Traveling to Boise, Idaho

A few years back Josh and Sam got married and Ben was in his wedding.  It was a really nice wedding in Wenatchee.  Then they moved to Massachusetts for a few years and they always tried to get us to come visit.  We really wanted to but we never had the funds or the time to go.  They recently moved to Nampa, Idaho, where Sam is originally from, to settle down, get jobs and go to school.  The last time I was in this area was when I was little and mom had driven us and Angela over to Grandma Karen's house in the early 1990's.

Over the next year they kept making us feel bad for not coming to visit.  I already had two trips planned and adding a third one would make it a bit tighter, not just with money but with my vacation leave at work.  We finally gave in and decided to go near Ben's birthday.  I wasn't too excited about going anywhere in February just because of the weather and my other trip being so close.  Ugh, lots to do.

We booked our flights and let Josh and Sam know when we were going to arrive.  They seemed excited for our visit.  Luckily, this trip was somewhat cheap.  I had Ben be in charge of the tickets and I paid for the food.  The night before I packed my stuff so I would be ready after work.  Ben had the day off so he had some time to pack up before we left.  I had him take me to work that morning and drop me off.  I told him I would let him know when to come and get me.  I wanted to leave as soon as possible so we had plenty of time to get up to Sea-Tac just in case something happens.

I finished my work around 1:50 that afternoon (our case load was on the light side) and Ben came and got me around 2:45.  That gave us another hour plus to grab everything and head up to the airport.  We got on I-5 and made our way to Ajax2.  We have had success there over the past two years I will continue to use it because of my state employee discount.  My philosophy on driving up to Seattle is that I always assume there will be traffic until there isn't.  We got to Ajax2 and parked in lot Q.  There was still a lot of snow in the parking lot from last week's snowmageddon.  The shuttle came immediately and we were driven over to Alaskan Airlines.

Our driver stopped, we grabbed our stuff and headed to the check in area.  We got our boarding passes and then stood in line to check one bag.  We wandered over to the security area and noticed that it had changed a little bit since November.  Going through security was a breeze.  We walked down to our gate (C2B) to see where it was.

We figured we had better eat something before our flight left.  We had a bunch of time so we took advantage of it.  We used the restrooms, I changed into sweatpants (because I wanted to be comfortable) and we then decided what we wanted to eat in the B concourse.  We had to wait a little bit but we were finally seated at this Rel'ish place.

We ate burgers and fries and sat next to a lady and her son, who fiddled with his Ipad the entire time.  I think he was playing Pokémon.  I got some paper out and proceeded with getting our sign ready for the geocache that was in the airport.  Flying Fish at Sea-Tac (GC7B73R) was a fun virtual.  I thought our sign was adorable.  We were going to grab this one last November when we went to Colorado but I had totally forgotten about it.

We hung out at our gate until it was time to go.  We both used the restroom one more time and filled up our water bottles.  I came back and a lady had stolen my seat near the gate.  Ben just shrugged so I found another place to sit until they called our group.  We were in group E, yes...the last group to board the plane.  We walked to the plane and had to go outside to board it.  It was chilly.  We got on and found our seats.  We got to sit next to each other.  It was about a 450 mile plane ride which was going to take about an hour and a half.

As we sat down Ben was playing around with his phone.  There is a feature on the I-phone where you can drop pictures or messages into a "cloud" if the other random people had the feature on.  Ben dropped a picture meme making fun of Patriot fans.  The girl in front of us started laughing.  She saw the picture and wondered who dropped it.  Ben started talking to her.  She said it was hilarious and she even said she was a Patriot fan, but not a die hard.  She thanked us for the laugh.

During the flight we played hangman and talked about random stuff.  We did receive cookies but no beverages due to the high turbulence.  There was a lot of turbulence on that flight.  We got to Boise before our scheduled arrival.  The pilot attempted to make his descent and ended up deciding not to when we all felt the huge shift in the plane.  We just had a "just kidding" attempted landing.  We circled around again and this time we made our actual landing.

We finally landed and Ben texted Josh that we've arrived.  He was parking the car and was going to meet us at the arrivals gate.  We got off the plane and headed down the corridor to baggage claim and grabbed our suitcase.  We went up the escalator and out a door into the arrivals.  There was Josh standing there waiting for us.  I haven't seen Josh in years.  We each gave out some hugs and we walked out to the car.  It was chilly outside.

We drove the half hour to Nampa and made it to his and Sam's townhouse apartment.  We unloaded our bags and went inside.  Spiderman and zombie decorations for days!!  Holy cow!  Every wall was covered!

We settled in, he gave us the tour of the house and Sam said hi before she had to go to bed.  He showed us the bedroom and bathroom we were going to use while we were there.  We watched some TV and decided to retire to bed.  We got washed up and passed out.  Today was a long day.

Next Adventure:  Dave and Buster's, Grocery Shopping, Chimichangas and Deadpool

Winter Storm Maya (#Snomageddon)

We do not get that much snow here in the Pacific Northwest during the winter; especially on the west side of the state.  However, every 4-6 years we get a "snomageddon" which usually ranges anywhere from 10-20 inches of snow.  Throughout the week we were getting warnings that certain areas in the lowlands of the Puget Sound were going to get hit hard.  We traditionally are not that well equipped to handle that much snow because again, we do not receive snow that often during our winters.

I made this cat meme and posted it to Facebook.  It was epic and I wasn't wrong.

Here, we have to worry about the trees.  If they get overloaded they will bend, snap and fall on people, houses and cars.  That is the biggest anxiety we have living up here when we get extreme weather.

I didn't make this meme.  I stole it off of Facebook.

That Friday we knew it was going to happen we just didn't know when exactly.  Everyone heard early afternoon around 2 or 3.  I wasn't really worried because my Escape drives pretty well in the snow.  I just worried about everyone else driving around me and possibly hitting me.  However, I was going over to Nicole's house for our February paint night anyway so I really didn't care if it snowed a little or a lot.  I wasn't going to be in the rush hour traffic with everyone.

A lot of people left the building early.  By 2, the place was a ghost town.  I frantically tried to get everything done so maybe I could leave a little early from work.  Two of the four of us in my unit left around 2:30.  The snow started falling around 2.  I got all of my stuff done so I left around 3.  I told Nicole that I was leaving early and I would meet her at her house around 5 since that's when she got off work.  In the meantime, I went to the cemetery, brushed off Grammie's headstone and visited for about a half hour. I made her a snowman.

Afterwards, I went over to Walmart and grabbed a few things...mostly to waste time until paint night.

We painted a kitchen piece with a lime in it.  It was just three of us, Nicole, Lindsay and myself.  We had fun and ate snacks.  We were over there until about 7ish.

Nicole stressed to us before we left to call or text when we got home safely since there is a few inches of snow on the roads.  I got home safely and texted everyone I got home.  I found out later on that everyone who headed home on Henderson had a hard time getting up the hill and caused a lot of back ups.  Haha, I didn't have to drive home at that time.

I got home and kept an eye out on how much it accumulated until I went to bed.

The next day we got up and it had snowed a lot.

Guess who doesn't have a snow shovel?  Well, we've never really needed one because it doesn't snow that much here.  All the stores were out of shovels...I tried several of them.  I even had Ben try to get one from Lowes but we were unsuccessful.  We had to suffice with brooms and a spade shovel.

Ben had to go to work at Lowes so we all went outside and brushed off all the vehicles and tried to get as much of the snow off the driveway as possible since we would be getting more that afternoon/evening.

It didn't help that our driveway had a slight uphill either.  Ben ended up sliding down the hill after removing all the snow off the top of his car.  I spent the day watching whatever was on Hulu, cleaning the house and doing laundry.  Erika and I went outside and made some snowmen, sledding down our slight hill in the front yard and threw snowballs at her dog.

It snowed more that night.

The next morning Ben had to get up early and scrape snow (about 12 inches) off of his car so he could drive into Tenino for a 24 hour shift.  I told him to be careful on the way there and to let me know when he got there safely.  I got up a little while later and spent most of the day hanging out in the living room watching TV and working on my blog.  I had considered heading out to Hawks Prairie just for a drive in the snow and possibly stopping at the store to get a few things just in case we are stuck for a few more days.  We had plenty of food but you just never know.  I sat on that thought for a bit.  About an hour later Doug called to ask if I could take Jenn to the store.  I suppose I guess.  I cleaned off the Escape and headed to their house.  My Escape handled the roads very well.  I can't believe some of the vehicles that were out driving around in the snow.

We get to Walmart and just made a parking spot since you couldn't see the lines.  We went inside and I noticed the weirdest stuff that they were completely out of.  Bananas, eggs and hamburger.  I would have figured the bread, milk, cheese and soups would be gone.  At least once a day something surprises me.

Jenn was done so we headed to the checkout and paid for our stuff.  We pushed the cart through the slush out to the Escape.  It was entertaining.  I dropped her off and headed home.  We relaxed the rest of the day.  I got a notification later on that evening stating that the L&I building was going to be closed so I didn't have to go to work.

Monday morning we saw it had snowed more over the course of the night.  All together it snowed 17inches.  In some places around Thurston county it snowed almost 20 inches.  Insane!  I really didn't know what we were going to do today since I didn't have to go to work but I did take advantage of a free paid day by sleeping in.  We made breakfast and watched some shows.  We noticed that the weather was getting warmer and the snow had stopped.  It actually started raining.  The snow outside was turning into slush and large puddles.

Early afternoon my brother called and asked if I could take him to the store because he couldn't get his car out of the garage.  Probably just as well because he wouldn't gotten very far.  We all headed over and got him.  We drove through the slush and to Walmart.  The same thing applied, we just made our own parking spot because we couldn't see the lines.  I found it weird that Doug wanted to go to the store even though I took Jenn the day before.  Oh well.  It got us out of the house for the day.

Everyone got their shopping in.  This time there weren't any empty shelves because the trucks had been here this morning.  There were plenty of bananas, eggs and hamburger.  I just laughed.  We took Doug back home and spent the rest of the day just relaxing.

I got back onto L&I's website and saw that because of the damage to the building by the snow we were going to have late starts on Tuesday and Wednesday.  That meant I needed to be in the building by 10 a.m.  This work week ended up being really weird.  I didn't have hardly any calls, which was nice, not very many reviews because I'm sure the people we get our reviews from and a lot of the provider's offices were closed or had very limited staff.  It was overall a pretty simple week except for Tuesday's slush drive to work.  That was interesting.

I enjoyed having the snow this year and I hope we get a lot next winter.  This time we have a snow shovel.

Next Adventure:  Traveling to Boise, Idaho

Logging at My Parent's House

As I mentioned in previous posts, the trees around my parents house have gotten scary over the years and dad finally decided it was time to get rid of them.  Some of the trees were dead and others had some root rot.  Most of the trees in our yard took a significant pounding when we had our snow and ice storm in 2012.  Our tree line in our yard has changed dramatically over the years, since we moved in summer of 1996, because of the weather and dad cutting down trees here and there.  For a while we were cutting them down and putting them in the wood shed for our wood stove.  The wood stove started getting worn out and my parents opted to get a pellet stove instead.  Most of the wood we cut down in our yard either went to Grammie and Grandpa's house or over to Grandma Karen's wood shed.

I'm not sure how he got a hold of the people who did it but they essentially did it for free as long as they got to keep some of the trees.  They came over two different times and it was weird every time I went over there and saw the yard had changed.  When they were done the yard looked so different.  There still needs to be some trimming and clearing but for the most part the large stuff was done.

 I know we were going to spend most of the spring and summer using the chain saw, the wood splitter and the truck.  Dad has cleared out a section of the shed at Grandma's house just so this wood could dry out for a year.  Some of the other wood we've been storing for a while went over to Grandpa's house to keep him warm over the winter.

It will be a marathon getting this all cleaned up but we will eventually.  I just have to think of it in segments or it looks overwhelming.  I am also calling it now...there will be some trees that fall over during our wind storms this fall/winter because they do not have the support anymore.  Once the burn ban is over, in the middle of October, I'm sure dad will be burning a lot of the brush he didn't get to before the summer started.

Every time I go over there the yard just looks weird.  It will always look weird to me because we grew up there with tons of trees around.  I always called our yard "the cave" because it was like driving into a cave.  There will be less shade in the summer and more opportunities for the prey to get what's left of the chickens.

There will be a lot of work a head of us but no trees will hit the house.

Next Adventure:  Winter Storm Maya (#Snomageddon)