"Life Moves Pretty Fast. If you don't stop and look around once and a while, you could miss it.": 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.