of 'prekraut' from the 323 pounds that were made that day at the family gathering.

 

the end

Everything has a last time.  Most often we don't know these last times are happening.  At some point there was a last time you took your kids off your shoulders but didn't know it would be the last.  At some point you tucked then into bed for the last time but didn't know it would be the last.  This trip did have a feeling that it could be the last family trip of such magnitude, the kids are getting older. As always we hope we have given them experiences that allow them to grow. This last day of the trip gave me time in our travels to remember this.  It was a busy day with an early start due to flight changes.  The drive to SeaTac was easy and dropping off the Tank was smooth.  I reminded the kids again to empty their water bottles so TSA wouldn't take them and Amy reminded me that I had told them a dozen times and they weren't children.  Seattle airport was the most chaotic poorly designed and laid out airport we have been in.  Agents were hollering, TSA was telling long lines of people about to miss their flights that they should have planned better, passengers were cutting in line and throwing laptops out of their bags on to screening... Stress and disgruntled travel was permeating the air. The older two asked to use the restroom at this point, I was miffed having suggested it when we dropped off the Tank.... Slightly more irritated when I learned it was to empty their water bottles. Grace was thinking that when the 'kids' move out then the three of us should fly first class. The flights themselves were smooth and we had great food during our layover in MN. It was about 2:30 am before we pulled into the driveway and officially ended what could be one of our last.

Penultimate

Minimal hiking and a different summit as well, as a different type of summiting.  Our start was later too and we filled our bellies (a phrase Amy came to loath) with breakfast sandwiches and hit the road to take a gondola ride to the top of Crystal Mountain and see Rainier from the north east vantage.  The gondola ride didn't do anything for Amy's fear of falling but was an easy 15 min ascent that offered great views.  We grabbed some drinks and pretzels at the top and wandered around a bit checking out the ski slopes that we all agreed were quite steep.  Back at the base of the hill the girls all "panned" for minerals and Merrick and I checked out the store before we headed back to the cabin in 95 degree heat.  The plan was for an early pizza dinner in Packwood, but we opted for an air conditioned bar advertising burgers.  We chose wrong, but at least the food was so bad that it was comical and the pool table was open.  We passed around some pull tabs quickly turning 7 dollars into four and then zero while we waited 4 min for our food to arrive...yes four min. That was our initial sign of how bad it would be.  We had access to a pool, but there was snafu and we weren't allowed in so we headed back to our cabin.  Back at the pad we walked up the river a ways with plans of maybe getting in to cool off from the heat, but calf deep wadding was all that was needed in the glacial run off.  

Rainier

Another early start but that is the only way to get around, or out in front, of the parking issues of the NPs.  We made the hour drive from the pad to Paradise to hike the Skyline trail on Mt. Rainier.  Along the way we interrupted a weird photoshoot with a purple mermaid in a glacial falls and morning fog. Skyline is a loop and an endless debate rages on about whether it should be hiked clockwise or counterclockwise. We went clockwise and the initial trail is topographically tough.  The trail portion is paved so there are no switchbacks and the altitude gain is a steep climb. The wild flowers were in full gorgeous bloom and the cold drafts of air from the glaciers were refreshing.  A few times we even heard the crack and moans of the shifting glaciers. We were seldom out of sight of marmots, including a prurient rodent in the restroom at Panoramic Point.  We noshed on some lunch and rested a bit.  A chipmunk hopped into Ella's lap to investigate her cliff bar. Merrick spotted a "chicken" walking across an ice field, which must have been a spruce grouse.  The views were amazing and the smells were wonderful but neither of them could be captured adequately on film. 

know your limits

Travel day as we had a a slower morning before driving to Rainier.  The travel was easy until we got to the park proper. It was Saturday and there were traffic delays.  We started to hike to Comet tail falls  with a little sprinkle coming down.  We did see some great waterfalls but it was also a lesson in flexibility and respecting the Mtn.  The delays meant we were not going to comfortably make comet falls, grocery shop and get to it new pad in any time that felt like fun.  After about 45 min on the trail we headed for food and made plans for the next day. I did slip on the way down and then instituted a new rule that anyone that slips can issue an F-bomb.  Merrick promptly feigned a slip and tested my commitment to the edict.  Our new pad is great and the large deck is  a wonderful way to listen to the Cowlitz river, look at the mountains and enjoy a glass of wine after a big taco meal. Full family meals are in short supply these days at home, so this too was nice occurrence on the trip.