Merry Christmas!

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas to all! Went up to Karen (Carol's sister) and David's house for Christmas Eve. Had great food and had fun watching the girls open gifts from them. I even got a cool little set of flavored Vodkas.

Then we got to see a bunch of pictures from their recent trip to Africa!! Very cool! They went on two safaris and got to meet two children they "adopted" or sponsor through Compassion International. One girl they've sponsored since she was a little girl and she's 16 now. Very interesting seeing all the pictures and seeing just how different life is over there.

They came back with some fantastic wildlife pictures too! Elephants, lions, cheetahs, and many more animals.

Things are good here at our house. Looking forward to Christmas day! We'll have the mom's over and Auntie Wanda for lunch and gifts. No new pony yet, but we're definitely keeping an eye out. I have all new wood posts set and I'll be putting up new fencing and gates here shortly.

Well, gotta' get to bed before Santa comes. Merry Christmas and to all a goodnight!

ByPlanes

So I was taking a walk with my girls and I noticed a biplane flying overhead. I pointed it out to my 4 year daughter, Morgan. She looks up and exclaims, "Oh, a biplane!"

I was impressed she recognized it as a biplane. So we walk a little further. Then, out of curiosity I asked her, "so why do you think they call it a biplane?"

Without missing a beat she explains with certainty, "because they fly by!"

:)

Morgan's First Snake Bite

So the other day I was mowing the lawn and just about ran over a garter snake. Of course, I had to catch it and call Morgan and Rachel over. When Morgan saw what I had, should could hardly wait to hold it. It was kind of a big snake, but I gave in and handed it over. It quickly wrapped itself around her arm she was in 7th heaven!

She stood there holding it for the longest time eyes big, just yackin' up a storm about snakes and how good she was at holding them. Well, I guess the snake finally got bored and started eyeing her little hand...and, sure enough, STRIKE!

He bit her right on the base of her thumb!! Of course, she screamed and jumped around and I grabbed the snake back. No sooner did I have the snake in my hands and she was already askin' if she could hold it again....little tom-boy.

The snake actually drew a little blood. She saw the blood and simply said "oh! That's not so bad!" She's quite a little trooper. Carol took her in the house wash out the bite and I went ahead and turned the snake loose. When she came back out she spent the rest of the afternoon searching for more snakes!!

Later I told her every good herpetologist gets bit from time to time. She "you're right" in a rather proud voice!!

Snuffy Pupples?!

We were tuckin' Rachel in tonight and she kept saying she wanted Snuffy Pupples. Carol and I were rather confused until we figured out her 'Reeka-eze'...she simply wanted Puppy Snuffles! :)

For those of you who don't know what puppy snuffles are...have you ever had a puppy sniffin' around your neck until you couldn't stop laughing...those are puppy snuffles. Well, we're not quite as good as the puppies, but you'd never know that by giggles we get out of Rachel!

Dive at Yellow House

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Originally uploaded by jamesx4.

Had a great weekend dive trip with my buddy Brian. We drove up to Hood Canal and stayed in what divers simply call Yellow House in Hoodsport. We stayed with The Dive Club, a great group of divers who welcome divers and non-divers alike into their club! The Dive Club also plans bigger trips and it sounds like they recently bought a van or bus for dive trips here in the Northwest.

Yellow House was GREAT! Man, if you're gonna' dive Hood Canal, that's the place to stay. They've got one bedroom on the main floor, two bedrooms upstairs and then they have four curtained off areas in a nice finished basement with bunk beds.

Brian and I did three dives starting with a night dive Friday night. Among other things we saw a squid, lot's of squid eggs and the highlight of the dive for me was this little octopus that probably would've fit in the palm of your hand. He was actually a septapus...he apparently got in a little fight and only got away with seven of his eight arms!

Saturday and Sunday we tried to dive a site called the Pinnacle or Sea Mount, but the water was just to rough to anchor the boat. So we ended doing a 75' dive on Saturday at Point Whitney. Found the underwater pipes with lot's of life on them, including two octopus. And then we dove Sund Rock on Sunday. Saw about four very large wolf eels and lots of lingcod, some rather large :)

Flickr Rocks!

All the pictures displayed in our blog are uploaded to a photo sharing site called Flickr. I'm so impressed with this outfit that I went ahead paid for a year subscription which is only about $41 or $3.50/mo. It's easy to upload pictures, easy to view the pictures and easy to link 'em to my blog. Family...friends....go check it out. They've even got a free level of service which simply restricts how many pictures you can up load per month, but it's a pretty reasonable number.

I love software done right!!

Mmmm...German Pancakes

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Originally uploaded by jamesx4.

For Easter Sunday, we had the mom's and Karen and David over for brunch. The highlight of our brunch watching these German pancakes raise. Carol hasn't made these in a long time so she was really excited to see 'em puff up so big!

Bon Appetite! Oh...that's French...sorta'!

Rachel speaks Reeka-eze

Can you decipher this?!

"Dih uh minuh, humpin' on my toad!"

We've been studying this language for about a year now and believe this to simply mean...

"Just a minute, something's on my toe!"

Yes, Rachel likes picking at her toe jam :-)

Let's try blogger now

Let's see...I've designed my own websites, even hosted it myself. Fun, but I just don't have time for that. I've paid for a host and tried GeekLog. Was kinda' cool. Ditched that and tried Mambo and Gallery together. That was a really nice combo. And then...

I figured my website doesn't really draw millions of fans, nor will it ever (surprise)! So why am paying for a host when there's now some really nice, free blogs out there. I got my gmail account, set this blog up on Blogger in just a few minutes and setup a quick account on Flickr and voila'...pretty much what need for free.

Well, see how long the free thing lasts, but in the meantime enjoy!

We gots a faaaaarrrrm truck!

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Originally uploaded by jamesx4.

I finally put some pictures of our farm truck in the gallery. We sold our nice Dodge a while back, but realized we simply need something for hauling stuff around. So I found an old, beat up, rusted out, sorta' runs farm truck. It's a 1974 3/4 ton Chevy long bed. Being 1974, I don't have to worry about DEQ.

Unfortunately, the gas tanks on the truck have all kinds of crud in them so I had to rig up a little temporary gas tank on the front grill of the truck. Check out the pictures :) Don't worry, I'm not driving it like this on the road. But, can you imagine somebody tailgating you with that little bomb strapped to the front of their truck!

Anyhow, once I get a new gas tank on that rusty 'ole beast we can finally get some sawdust for stalls, make a dump run, haul the brick from the chimney I tore out and lot's more!!

Playing with dead kittens

So my mom watched the girls last week and they watched some kittens being born. Well, one of the kittens was still-born. So my mom went ahead and let Morgan "investigate" the dead kitten, a strange, but good lesson. So when I arrived to pick up the girls Morgan was very excited to show me the dead kitten. I went to the back room where it was and she pretended the kitten was alive, making it climb up this little carpeted cat tree. Yeah, that was a bit odd!

Now several days later I was putting Morgan to bed and I reminded her that the next day she was going to be staying at "NeeNee's" again. I asked what she'd like to do over there...her eyes got big with excitement as she exclaimed in her ultra-cheery voice, "I want to play with DEAD KITTENS!!"

I think we've successfully taught her not to be afraid of death...wait, is that a good thing!