Update on the House

Now that Matt isn't studying we have been busily working away on the house. Here are a few updates.

Our amazing friends Lance, Cory & Jarrett all came over last Sautrday to help Matt with a boys favorite task: demolition! They got sooooo much done, and I was totally impressed.

Here's what the room looked like before.

Here's demo pictures:

Turns out there was a 50's dance floor under all that Pergo

Sledge hammer, yeah

Lance goin at it

Matt in pain after punching his fist through the wall

Matt getting in a running kick at the wall

Cory swingin the sledge

Jarrett working hard with the crowbar

Messy

Bike garage in the corner

I guess I forgot to take a pic of it all cleaned up. Sorry. You will have to wait.


We put up a brand new white picket fence. We used to have one but it was old and rotten and blew over whenever it was windy so we decided to upgade. It's embarrasing to have your fence blow over. So happy to have this project taken care of! (Umm... can't find the pics of these either. More to come. )

We turned this window into two. Much better.

I pulled 300 nails from the ceiling. Yay.

Matt's Dad is in town and has mad skillz so they are working on reconfiguring our cold air return for the furnace so that we can build a wall where it used to be. Great job gentlemen!

That's all for now. Much more to come. If you have framing and or sheetrocking skills you are more than welcome at our house at any time. :)

Wine Tasting in Oregon

This past weekend we headed south to Portland for a weekend of wine tasting and exploring with Aunt Diane & Uncle Barry (this is Matt’s Aunt & Uncle). We headed out Friday night after work and our first stop in tax-free-land was Deschutes Brewery Pub in the Pearl District. We love Deschutes beer.


Saturday dawned bright and sunny and we headed East. I had never seen most of the Columbia River Gorge along the Washington-Oregon state line, so we took a bit of a road trip.

Viewpoint

 

Multnomah Falls

Lunch at Skamania Lodge

They had a falcon show

 

Wine tasting a Columbia Cliffs

(awesome location, nice people, don’t highly recommend the wine though)

Wine tasting at Maryhill

(good wine, cool location)

Turns out there’s a museum out in middle-of-nowhere-washington called Maryhill Museum. We visitied. It was neat, but I didn’t take any pictures inside. Here’s a few from the outside.

Turns out there’s also a Stonehenge replica out in middle-of-nowhere-Washington dedicated to WWI soldiers. Kinda weird, kinda interesting.

Dinner was at Carlita’s in the Pearl District, which I don’t have any pictures of, but highly recommend. Go for the Ahi Platter. Yum.


Sunday was Willamette Valley wine tasting. Diane & Barry are ‘in the industry’ so they can get us free tastings at almost anywhere along with being able to teach us a lot, so it makes it pretty fun. We visited somewhere I can't remember, Solena, Lenne, and Troon, all of which get a thumbs up from us.

Awesome picnic lunch spot overlooking the vineyard.

Barry, Diane, Mackenzie & Matt

Thanks for hosting us Diane & Barry, we had a great time!






On a completely different note, I just found out that I get to work from home. It will be a couple weeks before my laptop arrives and I get to permanently make the move but I am already organizing the office and getting excited. Top 10 Reasons Mackenzie is Excited to Work at Home:

(in no particular order)
1. Making real food for lunch
2. Saving time commuting
3. Saving the environment not driving
4. Not dying on the viaduct when we have an earthquake
5. Making lattes every morning
6. Getting in my run
7. Tax breaks
8. Running errands when there is no traffic/crowds
9. Matt is excited to have dinner on the table when he gets home
10. Working whenever/wherever I want (do I hear some more work/play vacations coming on?)



Feel free to chip in with additional reasons I should be excited. And/or strategies for not dying of loneliness.

Fall Preview

Hi.

We are doing...nothing exciting for three whole weeks. (Unless that is, you put CPA studying in the class of exciting. I didn't think so.). So I thought I would update you on some exciting things coming up instead since we just finished booking plane tickets.

September 29th we head off to Europe/Africa. We will be spending four days with Chris & Bernie, two very cool Germans who we met down in Chile. We are uber-excited to see them again. (See, I speak German, right?)

Hi Bernie & Chris

They are two young males, which of course means that not a lot of planning has been done but we're just excited to hang out with them, see a lil bit of mainland Europe for the first time, and hopefully hit up some Oktoberfest in Munich!

Oh, and Matt wants to drive on the Autobahn

Sitting in a refugio in Chile:

Matt: So, like, have you guys been on the Autobahn???
Chris & Bernie: Very confused stares.
Valerie: Matt, you know Autobahn just means freeway, right?
Matt: very ashamed look. Oh. I guess you have then...



Next we will be meeting up with my parents in Marrakech to spend two weeks in Morocco!! We will...hike, ride camels in the Sahara desert, go to cool souqs and mosques, check out the coast, and generally enjoy ourselves. Hooray.




Adventure number two is Thanksgiving 2010 with my parents and sis. We will be going to the Carribean. A certain Carribean island with a bit of communist influence. You know? Yeah, that one. Hi Fidel.

I like this quote I found while doing research yeserday:

Unbelievable! ...

In this country there is no gasoline, but cars are all over the road ...
There's no food, but everybody is cooking dinner ...
They have no money, but everybody is dancing and drinking rum!

We will...see cultural sights, listen to music and dance our hearts out, sample the world famous rum & cigars, spend some time at the renowned beaches, meet people, and....not get caught coming back!


Now if I could just get through the rest of this work day....

....and the other 33 of them before we leave....

The Enchantments

The Enchantments are supposedly 'The Best Hike in Washington' and I can now say that aside from the stunning beauty of Rainier...I'm pretty sure I concur. There's still a lot out there I haven't seen, but it certainly was amazing. Because of how spectacular it is and the fragile high alpine environment, you have to have a permit to go there, which they do drawings for in February of each year. We got extremely lucky and got one for this summer!

It's more than a hike, its actually an 18 mile backpack where you gain 4000 feet and then lose 6000 feet. We went with our awesome friends Catherine + David. I feel like this blog is an ongoing saga of my camera mishaps, so I leave that story for the end and suffice it to say for now that this first chunk of pictures is all from Catherine.

The Enchantments are just outside Leavenworth, WA so the day started out with a drive to the land of Bavaria and then Matt trying to hitchhike so that we could make the trip a one one-way (start at one trailhead, come out at another) instead of an out and back. Once we were on the road (trail) we hiked for a couple hours through the forest and then emerged to Colchuck Lake. This lake is more of a day hike but it was beautiful. Check out the colors:

Just as we were sitting down for lunch we were hit with a sudden torrential downpour, accompanied by a bit of lightning, and the most thunder I have ever heard. Everything but the thunder cleared pretty quickly so we made our way up Aasgard Pass which is 2500ft of elevation gain in .9 miles. Steep. Really steep.

We emerged into the Upper Enchantments Basin which was beautiful and still very much snowed in. This included Isolation Lake & Tranquil Lake. We didn't spend too much time here since it was really snowy and we still had a ways to go, but the colors were neat.

Descending into the Lower Enchantments Basin was a whole different world. While there was still some snow in places it was mostly melted. One of the stunning things about the Enchantments area is the huge granite peaks everywhere. The boys scouted a killer camping spot that overlooked Perfection Lake and Inspiration Lake and had a great view of Prusik Peak. This is when my camera became functional. Yay.

Prusik Peak from our campsite

We settled in to a dinner of Mac & Cheese, and some Mountain House Blueberry Cheesecake for dessert. It was actually pretty good! Then we started a little baby fire to keep warm and keep away the hoards of mosquitoes (the one bad thing about the Enchantments). Fires are delightful while backpacking.

Dinner time

Dusk at the campsite

Campfire!

We woke to a gorgeous sunny day and spent a relaxing morning sitting around camp just enjoying the view, drinking coffee, and sunning ourselves.

Morning

We met lots of mountain goat friends. They were everywhere. Baby was my favorite! (For those of you who care, these are all taken with an 18-55mm lens, not a telephoto. They were not shy).

Matt & baby

We left all of our stuff at camp and spent the day just wandering the Basin. We were all a bit tired, relaxed, and blistered so we planned to only climb up to Prusik Pass which was really only a small hill. Once we got to the top Prusik Peak looked even neater, we didn't look so very far away, and our blisters were feeling better so we headed that direction. Most of the routes are diffucult rock climbs but some fun bouldering will actually get you most of the way. We didn't go to the top because well, we weren't ready to die yet (oh, and we're not experienced rock climbers), but we got pretty high and it was a great view of the whole area.

After spending a few hours sunning ourselves on some boulders by the lake we packed up camp and headed down to the Snow Lakes area. We decided 10 miles and 6000ft of decent was more than we wanted to do in one day (the next day) so wanted to get a head start. The trail was a little crazy and the five miles took something like three and a half hours, but we blazed past Upper and Lower Snow Lakes and made it all the way down to Nada which we had all to ourselves. Somebody decided that a dam that occasionally has 4-5" of water going over it is a good trail. David & I went barefoot. Matt & Cat in their big boots thought they could take it and ended up wet. Note to trailbuilders: dam does not equal trail.

The next day we hiked out to the trailhead, bathed in Icicle Creek and headed into Leavenworth for some well deserved burgers and a pitcher.

I highly recommend this trip. It was beautiful. We saw hardly anyone. Go! (With a permit of course...)



***If you care to read the next installment of: Mackenzie is a Moron When it Comes to Camera Packing here you go. An hour or so into the hike I turned my camera on (it had a battery this time), snapped a picture, and looked at the nice little message that popped up: No Card. So sad. Catherine had her point and shoot camera with her and I thought it might also have an SD card but no, it was an xD. What a sad sad day. When we got to our campsite (which was pretty far off the main trail) I looked down and low and behold...an SD card! I was ecstatic. Here is me being ecstatic: