It's SOMEONE'S birthday today!

Customize your own digital ecard Happy 27th birthday, Elisabeth!  I love you!

28th Anniversary Fieldtrip: The Plan

Tom and I got married over Memorial Day weekend 28 (gulp!) years ago.  My thinking then was that we could go away for a long anniversary trip together each and every year.

Pffffft!  Obviously that was before we had four kids within five years!

For many, many, (many) years, we hardly ever got away alone together because we had four kidlets at home – and who would take four kids under the age of, oh, 18, for three full days?!  But now those four kids are adults who are willing to come back and pet/slash/house-sit so Tom and I can get away for our anniversary. 

And THIS is where we’ll be going:

This all started when our wonderful neighbor, Kim (Abby’s mom) reminded me that Alderbrook Resort, where she works (remotely - she doesn’t commute there every day!) has a Memorial Day special.  We’ve been wanting to head over there for over a year now and what better opportunity than an anniversary get-away? 

So on Saturday morning (oh, please, please, please, weather gods, shine on us!) we’ll get on a ferry*…

and head to “the Ports” – Port Ludlow…

Port Hadlock,

The Dungeness Spit, home to -- yeah, those…

Port Townsend,

and Port Angeles, where we’ll stay in this hotel on the water.

On Sunday morning we’ll take a short trip to one of the most beautiful lakes in Washington, Lake Crescent. 

And from there, we’ll head into Olympic National Forest to visit Hurricane Ridge, from where (on a clear day) you can see pretty all (or a whole lot of, anyway) the Olympic Mountains.  We’ve lived in Washington for almost 20 years now, and I’ve never been to Hurricane Ridge!

And then we’ll head here, to Alderbrook Resort and Spa, which deserves a few photos (right from their website)!

(Yes, we have a waterfront room reserved for us!)

I am so looking forward to some kayaking (oh, pretty please, weather gods, with a cherry on top, please shine on us!), some hiking, and maybe even a spa treatment… or just a good book (suggestions?) and a long nap.

On Monday we’ll head back eastward, but hopefully we won’t be in too much of a hurry (unless Kim calls us to inform us that 50 cars are parked in front of our house… but that’s so “I’m in high school and my parents are gone for the weekend…!”), so maybe we’ll stop somewhere on the way back. 

But where? 

And hey, did we miss a “must-see”?  If you’ve had some great experiences around the northeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula, do let us know!

*Photos in this post courtesy of Google images and websites indicated there… but photos in future posts regarding this trip will be courtesy of me!

**PS:  Kat, can I borrow your Nikon? 

It’s school portrait day–still/again?! (A not-very-well-veiled excuse for a proud mom to show off her cute daughter…)

It doesn’t seem that long ago that my kids came home from school and pulled a big envelope in their backpacks.  In the envelope were prints of the school portrait that had been taken weeks previous, on a morning when I’d made a special effort to comb their hair, dress them in something just a bit fancier than normal, and implored them to please “smile for the camera!” 

Today I got Kat’s “school portraits” in the mail.  But instead of her elementary, junior high, or high school school portrait, it’s now referred to her as her “annual sorority image” – otherwise know as her, let’s see, grade 15 school portraits!?  

And now I have to choose an image to order.  Help me, won’t you?

Kat’s always been a cutie – petite and sweet, with a grin that could melt your heart.  But I think she’s really “come into her own” over the years…

		Kat’s School Portraits VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

…and I especially loved her senior portraits…

		Kat’s Senior Portraits VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

She might kill me for posting this – hell, she doesn’t even know that her portraits came in the mail, and she surely hasn’t seen them herself yet.  But I’ll take that chance because tonight I just plain feel like a proud mom of my sweet, kind, adorable, smart, and incredibly wonderful l’il Kit-Kat!

My memory-filled home office

This is my home office, where I work somewhere between two and five days a week.

Although 99% of my time in this room is spent sitting in that chair, staring at that screen (and an extended screen), and pounding on that keyboard, I’ve surrounded myself with memories.

Come with me on a tour, won’t you?  (That’s actually done by standing in the middle of this teeny-tiny room and just having a look around.)

There are two bulletin boards in my home office.  One holds important work documents.  This is the other one:

In addition to lots of photos of my birth family, there’s an edelweiss flower from Mom’s homeland, Bavaria, along with a nametag that she probably wore when she was on the Ski Patrol in California.  There’s also a photo of Dad and his new wife, Lou, whom I adore.  And there are the programs from the memorial services, both for Mom and for my dear friend Kristin.

These two photos sit on the window sill:

 

That’s Mom and me when I was in high school and Dad and me when I was in college.

Under the bulletin board with all the family photos and memorabilia are these paintings by Dad…

…of the house I lived in from the time I was in eighth grade until I went away to college in Santa Barbara.  That little house is no longer there.  Some gazillionaire bought it, razed it, and built this:

At least the pool is still there, but they even made massive changes to it.

I love what they did, but it doesn’t change the fact that my childhood home is gone from everywhere but my memory.  (And maybe that’s the most important place for it to remain.)

This circular object hanging on my office wall…

…is the hat box Elisabeth made me for Mother’s Day while she was away at college.  She made simple black and white copies of pictures of me throughout my life and ModgePodged them onto the hat box.  I love this gift!

And then there’s the photo gift from Mom, given to me two Christmases before she died.

That’s her and Dad, and me with my now-51-year-old baby brother, Chris.

Right next to the door is a candle given to me by Elisabeth, sitting on a gift from the staff of the Mumbai-based office of the Microsoft agency I used to work for.  They gave Tom and me this silver piece for our 25th wedding anniversary.  I adored these people, and as much as I hated working every single evening for two solid years, they made it bearable and, at times, even wonderful.

And now, I’ve played too long in this office filled with memories.  Time to get to work!

This scene was MY best Christmas present!