Between Christmas and New Year’s, we visited our families back in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Emilie got to try snowboarding for the first time, and also got to try saxophone for the firsrt time. The weather got progressively colder throughout the trip, down to minus-15 F – some 60 degrees colder than our home back in North Bend!
Emilie got to try snowboarding for the first time, here in MN – thanks to help from Uncle Brian and cousins Evan & Aaron (who are very good snowboarders):
Merry Christmas from the sunny (but cool) Pacific Northwest!
Emilie and Carol perform on Christmas Eve, part of a flute trio accompanying the congregation on “Away in a Manger”:
Flute Trio from Jim Reitz on Vimeo.
Stayed at the Suncadia Resort near Roslyn, WA this weekend along with some friends. No snow there, but still had a fun time skating, hiking and relaxing.
We spent the weekend at a resort near Roslyn, WA – the town that stood in for Cicely, Alaska in the wonderful 90’s TV series Northern Exposure. Many of the locations in the fictitious Cicely were based on real buildings in Roslyn – and still exist.
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| Macys Parade 2009 |
Panther Pride Unicycle Team (PPUT) pictures taken at the 2009 Macy’s Parade in downtown Seattle, the day after Thanksgiving. This link takes you to the team’s photo page.
Emilie performed with her 6th grade band at the Twin Falls Middle School fall band concert.
Some waterfall pictures taken at nearby Twin Falls State Park – one of the best short hikes in the area.
Cafe Night Peformance from Jim Reitz on Vimeo.
Emilie performs “What Is This Feeling?” from the musical Wicked – part of her middle-school’s “Cafe Night” held at a local jazz club.
Today was a cool but beautiful autumn day in Seattle – we stopped at Seattle Arboretum’s Japanese Garden on the way back from downtown. Jim made good use of the scenery, testing out his new Canon 7D camera. Here are some snapshots from our visit.
Here’s a second batch of photos from Jim’s golf trip to Ireland in early September. Note – some of these were taken by Scott with his camera. Click on the small picture to browse the entire photo album.
Jim was fortunate to travel to Ireland with a couple friends, to play some of that country’s (and the world’s) best golf courses. We had a couple days of rain – it had been raining in Ireland for 2 months straight – followed by 5 days of absolutley perfect sunny 68-degree weather. Here’s a few of the pictures I’ve processed so far. Click the small picture to browse the entire photo album.
We had a long but enjoyable trip to the Midwest this summer. Emilie competed in the North American Unicycle Championsips in Bloomington, MN (note: full Unicycle event pictures here) We also managed to visit lots of relatives & friends, splash around in water parks, and attend the PGA Championship at Hazeltine. Here are some snapshots from this 3-week trip – click on the small picture to browse the entire photo album.
Members of Carol’s former Taiko (Japanese drumming) group came over for a party this weekend. Everyone caught up with each other, and got to see how grown-up all the kids were since the last get-together seven years ago. Click on the small picture to browse the entire photo album.
Swimming with friends at nearby Rattlesnake Lake, on a hot summer weekend.
Hi – special greetings to all of our new Rick Steves tour friends! I’m finally finished editing photos from our Italy trip! I ended up selecting and publishing about 400 pictures, out of about 2800 exposures I took.
There are several ways to see our photos:
The best way: Click here to browse our full set of photos on Google’s free PicasaWeb photo-sharing service, which is where all our photos are actually stored. Here you can view, download, search – even order prints online.
Other ways: 1) Click on Our Photo Albums above to view all photo albums here on our family web site (no printing or downloading), or 2) read thru individual posts below and click on each embedded photo album to view them.
So we got to the airport in Rome, after carefully checking in for our flight online the day before. I had checked the web to verify our flight was on time – and Northwest sent me text messages assuring me everything was as scheduled. Imagine our surprise when we arrived at the airport and found that EVERYONE on our flight had been BUMPED. It seems the same flight the previous day WAS cancelled, and we were all being replaced with the previous day’s passengers. We were herded onto buses, and shuttled off to be “prisoners” at some cheesy airport hotel for an extra 24 hours.
We arrived at the “Airport Palace Hotel” and – after working myself through the stages of Anger, Grief, and Denial – we discovered that we were actually “stuck” in a pretty nice place. Turns out, the Rome airport is near the coast. Our cheesy hotel was in the Rome suburb of Lido di Ostia, which happens to be a really nice beach resort on the Mediterranean. So, making the most of a bad situation, we spent the extra day hanging out near the beach & enjoying the sun. That evening we saw one of the most gorgeous sunsets ever – some great photo ops!
Northwest ferried in an extra plane to take us home on Monday. That was fun, too – the gate agents at the airport all became computer hackers, as they attempted to see who could figure out how to issue boarding passes for our “non-existent” flight number. Even more fun, since these were all Delta employees (Northwest & Delta recently merged) trying to subvert the Northwest reservation system (which they didn’t know) into doing something it wasn’t supposed to do. After 1.5 hours, one bright agent managed to print one boarding pass, and the entire terminal erupted into applause. Boarding passes were finally printed, we actually boarded a plane, and eventually made it home.
This was one of the best purchases I made prior to our Italy trip – a Lenmar 4-port USB charger. Many – if not most – of our electronics now have standard +5V USB ports for charging. With this little gizmo, a single outlet could simultaneously charge 2 iPhones, a Zune, and a Nintendo DS. Added bonus – this version comes with interchangeable electrical plugs, so it natively works with either US or European power outlets.
