Swimming, reading, hitch & Slugs!

We've had Owen in swimming lessons for most of the summer and fall and he's really doing well with it.  One of the things we love about where we live is that so much is close by.  Owen had lessons at this outdoor pool during the summer months and we would ride our bikes down to the park and back.  Once in a while, Molly would come along and we would swim while Owen was in his lesson. 

Just a funny picture from dinner out one night.  The funny caption would be "My name is Molly.. you gotta problem with that?"  In reality, I think this was the drama that ensued after we informed her that she had to eat dinner before having any desert.  

Did I mention that there are some serious slugs up here in the pacific Northwest!   Holy goodness.  At first Owen was scared of them, but now he's more or less used to seeing these monsters.  The big ones can be over 5" long and there's several varieties around... like the gray spotted slug in our shed...

and the banana slug...

 but the most common and prevalent is the black slug.  Here's the kids looking at one on a local hike.  After a rain down on the trails around rocky point you can literally see 30+ of these things sliming around.

For moving bikes around we had purchased a hitch mount bike rack a few years ago.  Unfortunately, the only hitch we had was on the car that I sold in Pennsylvania...   After cramming bikes in the back and on the roof of Allison's car a few times, we decided to put a hitch on her car so we could use our rack again.  Previously I had always used etrailer.com to find hitches, but when I started there they had ridiculous shipping fees to Canada.. :(.   While shopping, I was fortunate to see an ad from hitch depot usa for a limited offer of free shipping anywhere in North America... so I placed the order.  It was a Curt brand hitch, which looked to be pretty well identical to the hidden hitch model I was looking at from E-trailer.  Anyhow, it arrived in less than 2 weeks and I'm happy to say was very easy and quick to install.

The hardware was simple and only required to fish line the hardware through some openings in the uni-body frame rail openings.  Only difficult part was that I had to drop the rear part of the exhaust system, and this involved removing some original corroded hardware. It worked, just took some time to prevent breaking any corroded bolts. I really missed my compressor and air tools sitting in storage in Pennsylvania.

Here's the finished view.  I didn't bother with purchasing the wiring kit as we don't plan to tow any trailers.  If we want to in the future, it's an easy enough thing to add later.

The local library in Port Moody sponsored a reading club over the summer.  Owen and Molly both kept track of all the books they read over several weeks in a log sheet from the library.  If participants filled out their entire sheets, they were invited to the award ceremony at the end of the summer!  It was really a great little event and the kids loved the recognition for reading.  Here's Owen & Molly getting their medals and certificates.

The medal....

They were so proud of themselves....... and so were we.  :)

The library had several supporting activities after the ceremony.  Here's Owen putting stickers on his certificate.

And they both got a little watercolor tattoo

Owen loved his bat.

And Molly of course had to have a butterfly.

Celebration of Light 2011 (China)

Vancouver hosts an international fireworks festival every year, where representing countries put on a competition of sorts in English Bay on the west side of the city. 

Vancouver Celebration of Light

For 2011, there were three nights planned, hosted by China, Spain and Canada.  We decided to go into the city on July 30th for the experience...  Driving into the city was strongly discouraged, so took the bus from the house, to the local Skytrain station, and took the train into the city.   Owen and Molly were so excited to ride on the train!

 
We had a nice afternoon walking around Canada place and Gastown.  Here's Owen on the pier watching some seaplanes take off in the water..

There is a Steamclock in Gastown, which is one a the few functioning steamclocks in the world.  Owen was just enamored by this clock and the mechanism.

We were fortunate to be walking by at the hour, so here's a video of the chimes....

After this, we took a bus across town, which ended up stopping service about a 1/2 mile from the bay as there were so many people starting to collect in the area and they had several blocks in the city closed to all taffic.  This is when Allison and I started to wonder if it was a smart idea to be down here with the kids....?  We pressed on and made it to the beach just before 7 and there was still over 2 hours to go until it was dark.   We found one of the last open spots in the grass and sat for a while taking in the scenes....

Here's a few fun shots of Molly dancing for us.... shake a little to the left...

And a little to the right....

And then giggle like crazy...

It was getting to be after 7:30, which is not too far away from bedtime, so we had to play this carefully or risk major meltdowns...  The quantity of people coming into the area at this point was increasing substantially, so we decided to start walking back toward the busline and get something to eat for dinner.  Thankfully we found a great little pizza shop right off Davie street and enjoyed a quick bite.  Owen was so sad to have missed the fireworks.....

While we were sitting there having dinner, there was a nonstop wall of people walking toward the beach.  Later we found out that this event was attended by over 250,000 !!

One of the pre-show highlights was an airshow put on by Pete McLeod in his Red Bull Aerobatic plane.  Unfortuntately, we missed this by about a half-hour, but we heard the plane. 

After getting some food, we continued to walk out of the bay area to where we could catch a bus again and re-trace our steps back across town, ride the skytrain back to Coquitlam and catch the bus home.  What a great experience and good time we had!

Espresso

A long story short, during the recent years working in Lancaster I had access to a fully automatic espresso maker, which became a wee bit of a habit before every meeting.  For my birthday this past year Allison and her parents got me the ultimate kitchen accessory. :)

I'm surprised, but very happy that bed-bath & beyond honors their 20% off coupons on items like this.   We researched local stores, but the pricing in Canada was significantly higher than of the stores in Washington.  We purchased it in Bellingham, and after a month on order, it was finally delivered.

It's the same model I used at work, a Saeco Giro II . It has a ton of features and produces the most beautiful and tasty cup of espresso in less than a minute.

Bonus now that Allison spent some time experimenting with the milk frother and chocolate syrup, and has developed a very tasty Mocha! 

July Random happenings...

2 days after we arrived back in Vancouver from our visit back East, I was on a plane to our factory in Ovar, Portugal, then continued onto Germany near Stuttgart for a conference.  I took this picture of Allison and the kids right before I left and had it on my phone during my trip.  Love the beautiful smiles!

Ovar is on the coast and the hotel we stay at is in Espinho, right on the beach. This was the view from my room.  We caught some really nice weather during our visit.  

Staircase at the hotel.  Architecture is cool.

 In Germany, this MAN service center was right across the road from the hotel I stayed at.  How can you go wrong with "Trucknology Center" on your building.  It made me laugh a little and think of Owen and his trucks.

 Back home, some deep conversation over a plate of apples.

This pileated woodpecker was at the tree right in front of the house one morning.  Was in a hurry and shooting through a window, so it's a little blurry, but you get the point.  This bird is BIG (+12") and there's chips flying when we starts attacking the tree.  It's crazy to watch! 

 During our travels back home, I caught one of Molly's little dee-dee songs. Try not to smile when you watch this...

 My little fashion model.

Allison signed Molly up for a little tutu's class this summer and she absolutely loved it!  She still shows us her dance moves around the house months later.  She looks so grown up in her outfit.

She was posing for Allison and asking her to take pictures.  What a little diva. :)  and great form for a 2 year old eh?

For some reason the kids love to play in the car when I wash it, so here they are also with the furry one too...  Molly likes to buckle herself in when she's sitting in there.  She can get in by herself, but needs help unbuckling... usually it isn't a problem, but sometimes it turns into yelling... Daddy!!! help me get out!!!

Summer Trip back to Pennsylvania! June 18th-July 7th

For years, we had planned for Owen to go to summer camp at Kirchenwald, where Allison attended when she growing up and later worked as a counselor. As we were committing to this assignment, we realized we would be on the other side of the continent at camp time...  So we planned a trip back in June and registered Owen for camp.  It was a good time to be back in Pennsylvania/New York as it aligned with Allison's sister's family summer visit and also a reunion with my family. 

Planning was a bit hectic, but we made it work.  I drove Allison, Molly & Owen to Seattle on June 19th and sent them off on a flight to Philadelphia.   The kids were great on the flight home for Allison and after a long day of travel, arrived at Grandma & Grandpa's house.  The next week Owen attended day-camp with his cousin Shaun.  So many stories and great memories came out of this week.  Here's his group picture.  Shaun is in the gray shirt.

The second week, Owen spent with his cousins on my side of the family at my parents.  Mom hosts an annual cousin's camp and it's something that Owen looks forward to every year.  This year the theme was "Down on the Farm".  During the week, they did so many wonderful things along this theme..   Here's Owen with Alyssa, Ellie & Riley, my brother's girls.

 

Riding on Mr. Klinko's John Deere!

Riding horses!

With Grandma & Grandpa...  how about these smiling faces!

I stayed in Vancouver for 2 weeks working and doing some things around the house in the evenings.  It was so quiet without Allison and the kids here...  June 29th I left after work and drove to Seattle to catch a red-eye into Philadelphia.  The border crossing was slow and traffic going into Seattle was heavy.  I just made it to the airport in time to catch my flight.  I arrived in Philadelphia at 6:30am and stopped into my old office in Lancaster for a short visit.  Allison and Molly met me at the office and we drove over to our house to sign a contract with a new realtor.  After a short lunch, we caught up with Seth & Mary at the outlets in Limerick, PA.  They had spent a few days visiting with friends near Philadelphia while the girls were at Cousin's camp.  After doing some shopping, we drove up to Mom & Dad's in Binghamton for a family get-together over the July 4th holiday weekend.  We had a great weekend, lots of laughing and great food as usual.  :)

Dad built a zip line in the backyard for the kids and it was a huge hit!  Here's Owen looking very cool calm and collected.

A quiet moment with Molly and her drink cuppy.

Sam was on the porch with Amelia, Lydia and Molly, and they were laughing so hard!  I  forget what the topic was, but all the girls were having such a great time. Molly was all wrapped up in her blanket because she was "chilly".

Love this picture...  Molly was biting Sam's foot with a muppet puppet and then giggling like crazy.  You can't help but laugh at this.

Riley, Allysa and Ellie.  This picture pretty much captures their personalities perfectly.

Molly pushing around her stroller

Owen and I...

Nirchi's pizza is a must during trip's home.  Memories of so many years involve this pizza. 

Mom and (most) of the grandkids...

Dad built an air over water pump up bottle rocket launcher and the kids constructed rockets with 2 lt. bottles and paper stock fins.  It worked awesome and they loved shooting them off...

In the back room, Molly reading books.

Some serious tractor driving with Grandpa. Funny almost identical expressions..

Molly all tuckered out in her stroller after a morning of serious playing.

Here we all are with Aunt Karen and Uncle Larry also visiting from Alexandria, VA.

After our weekend in New York, we spent a few days with Allison's parents and family in Lancaster. 

Driving somwhere.. Molly, Owen and Shaun....

Grandma, Molly & Great Grandma.  Molly was showing off her very fashionable double sunglasses look.

Over a year ago, Owen won a goldfish at the E-Town fair...  Goldie we affectionately took home and cared for... We tried to prep Owen that the fair fish sometimes don't live too long... but Goldie was a warrier and suprised us all!   He lived through the winter and when we moved, Owen gave him to Grandma to take care of.  During our trip home, Owen decided that Goldie would be happy living in Grandma's fish pond with some new friends.  Writing this a few months later, I'm happy to report that he's doing well!

Grandma with the Molly fish in the pool.

 

We made so many wonderful memories during our visit and cherish the time we spend together.  

Thursday July 7th we flew back to Seattle and made the drive home to Vancouver. One happy detail about our trip home is that we brought our dog with us!  Bailey was small enough to check in the cabin, and he rode in his carrier under the seat with no noises or issues the entire trip.