Our friends, the Ables, who are still in Almaty/Bishkek sent us a photo from their apartment showing the winter in Central Asia. With all that snow, we're glad we aren't still there.
Our Traeger Wood Pellet Grill has died - it experienced a slow death by rust. The fire box was rusted and the business end - the part that held the wood pellets and slowly delivered them to the fire box, had totally rusted to nothingness - - honestly, I think there was some domestic abuse involved....caregivers not providing proper care after the party. But all is not lost. Costco had a warehouse special with lots of new stoves of various styles ready for adoption. After a successful search, Ray brought home the "SILVERTON". It is magnificent and will be a wonderful guest at our outdoor festivities where meat is smoked and grilled.
A great side effect of the new Traeger is the box!!! Believe it or not, there are three children inside this box waiting to burst out and scare us. One day Logan got 'stuck' inside, with the box in an upright position, and he and we had a hard time separating the top from the bottom.
We did a bit of geocaching and tried a puzzle cache; we were successful.
After a good deal of thinking, reading the hints, description, and previous logs, we figured it had to be a public place in a residential area. I figured it was a park, and one log said "This was a cute place, There should be a sign". I figured it was a park and started working with google. There was a list of Oregon City parks, and when I looked I didn't see anything that looked promising. Then I clicked on the site for Waterboard Park. The park was outlined in yellow, and when I enlarged the map, there was a little quadrangle at the bottom of the map, also outlined in yellow. I enlarged it more and saw that the name was Dement Park. The description of the cache had a lot of words with 'ed. And so, when you add that to Dement Park, you get Demented Park, which fits right in with the description of a place that makes you insane. Off we went and we arrived at this little park which is off of Linn avenue. First thing we saw was a little bench underneath a roof. We thought it was in that because the description said the cache was on a man made structure. But it wasn't. The only other man made structure was a guard rail - a GRC - which is a common and boring place to hide a cache. And it was there, just as we hoped.
You can see the magnetic key case just to the right of the bolts and nuts.
We spent the whole week trimming the three fruit trees by the garden; we finished them! Now we have about seven more to do in the area by the barn.
Abby and Clara helped us pile up the branches.
Warren and Whitney's new sidewalks, patio, retaining wall, and graded back yard are finished. They are so excited! It really looks nice.
On Friday we had a Family History meeting with Jenny and Larry Nilson. Jenny is entering all of the information she has into the FamilySearch program. I helped Larry tidy up some of his data and showed hi how to figure out which cards he's printed. We were getting ready to go when Jessica called and asked if I wanted to go out to lunch....duh... I asked Jenny if she wanted to go too, and her answer was an immediate "yes". We ended up at Cheesecake Factory where she'd never been before. It was so fun to see her enjoying the menu and then the food. She loves cooking food!
I got the Chinese Chicken Salad
Friday night was the family birthday for Holland. It was very festive! And...all of Holland's cousins liked playing with her new toys.
Saturday we went to the gymnastic meet in Corvallis against UCLA who is the reigning national champion. We especially wanted to see Katelyn Ohashi who has an amazing floor routine where she jumps in the air and does the splits in the air and then comes down onto the mat in the split position and then bounces back up to end her routine with a flourish. Apparently MANY other people wanted to see her (and UCLA) too; the crowd was huge!!
Here she is. Unfortunately she did not do her floor routine and only performed on the beam. Oregon State lost, but not by much. It is possible that UCLA had their less accomplished athletes compete since they were pretty assured they would win.
Holland was an accomplished athlete too.
Her event was popcorn consumption.
On the way home we stopped in Hubbard for dinner. Surprisingly, this little cafe looks like it could be in Kaz. The food was really good. I got a pork burrito that was served with gravy.
Well.....this picture looks like the entrance to a little cafe in Astana.
Sunday night there was an added service at Jessica's - Abby's Beauty Salon - it was "open"
My new hair style is a unicorn pony tail. Abby did say that my hair was way too short and crunchy.
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