Summer = Camping

Summer has finally hit Alaksa! Besides the numerous amounts of extra people summer brings (good old tourist season) it always brings the start of outdoor activity, my favorite being CAMPING!
Memorial day weekend was our first camping trip for the summer and we had a blast. We went out to the Kenia area and camped at Clam Gulch. We were able to drive right out onto the beach with the pop-up and camp along the ocean. It was great to hear the waves on the shore and to look down the beach and not see one other person.

We had to be quite bundled up since the wind would not let down until Monday morning but we managed to have fun anyway.We filled our time with claming (though no success in finding any clams that we actually kept), roasting numerious amounts of hot dogs, staying warm by the fire, and playing some card games in the shelter of the pop-up. This picture camptures perfectly the mood at the table during our 3rd round of "Nuclear War". Poor Tyler was being bombed form both Kyle and Natalie with no sympathy or compasion for him.
He tried to form some aliances with them but they had both played one to many times when those so called "aliances" had been so easily broken.

It was a great start to the camping season and a fun trip which we'll have to do again next year. We couldn't have had a nicer start to the summer and the camping season. And our next trip Yawkey will get to come on.

Yawkey

Well we are happy to announce that we are adding a puppy to our family! That's right, Tyler and I are getting a little Boston Terrier puppy the end of May. We have decided to name him Yawkey (after the street that Fenway Park is on in Boston) and are having him brought up from Seattle the end of May. He will arrive here in Anchorage on May 26th so we are getting our house ready for a little puppy and excitedly waiting for May 26th to arrive. Here is the one picture that we have of Yawkey which we saw and immediately fell in love with him (ignore the arrow at the corner of his eye this is our computer mouse, since the picture is on our desktop the mouse showed up on the photo):
More pictures to come of course once he arrives up here.



Just to give you an idea of what he might look like as an adult here is a pictures of his father...quite a nice looking dog if you ask me so we hope Yawkey takes after him.

The Big Pile-Up

Things seem to piling-up at work, home, outside and everywhere. Just a week and a half ago we had this outside: and the snow kept falling to accumulate a total of 16+ inches. I thought spring was just around the corner but looking outside I guess I was wrong.

At work we have secured several new contracts so I have been working through this stack on my desk:
I thought that I could get a stack of new hire paperwork like this off my desk in a week but then another new contract came in and there was yet another stack covering my desk. I am happy to say though that I can finally see my desk now and things may slow down for a week ; at least I hope.

The newest project that Tyler and I have been working on has created a pile-up on our kitchen table. We have been putting together a church cookbook for a fund raiser for our mission trip to South Africa this summer. I have actually found the project a lot of fun to put together and enjoyed using some creativity to create the design and layout of the cookbook. I am happy to report this overview of our cookbook making endeavor:

2+ weeks of typing out recipes from contributors
1 hour at Kinko's
6 bumps/creases in the laminating
1 paper cut
6 hour "House" marathon
2 Taco Bell Dinners
3 other fast food dinners
1 Frozen Lasagna
4+ hours at the church copying
1 cookbook that didn't work
99 complete "Simply Delicious" Chapel by the Sea cookbooks ready to sell!

It's nice to have our kitchen table back and finally some time to try some of the wonderful recipes that are in this new cookbook. We are both looking forward to some relaxing evenings and some good homemade meals again.