Just the Beginning

Kristen and Me

Last weekend was the start of some serious weekend craziness. To preface this weekend, I didn't get home before 10 most nights this past week, so the week itself was pretty exhausting with random socials and frisbee games to go to at night. Friday night we started out with an impromptu dinner. We were planning on meeting up with my sister-in-law Kristen for her sister's karaoke birthday party a little later that night, but we thought we'd grab some dinner across the street first. Turns out we weren't the only ones with that thought, so we ended up running into Kristen and her sister and a few friends for a pre-party dinner! After that we headed across the street to the Rock Box. It's styled like Japanese kareoke where you can rent out a private room to just sing with each other, so we had our own little room with quite a few birthday party people! Kristen and her sister both did a few songs along with several of Katie's other friends. Next time I'm determined to have a few songs ready to do my own rendition ;)

Birthday Girl Singing a Song!

Saturday morning we got up bright and early to meet up with a few of Ryan's Crossfit buddies to head out to South Central Washington for the Spartan race. As a spectator it was especially awesome for me to be driving away from the Seattle rain and into 80s and sunny for the afternoon! The race was about 4 miles longs but the big deal of it was all the obstacles. I hung out with one of the other guys' girlfriends spectating and we could only see a few of the obstacles from the starting area, so I got a few shots of those, but there were a lot of other things involving large amounts of mud throughout the rest of the course. All of the guys sounded like they had an awesome time working together to finish and were super dirty but super motivated to do it again as soon as possible.

The Pre-Race Spartans (still clean)

Ryan climbed the rope to ring the bell

Ryan (followed by his crossfit coach) running to the next obstacle

4 of the guys on their team going over the net

on to the next obstacle

getting dirty again

they all made it!

my hubby ;)

As soon as we got home from that event we headed over to birthday party number 2 for the weekend! This time it was at our friends' house that have an outdoor pizza oven, so every once in a while they have a build your own pizza party. If it wasn't so tedious to use and maintain I would seriously consider investing in a pizza oven as well, the product is divine!

Sunday we spent most of the afternoon cleaning up the house and doing some yardwork in preparation for another little dinner party at our place. Kimberly came into town Sunday evening and will be in Seattle all week for work (boo for the work, yay for being in Seattle!). So she came over along with Kristen and Katie for a little Sisters (and Ryan) cookout. Earlier that afternoon I harvested a bunch of rhubarb and made my first rhubarb crunch from my garden!! It was delicious and so much more rewarding knowing I had grown the rhubarb myself too! Since this is just the first year of my plants, they were pretty small so I barely had enough for a crunch, but hopefully I'll get a few more harvests this year and even more next year! It was a fun dinner and great to see Kristen and Katie, and I get to see lots more of Kimberly this week and especially next weekend for our next adventure!

RHUBARB CRUNCH

Combine with pastry cutter:

2 c. oats
1 ½ c. flour
1 ½ c. brown sugar
¾ c. butter

Put half of mixture in 9 x 13-greased pan. Pat to form crust. Cover with rhubarb mixture. Top with remaining crumb mixture. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes

Rhubarb mixture:

8-c. rhubarb (cut in 1-inch pieces)
1 ½ c. sugar mixed with 1-t. cinnamon

Lately...

No big events the last few weekends, which has been a refreshing change. This was actually our last weekend with no travels for a while, so we've been enjoying it big time! We have had a few little events to share though. June 1st, Tara turned a whopping 14 years old! A lot of times she definitely looks like a 14 year old, but she definitely does still have some energy especially at food time!

Tara's Birthday photo! 14!!

Here's a little video of Tara when she has a little spurt of energy and jumps around ready for breakfast!

A week ago we had a few people over for a Sunday BBQ. In preparation, I had fun going out to the yard and picking a few flowers for a little decoration in our house. I love how it spruces up spaces like the bathroom and it came right from the yard! Love flowers!

One of the couples we had over also have a boxer puppy. They actually got their dog after meeting Ben and thinking he was an awesome dog. Their dog is just now getting about Ben's size, so they had a lot of fun chasing each other around the house. I love having a yard big enough for the dogs to have fun in! Our dogs are so spoiled.

Ben and Flip facing off (2yr old and 8mo old)

Biggest news from this past weekend...we now have a functioning stove top!!!! Ryan and his buddy Joel (who has been crazy helpful throughout our whole renovation process) installed the stove and hood and hooked it up to the gas line. It is gorgeous and I can't wait to start using it. I can't believe I've spent the last 7 months without a stove, but it's been fun figuring out more things to do in the oven or microwave. I love how this has turned out though! Good job boys!

We've enjoyed the last few semi calm weekends but we're about to get ourselves into a lot of excitement in the next few weeks!

Alaska!!

My sweet hubby turned 29 last weekend! A few months ago I told him to take off the week after his birthday because I was going to take him on a birthday surprise vacation. I'm pretty sure he had a good idea of where we were going since we had been talking about doing it for a while. Sunday morning (his birthday) I gave him a book of hikes in Alaska to go along with our tickets for an Alaskan Cruise!!! A few hours later we were loading up on one of the cruise ships that we see docked in Seattle all the time. When we got to our room, Ryan had another fun surprise. I had them decorate our room with happy birthday decorations! It made the week even more festive! After dropping off all our stuff we headed up to the top deck for the departing party. It just happened to be an absolutely gorgeous day in Seattle, so we soaked up some sun while sitting out having drinks delivered to us...divine! With a little dance party in the background we watched Seattle float out of sight and our cruise had begun!

Day 2 of the cruise was an at sea day, so we spent the day relaxing on board and checking out the amenities. Before we got on the cruise, we were fairly well prepared to be hanging out with a lot of much older people. What we were slightly more taken aback about was the overwhelming about of obesity on the ship! I guess it makes sense with the immense amount of food on board and no real need to be active if you didn't want to. I think this motivated us even more to hit the gym daily and be as active as possible in each of the ports! Anyway, back to day 2. We went to a few of the events and checked out several of the bars throughout the day. That evening was formal night, yay! I love a good excuse to get all dressed up! Of course we got the obligatory cruise photo done that night too. 

Day 3 was our first port stop in Juneau. We didn't really know what to expect in any of the towns, but we were able to find hikes within walking distance of the port in each of the places. About a mile outside of Juneau we were able to start hiking up a mountain. There were amazing views everywhere, and we actually got to see and hear several avalanches on the mountains around us. We didn't end up making it all the way to the end of the hike since if became covered in snow, but we made it pretty far in and really enjoyed the surrounding mountain views and just the fact that we were hiking through Alaska!

After we came down from the mountains we still had a little time to kill in Juneau so we walked around the town for a bit and ended up in a little hole in the wall pub with some pretty awesome live country music. It went quite nicely with the reindeer sausage pizza we got too! 

Day 4...Skagway! Again we spent most of the time in port hiking up the surrounding mountains. Again we had to turn around before we really wanted to because we got stuck in the snow. We actually hiked for a while this time through the snow but towards the top it got really foggy to the point that we couldn't see very far in front of us and we kept hearing avalanches a little too close for comfort, so we figures we should call it a day. Highlight of this little hike though, WE SAW A BEAR!! It was my first time seeing a bear in the wild. We were actually on our way down from the hike and a pretty good sized black bear was just trotting in the opposite direction about 50 ft from the path. Unfortunately I didn't pull my camera out quite fast enough to snap a shot before in disappeared into the forest again. It was awesome though and if I didn't know that it could seriously injure me, I would think it was super cute and cuddly looking! Awesomely enough my mom had just told me the day before that she ran into a bear on a hike in Tennessee. Apparently this was the week for our family to run into bears!

The view at the top.

Day 5...another at sea day. No getting off the boat today, but oh my goodness, the views! This day we spent cruising through glacier bay, as in surrounded by glaciers. That's so awesome! We got to the end of the bay area and just sat there for about and hour soaking in the views. It just happened to be a perfectly sunny day that day too, so it was spectacular. We saw a little more wild life too including whales, otters, and mountain goats. The glaciers and mountains definitely took the cake though. We even got to see a few pieces crack off of the glaciers and fall into the water. 

Day 6 was in Ketchikan! We actually only had the morning in port so we had to get up bright and early to get out hike in before the ship took off again. We did the same thing, found a hike withint walking distance from downtown and spent a few hours hiking up a mountain until we ran into too much snow to go any further. When we were done we walked around the town for a little bit before boarding the ship again for a relaxing rest of the day.

Our last stop of the cruise was to Victoria, BC. We were in port there for a few hours in the evening. We had been there once before when I went to run the marathon, so there wasn't anything new we were dying to see. We just walked around the town for a couple of hours and came back to the ship for the last night of entertainment. 

Sunday morning we woke up back in Seattle. We had some breakfast delivered and packed up to be out of our room by 9. It was really nice not having to make any other travel plans to get home and just jump in a taxi and be home in 5 minutes. One more thing we can check off our list now, the Alaskan Cruise! Awesome time!

Catching Up

Just a few random photos/updates from the past few weeks before I get into the next big blog post! A few weeks ago there was a big earth day event on our base. Our group planned on doing a cook out as a fundraiser at it and we were all asked to help out with it. Since I don't have great muscles for setting up and tearing down and don't have any great desire to cook meat, I offered to bake some cupcakes to bring to the event! In keeping with the earth day theme, I made some carrot cake cupcakes with grass frosting and some chocolate dirt cupcakes complete with a little worm in each one! They came out super cute but I hadn't actually even tasted them before I brought them in and was just hoping for the best since I tried out new recipes. They were a HUGE hit! One of my bosses (who is typically pretty negative and doesn't dole out compliments much) came over to my desk later that day super excited and told me the chocolate cupcake was by far the best cupcake he had ever had in his life! I'll definitely be using both those recipes again!

In other cupcake news, little boy Ben turned 2 a few weeks ago! Of course I couldn't let that go by without a special treat! I found a few recipes for dog friendly cupcakes and tried one out. It was pretty much just a peanut butter banana cupcake without any sugar in it at all. Ben was pretty confused at first, but proceeded to enjoy it. Tara didn't hold back at all and devoured hers immediately ;)

In non food news, we made it to a baseball game a few weeks ago. It was especially exciting because it was against the Detroit Tigers! We went with a few guys Ryan works with and had a blast. I thought the Tigers had it clenched and they were ahead the entire game, but somehow the Mariners had a huge comeback in the 9th inning and won! Boooo. At least I got to cheer on the tigers.

A Few Randoms

Our big project for the weekend was clearing out the rest of that silly attachment to the back of our house. When Jordan was here, he helped us tear out about half of it, so this weekend we finished that off and now have an AWESOME back patio! Hopefully next weekend we'll add a little more plants around it and make it even better, but it's a perfect place for the grill now and we're finally rid of all the carpet that we tore out 8 months ago!

Seattle has been especially beatutiful lately. Although we still have those rainy days, we've been having even more nice sunshiney ones and I'm pretty sure we've both gotten a little color on our skin in the past few weeks!

A few days ago as I was riding the ferry home, an announcement can on the loudspeakers saying that were were 3 Orca Whales swimming next to the ferry! I immediately jumped out and happened to be on the correct side already so I got a great view! I tried to snap a few pictures with the trusty iPhone, but the one bellow is the best I got. I was able to see a lot more in person though. It was pretty awesome. We've seen grey whales before on the ferry and say a lot of humpbacks in Hawaii, but this was the first time I've seen orcas in the wild! Free Willy!!

Saturday night after Ryan went mountain biking we had some friends over to enjoy our grill. After grilling out I got a sweet tooth and decided to whip up some cookies and went for a chocolate white chocolate chip cookie. It was sooo easy and fast and turned out delicious. I will definitely be hitting up this recipe again when the mood strikes!

Finally in picture news, the Pioneer Woman picked one of my photos again as one of her top choices!! It always makes me super excited when I see my photo pop up. There are litterally thousands of entries, so I'd say having mine picked would mean mine is in the top 1-5%, which is awesome! This time again it was cell phone photography and I submitted one that I took at the Capital Hill Block Party, a weekend long music festival with bands and stages everywhere. It was a lot of fun! You can find the original Pioneer Woman post here.

Ouchie!

Just a few days after blogging about how excited I was about my running progress, all that got thrown out the window. I was just about to sign up for a half marathon at the beginning of May, then a week ago on an 11 mile run which I finished with a great pace, I strained my Achilles :( At first I thought maybe I was just sore from my run which would be totally understandable, so I rested for a few days. Then I tried running again and quickly realized it was not just a sore muscle. Ever since then it's been painful just walking or standing around. I went to the doctor this morning and he said absolutely no running for at least 3 more weeks...ugh! Good thing I hadn't signed up for that half marathon yet. It's so frustrating not being able to run now and I feel like I'm going to have to start my training all over again when I am able to run again...phooey!

In the mean time, we have had several great weekends here in Seattle and therefore have gotten a lot of fun yard work done! Yay for home ownership! Ryan mowed the lawn a few times. It's not a huge lawn so we just got a little push mower which seems to be doing the job quite nicely. We've also put down some more seed to try to grow more grass in some of the patchy areas. We're still trying to determine what kind of plants are already on the site, but have determined for the most part there's not much worth saving. We planted several edible things like blueberries, strawberries, oregano, mint, basil, cilantro, spinach, and arugula. We'll see if we can get any good harvests from any of them this year! My rhubarb is almost ready for it's first harvest!

We also added a little more color to our yard with some new flowers. I can't wait to see them all grow over the next few months and get even more full and vibrant! Our other yard project at the moment is tearing out the giant juniper bush in the front yard. It's huge and useless and breaks up the yard a lot which is no good when your yard is already so small! Unfortunately this guy has been here for a long time and has intertwined itself and has crazy roots so it's being a huge pain to remove, but we've made lots of progress!! I can't wait to turn it all into one continuous lawn.