Olympics: Hockey

The first event we had tickets to was to women’s hockey.  This was the much anticipated match between the very blond Finnish team and the very unblond Chinese team.  We haven’t lived in Canada long enough to appreciate much more than the gladiatorial aspects of the game, which were strikingly absent from this event.  We were rooting for China, as were a surprisingly large number of other people, but the Finns won handily despite a good effort from the Chinese, whose goalie looked absolutely overwhelmed by the size of her protective gear. 

Buntzen Lake

This is a place about 10 minutes from our house called Buntzen Lake.  In the summer a lot of people come to swim and fish.  January offered a few sunny Saturdays so I took the kids for a little hike on one of them.  It’s pretty wintery and cold, but they still ended up wading into the water until their feet were freezing.  Ethan was the first one in, but he wasn’t too happy about it after the fact.

Little friends

 

We regularly get what seems like a family of raccoons showing up at the sliding glass door leading to our back yard at night. They give us these very blank but hungry looks and ogle any food we've got in hand. The kids think it's great and its all we can do to keep them from opening the door and letting the whole crew in for a bite.  There is a little fish pond in the back yard and we used to have some goldfish in there, but the raccoons would turn it into a raccoon hot tub and night and eat all the fish while they were splashing around.  I guess its their revenge for our poor hospitality.

Train place

Here is a campground-ish place we ran onto on on the way from Vancouver to California.  Its somewhere between Redding and Mount Shasta.  It seemed to be closed when we stopped (for one of our many many biologically compelled stops), but it looked like you could sleep in old cabooses, which sounded pretty cool to most of us.

Full contact cookies

At the age and stage of our clan, making cookies is a full contact sport.  Why sit on a chair and decorate cookies with all your clothes on when you can strip down and get on top of the table to do the same thing?