After two years of living overseas, living out of suitcases, living off of friends and families, we’re finally back in our house. Our renters have moved out, we’ve had the whole place deep cleaned, and the wood floors redone and Friday the movers came and emptied out our 10×10 storage into our house. We’ve been spending the last 3 days unpacking, organizing, and restocking. It’s been a great two years, but its nice to finally set some roots down again. Come visit!
On July 30th Mark and I headed up to Vancouver Island to the town of Coombs for the Coombs Bluegrass Festival. They played three times over two days and got a great reception from the audience. Their Friday night performance was one of the best I’ve ever seen them have. Unlike the band, I didn’t have to rehearse, so I got to see some other really amazing bands. Below are a few shots from the weekend.
Robin (extremely talented fiddle player who joined them for the weekend), Mark Steudel, Mike Karbowski, Mark Meyers, Dave Grout, Pete Thorn, Ken (Banjo played filling in for Greg)
Band in action again
Mark Meyer on Dobro
Mark Steudel in action
We’ve been wondering what to put on the homepage of our web site for a while now. We have a blog, we have a gallery … So a while back we thought, it’d be cool if you just see a bunch of random images from our gallery, so we wrote a little program that grabs a bunch of images from our gallery and continually randomizes them on our front page. You can click on them and enlarge them. Anyway we finally got it done and put it up. Check it out. It’s not perfect, but we think it’s fun.
Mark
Recently we decided that we needed to update our point-and-shoot camera. We’ve always had a water-resistant one because we do so much in the water and *someone * has a bad habit of dropping electronics out of their float tube! Our friend Kaj had written about his waterproof camera, so we decided to go this route. Its not much more expensive and you can do lots of cool (albeit possibly useless) things with it….as evidenced below. We may look dorky, but we’re having tons of fun!
Fishing at Starlight has always been a fun activity, but in the past we haven’t eaten too much of it. Usually we eat a single fish just a couple of times a summer. My friend Matt was up at his house down the lake last weekend and we decided to do a whole meal of lake fish. This involved catching lots of fish (photo #1), cleaning all the fish (photo #2, with the help of Lucy), cooking the fish (photo #3, Mark and Matt did all the cooking) and the eating (photo #4, as you can see each fish was cooked differently. There were six different kinds including pan-fried, mustard-soy sauce, lemon, steamed, etc). It was a yummy dinner!
Damsel Flies are very delicate versions of Dragon Flies. These two paused long enough for me to capture them as they rested during their mating flight.
Looking at this fish, where would you guess it’s from? Note the blue gill plate, the pink underbody body, the black “ears” behind the eye … if you click on the picture and look closely you’ll see iridescent flecks of gold and silver. If you guessed Tanzania, Kenya, or South America I wouldn’t blame you. This fish is from the lake (Starlight lake), right here out our front door. It’s called a Bluegill, also called Panfish or Sunfish. The fish is very common, and in some lakes (mainly trophy trout lakes) considered a pest. But they fight well on light tackle and supposedly taste great (we’ll let you know how that goes). We’ve seen some amazing animals in Africa, but it’s great to remember that we have our own animals to appreciate right here at home. (Note: this picture is unaltered, it just happen to come out this vividly. We used our little waterproof Olympus Stylus 850SW)
Yesterday we had a great time on Dad’s day. We spent it biking around town, eating good food, and just good ol’ hangin’ out kind of fun. Hope everyone else out there had a great day as well!
Currently there are approximately 400,000 people living with Multiple Sclerosis in the United States and 200 more are diagnosed every week. The Pacific Northwest has the highest rate of MS in the country and yet no one knows why. I’d like to help the National Multiple Sclerosis Society eliminate MS…wouldn’t you?
Why am I supporting MS? As some of you may know, my uncle, Ray Heacox, was diagnosed with MS in 1998. Mark and I have been living with Ray and Cynthia for the last six months and have gotten to see first hand the challenges that Ray has to overcome every day. Symptoms vary greatly from one person to the next and include: fatigue, numbness, vision problems, coordination problems, and many others. Wouldn’t it be better if no one ever had to live with MS?
In order to raise money for MS, this fall (September 13-14) I’m riding 175 miles in the MS Ride. The ride takes place over two days in the Skagit Valley (North of Seattle). I’ll be riding with 2,000 other people who are also committed to raising money for MS. My goal is to keep up an average rate of 15 mph and to complete each day in 8 hours (plus one more hour to walk 5 ft. from the bike to the car!)
My goal is to raise at least $4,000 this year. In order to jump start the donations my mom (Deborah Schenk) and my aunt (Diana Huffman), Ray’s sisters-in-law, have agreed to provide challenge donations. Deborah will match the first $1,000 pledged and Diana will match the second $1,000. Please help me reach that goal with your pledge. Your donation is tax deductible. You can donate through the MS Society’s website via my fundraising page (http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/bebethsteudel). You can also mail a check to me made out to “National MS Society”.
The National Multiple Sclerosis Society will use funds collected from the Group Health Bike MS Ride not only to support research for a cure tomorrow, but also to provide programs that address the needs of people living with MS today. Because we can fight this disease by simply riding a bike, because we have chosen to help thousands of people through a contribution to the Bike MS Ride, we are now getting closer to the hour when no one will have to hear the words, “You have MS.”
Bebeth