Hiking up and down Ingalls Creek

This year for my annual hiking trip with my buddy Joe, we went for a 3-day trek in the Cascades.  The first day was going to be parking the first car, and heading over a ridge and down into the valley by Ingall’s Creek.  The second day was up the creek to Ingall’s Lake and back down to camp.  The third day would be a 10 mile trek from camp following the creek as it turns into a river and we arrive at the second car.  The weather was beautiful with temperatures in the high 80′s, luckily we spent most of our hiking time in the shade of the trees.

At the trail head.

Staring up a scree field at the beautiful blue skies.

Our view as we crested the ridge, and started down into the valley.

Once we cleared the trees at the top of the ridge and started down towards the valley.  Looking north towards the Enchantments.

On the second day we woke up early and made our way up the creek towards Ingall’s Lake.  It was about 5 miles to the Lake, most of which was in the shade of the trees.  As we got closer the trees thinned out and we got some beautiful views.

We arrived at the meadow below Ingall’s Peak.  You can see the water of the creek coming out of Ingall’s Lake in the left of the picture.  We spent lunch here in the meadow, relaxing, reading and playing cribbage.  As always, I whupped up on Joe.

My buddy Joe standing below Mt. Stuart, looking east from the meadow below Ingall’s Lake.

The view to the southeast.

The morning of the third day we woke up, packed up our campground, and prepared for the 10 miles back to the car.

We stopped for lunch around noon and I went to go refill our water bottles.  As I got to the river I found this structure someone had left behind.

The weather stayed beautiful the entire weekend.

This looks nothing like the trickle of water that started at Ingall’s Lake.

Jacob really wants to look like Daddy

Jake’s hair was getting pretty long (at least we thought so) and thus a trip to the Supercuts was planned. On the way there, I asked Jake what he wanted his to look like and he replied, “I want to look like Daddy!”

I decided to double-check what that meant to Jake and he replied, “Spiky! Spiky! Spiky!” in a very NOT inside voice. Voila, the boy’s new do…

KIAI

My son is well known for his bath time antics… Just ask Kate or Daddy about “Who put the lime in the coconut?” A favorite song Jake and Mom sing when shampooing with his coconut monkey shampoo (Jake at the top of his lungs of course). But we also have a long-standing family tradition of creating crazy hairdo’s while soaped up in the bath–well starting with Kate at least.

Soapy spikes with Kate became soapy mohawks with Jacob. First a relative shorty…

Then a serious punk-a-licious spiked hawk which means a haircut is imminent.

But nothing quite compares to Jake’s antics once he’s out of the tub and towelling down, as you can see here. KIAI!!!!!!!

Fruit Ninja Kinect is too much fun

This morning started off fairly lazy with some cuddling with mom.

Once the day got going we showed the kids Fruit Ninja Kinect which we had recently downloaded. It’s a fantastic version of the game that integrates great with Kinect. You swing your arms to slice the fruit that fly across the screen, and you can even have two players at the same time. So Candice took turns playing with each of the kids. The hard part is trying to make sure nobody gets hurt with all the arms flailing around.

Wild Waves: The Second Act

As many of you might recall from our last year’s posting on Wild Waves, I’d promised the girl that I would take her back this summer without her brother to enjoy the park because Jake really didn’t like anything Kate wanted to do. Once we got past the summer’s inability to get warm this year, what with how cold the weather’s been in the great PNW, Kate and I finally decided to gamble and just go for it. So we headed out while the marine layer still had the sky socked in and started out on the roller coasters.

Kate is my little roller coaster addict so this wasn’t all bad but as you can tell by the sweatshirt, it was still chilly when we first arrived. We killed a little more time on a few more rides and the sun decided to begrudgingly join us.

And by the time we ate lunch, the weather finally worked through all its issues.

We then spent the rest of the afternoon on the most excellent water rides. Of course, we’re missing photographic evidence because I couldn’t bring my phone on them too. Needless to say, it was a fun, sunny, float-away afternoon.

123456 G

My fascination with gamerscore continues. I was playing a bunch of games on my Windows Phone and later that day I popped onto my Xbox and realized that my gamerscore was at 123450. Now it was on…I had to find a way to hit 123456…cause I’m a geek like that. I had to send out email to my friends to see if I could find a 6 point achievement (or a 5 and a 1). One of my pals pointed out that DJ Hero has a 1 point achievement. Luckily we had a copy of the game, and a controller at work for input testing, so I borrowed it for the night, played my first song and got the 6 points I needed!

Blue Angels 2011

The Blue Angels are an annual tradition at SeaFair and they enchant Seattle for almost a whole week between practice and performance. The kids (big and small) adore when the Blue Angels are in town; who wouldn’t be fascinated by the amazing rush you feel from the roar of the Navy jets. But this year was even more exciting for Candice as she decided to test drive her new telephoto lens, a Christmas present that’s been waiting for a good test candidate.

The first test shot was taken from Madrona Park across Lake Washington of downtown Bellevue. A mere distance of 3.5 miles…

So the love for the new lens was pretty well established when we decided to try some people shots. Here are the kids showing the sibling love AND Kate’s Mommy & Jake portrait.

  

Next test could only be the Angels themselves. Again, completely unhappy with the outcomes. Here are planes 1-4 on one of the first flybys.

I truly love Tricia’s reaction to the roar. Although no idea what Jake finds so fascinating…

Here are Angels 1-4, wheels down.

Yes, those are Angels 1 and 2 right next to each other inverted. Gorgeous!

My absolute favorite, 1-6 all in formation nice and tight. Thank you Blue Angels! Thank you gorgeous day! And thank you new camera lens! Trifecta!!!

10 Years at the Soft!

July 30, 2001 — Candice’s first day as a full-time employee at Microsoft.

August 1, 2011 — In honor of her 10 year anniversary, she followed the Microsoft tradition of 1 lb. of M&Ms per year. This ends up being a lot of M&Ms and something that makes children jealous, at least according to Kate. It only took Candice and her coworkers 2 weeks to eat through all the M&Ms. Next time around she may have to switch to grapes, or carrots, or at least include an exercise program with the candy.

All in all it was working out to be a quiet anniversary until her next team meeting rolled around. Little did Candice know but her boss had contacted Pete to get some background information on what her 10 years at Microsoft entailed. Here’s what Pete shared…

• 7/30/2001 – Candice throws off the shackles of the stock market and starts a new career at Microsoft
• 3/19/2003 – Candice lets loose her inner flower child as part of a team offsite event
• 12/9/2006 – Candice starts her Dance Central career at the Microsoft Learning holiday party
• 3/15/2006 – Candice wins a bet, and her boss ends up doing his next presentation to the team wearing lederhosen
• 10/2006 – Falls asleep while trying to watch Napoleon Dynamite on three different occasions, brings home a VOTE FOR FITS  t-shirt, but doesn’t get the connection
• 12/2/2006 – Candice crashes the DevDiv holiday party… as a designated driver (she’s pregnant with Jacob)… and proceeds to beat everyone at pool and darts

• 12/15/2006  – This day goes down as the infamous Feuerzangenbowle fiasco (rum + sugar + fire touching the ceiling); Lutz’s holiday parties are never boring
• 4/2007 – Moves to Windows Engineering Tools and Release and gets her very own PocketDev™ who likes monkeys
• 7/30/2009 – Candice joins the Xbox organization…and has a gamerscore of zero.  John Barr requires her to have a commitment to get a gamerscore of at least 5,000 by annual review. She reaches it by April… Commitment Exceeded
• 9/15/2010 – Candice sets a personal commitment to get a gamerscore of 10,000 by the holidays
• 8/31/2011 – Candice’s gamerscore is 13322 (almost double that of her 8-year-old daughter, 7537)