Olympics Day 3

Last Day - Good riddance to the Bollywood Motel! Another long night, but I think we're getting used to the smell. We packed up everything, and got going again by about 8:30. We had the whole day to look around and shop.
We got off at a different station this time, Waterfront, and headed down another 4 or 5 blocks to see the flame. It's quite far from any of the other venues. Now I understand why Gretsky had to get into a car. It's a few miles from BC Place where the opening ceremonies were. There are big fences around it, so you can't get very close, but there is an opening in the fence so that you can get pictures. We could see it just fine. It's pretty impressive, with the water behind it. I guess the ships coming in can see it too.
Another eagle! We had heard that there was a neat place called Live City, so we headed over there to see what was going on. After a long line to get in, it wasn't as cool as we thought. There was a sponsor display by Coke that was supposed to be fun, but had a 2 hour line and we didn't have time for that. We did see a display by Panasonic, on a 102-inch high definition 3-D TV. It was a 15 min highlights of Olympic events, and it was pretty impressive. There were big screens in the Live City, and a few other displays, but not much going on for us. We looked around, and worked our way back toward the main arenas, stopping for lunch. We also finally braved the giant line and went into the main Olympic Superstore and got some sweatshirts.

Late in the day we headed off to our last event. Short track speed skating, at the Pacific Colosseum, where I saw the Men's Figure Skating. We had way better seats than I had! We got there about an hour early, and looked around. Kipp got a hat that had the logo on the front, and was edged with flags. It's pretty neat. When we got there, the men were already warming up. We could see Apollo Ohno warming up, with JR Celski. It was fun watching all of them. Did I ever mention that it's cold in those arenas? We all had those cute red mittens by this time! This last event was from 5pm to 7:30pm. It was fun, because it was mixed. We saw Ladies 500m quarterfinals, men's 1000 m heat (both US men qualified!), women 500m semifinal, 2 men's 5000m Relay (now that's a fun one - 40 laps, 4 teams at a time on the track, and they all push each other to change turns! It's wild! Fun to watch, hard to keep track of who's in front sometimes...US did well, qualifying for the final), then finally the Ladies 500m Finals. China won Gold, Canada Silver, and the crowd went wild! It was very exciting. The only drawback to my Olympic experience is that we don't get to see the medals getting awarded. Because they are so greedy, you have to pay to go see a medal ceremony, which takes place the next night at another place to see actual medals placed on necks and hear anthems played. I knew we wouldn't see anything for hockey, and also for figure skating, since I was going to the short program. But I thought we would see the medals awarded for this event! But no, all we got to see was a "flower ceremony", and there was no anthem played at all. I really think that is rotten. The audience is cheated out of that memory, and the people who see the medals awarded, for the most part, have nothing invested in the athletes. I'm sorry they have gone that way, and I don't know when they started doing that. So we left after the flowers. Back to the bus, then the skytrain, and back home. We made it back to Covington at 11:45pm, and into bed. It was a wonderful trip, and I loved it all. The kids got tired of all the lines, but that was to be expected. They handled all of it well, and I was really proud of them. They had fantastic behavior the whole time. We have souvenirs, pictures, and memories to last a lifetime!

Olympics Day 2

We had a very poor night. The full size beds were pretty uncomfortable, no blankets, only a sheet and a bedspread, no heater - there was a portable space heater brought in while we were gone, which had it's own lovely scent, creative lighting....well, it was a place to sleep! We had seen other hotels along the road, and Kipp tried to call a few before we left, to see if we could change for the second night...yes, Holiday Inn had a vacancy....$400/night. We stayed where we were.We got ready early, and were on the train by about 8:30am. We wanted to try to shop in the main Olympic Superstore. This picture is the line to get INTO the store. It had been open for 1/2 an hour at this time. The line looked like this most of the time we saw it, plus or minus 50 feet. We had been hoping that if we got there early, the line wouldn't be very long. So instead we went to Starbucks, and looked around. They were encouraging people to get to the venue 2 hours early. Our first event, Ice Hockey started at 12, so at 10am, we started to head for Canada Hockey Place.

We were so excited! We were seeing Men's Hockey, USA vs Switzerland. The US were favored to win, which was good, and this was the first game played. They had security set up, of course, and it moved pretty well. Then they scanned your ticket, and you were in! They had shops of course, with mostly hockey jerseys, and other stuff. They had this fun eagle in one of the shops. We didn't find anything we wanted, since we wanted just "regular" olympic stuff, not hockey olympic stuff. We went to find our seats, which weren't too bad. We could see pretty well, and the game was good. No score until almost the end of the first period, when US finally scored. We did win the game, 3 to 1, and it was exciting. Hockey is pretty fun in person! Everything here is Olympic, even the ice machines were decorated in Olympic rings. The outside of the building, as we were leaving. We needed to go right to the skytrain, for me (Jenny) to get to the next venue, for Men's short program Figure skating. I was getting a little sad - not sad - I was REALLY looking forward to seeing this - it had been my dream. But leaving the family and going alone, I realized that it would be a little bit lonely not having someone to share it with. Boy, is God good. So I got off by myself after 5 stops, and the rest of the family stayed on the train. They went to a mall, shopped and had dinner. They were thinking of a movie, but Kyler didn't want to see it. I jumped onto an express bus they had, and took it right to the Pacific Colosseum, where the Men's Figure Skating was. I was about 1 hour early. I looked around a bit, and finally headed up to my seat. And I do mean UP. I was so high, I could almost touch the roof! I was only a few rows down from the top! I got to my seat, and next to me was a single gal, also named Jennifer, who is an ice skating coach! What a nice lady! She and I hit it off, and had a fantastic 5 hours of watching all 30 men skate! She told me everything I needed to know, why they were good or bad, what to watch for, what was being scored. It was great! We had a good time. There was no one on my other side, and no one on her other side. We could see Scott Hamilton, and every one of the skaters well (on the screen, anyway). It was amazing. I loved it. The event was from 4pm to 8:45pm, and we ended up heading back on the bus to the Skytrain the same direction. She got off just a few stops ahead of me. It made my night just really enjoyable, and I couldn't have had a better time. Kipp and the kids came and picked me up at the train, and we got back to the motel late, at about 10pm. It was a long day, and even the smell couldn't keep us up too long.

Olympics - Day 1

We started off after a great breakfast of eggs and cinnamon rolls :) Ilea decorated her window of the car. We were all very excited. We got off by 9am, and made it to the border by 11:30am. There was only 1 car ahead of us! We got to our motel in another 15 minutes. Our friends had given us instructions on how to get downtown using the skytrain from Surrey, where our motel was. The motel, The Bollywood Motel, did leave a little to be desired. It had an overwhelming smell of Lysol, so at least we knew it was clean! They also had our reservation, so that was also a plus. They also didn't charge us as much as I had heard on the phone at one time, so that was also a plus! The downside was that it was about as poor a room as we had ever been in, but we were only there to sleep, and at this point we were so excited about the Olympics, we didn't care too much about the room. We left our stuff, and drove a few miles down the road, grabbed lunch at Burger King, and got onto the Skytrain.

The Skytrain is mostly above ground train, with about 12-15 stops to downtown, which took about 1/2 hour total. We got on at the very end of the line, so we had seats, but it filled up to standing room only by the time we got off. We got into the city by 1pm.

Our first goal was to pick up our tickets at the will-call site. This was at 1010 Hamilton St. We headed toward the street, and turned up it, needing to go about 4 blocks. When we got to 1010 there was a Cosmetic Laser surgery and Dental office. We were very confused. We had the confirmation page I needed, but not the page with the address, we had just penciled that in. Another group showed up a minute later, also looking for the same thing. They charged right in, and a minute later we found out the street had changed names and we were now a block off. So we all trooped around the corner to the real Hamilton St, and got our tickets. Kipp meanwhile was figuring out our phone plan, so that we could call each other, our friends in Surrey, and check email, maps, Facebook, web, etc.
After we got the precious tickets, we had some time to just wander around. We found more of the great art eagles that we had seen in the summer in Victoria.We went back to the main arena, BC Place, where the opening ceremonies were. There wasn't a ton to see from the outside right then. We looked around. There were lots of people. We did get a souvenier for Kyler, a stuffed animal called Sumi, one of the mascots. He really likes it. Then we rode the Skytrain back to Surrey to meet our friends for dinner. Joe and Anne have 3 daughters, and the kids all had fun playing Wii, although Leila did take time out to bake us dessert! We got Ilea's name from playing around with Leila's name backward.

Howard Family Blog moved to http://blog.hijkk.net

Hi everyone, it appears that after reading lots and lots of pages about what is happening to Blogger's discontinuation of FTP for publishing blogs, it appears that for now, we need to announce that our blog has officially moved to http://blog.hijkk.net.  Thus, those that are reading this blog via a blog reader, will need to go that page and resubscribe (select that RSS feed icon in the URL line) or just change your subscription to utilize: http://blog.hijkk.net/feeds/posts/default.

Currently the old pages will continue to reside at the previous URL (http://hijkk.net/blog/) but I believe that only the new URL will continue to be updated.  Blogger is suppose to have some tool available in a few weeks that will help in some of this migration so things might be a bit easier later but for now, you will have to resubscribe.  Sorry.

If this is all utterly confusing and you have no idea what I'm talking about send me a note and I'll help you get setup correctly.

Migrating blog to a new domain name

Blogger (the blogging service we use) had decided to discontinue the use of FTP. This is what we use to publish our blog to our hosting provider. Thus for the next little while, our blog may not be working properly (hopefully no one will notice). Ultimately the new URL to our new blog will be http://blog.hijkk.net rather than the old http://hijkk.net/blog/. If you go to the new blog, you should be redirected automatically (which should include RSS feeds as well). We'll see how it all turns out.

Christmas Newsletter

Yes, it's finally here! We didn't get it out before Christmas, or New Year's, but almost got it out before our Tree got put away....since the boxes aren't actually in the attic yet, this might count, right? This year it's the thought that counts! We have been asking our kids what the high point and low point of their day has been. We've had better discussions this year than in most years, and way better than the typical, "How was your day?", "Fine" conversation. So we thought we'd translate that to our Christmas letter and let you know how our year went.

Kyler

Winter 09

• High Point – Inner Tubing w/cub Scouts - this is an annual event with his pack. It's free for all the boys who help sell popcorn during their fundraiser in the fall.


• Low Point – Going to see Ilea’s concert with Grass Lake Gator Singers Kent District Choir Night- This was a long night, with choirs from all over the district. While each one was pretty good, they all had to march up, sing a few songs, then march off, and the next one came up. It was quite a production, and a very long time for anyone to sit in pretty uncomfortable chairs. This turned out to Ilea's low point too, and she was performing in it!

Spring 09

• High Point - Mom N’ Me Camp - This was a good weekend for Kyler and Mom, at least better for mom than the weekend with rain. There was sun, and lots of activities. I'm sure we'll both always remember this.


• Low Point – Cub Scout Activity/Pool Night - Kyler didn’t have much fun because there wasn’t any play time (they learned about swimming and safety, earned a badge, I think).

Summer 09

• High point – Cruise to Alaska & Church camp - It was Kyler's first time at camp, which was from Wed to Sat. He had a great time, despite this picture. It was Ilea's last time at Jr Camp, and the only time they will be together until 6th and 9th grades. Next year Kyler will be on his own.


• Low point – when Mom & Dad went on a hot air balloon ride without the kids :(

Fall 09

• high point – Macy’s parade (we were in it - the costumes are above) & Cub scout winter camp


• Low point - Ilea going to girl scout camp because he missed her - Isn't that sweet? She went away for 2 nights.

Ilea

Winter 09

• High Point – Snow - We started Winter with record snow, and it was wonderful. All day last Christmas it snowed and it was so beautiful. Lots of things were canceled, including a few days of school.


• Low Point – Singing at the Kent District Choir night with Grass lake Gator Singers

Spring 09

• High Point – Plane ride and End of School - For Father's Day Jenny got Kipp a ride on a small plane, won at a silent auction. It was fun. The kids were able to go up with him. They flew over our house, and down to Olympia and back.


• Low Point – Cub scout rocket launch day - Fun for the 2 seconds you get to light off your rocket (which Ilea didn't get to do - it was just for the scouts), not so fun for the rest of the time...

Summer 09

• high point - Cruise to Alaska - we all had a fantastic trip. The weather was great, food was awesome, and it was very relaxing. Couldn't have asked for a better week.


• Low point – Heat in Fresno - It's great to spend one-on-one time with Grandma and Grandpa, but the temp did hit upwards of 110 last summer. Lots of pool time and air conditioned activities!

Fall 09

• high point – Birthday & Girl Scout Encampment - For Ilea's birthday we went Bowling with 6 or 7 other girls. We forgot the camera and don't even have any pictures! Luckily her girl scout leader, Jane, remembered it when she took the troop to Camp this fall. They went up to Carnation, in the mountains, and had great weather.


• Low point - Hitting Kyler with the Clarinet case in the face at the end of a bad week. It was a really bad week.

Jenny

Winter 09

• High Point – Snow! I loved it.


• Low Point – Kyler’s Star Wars Slumber party with 5 boys – never again!

Spring 09

• High Point – 17 yrs of marriage to Kipp - We did end up celebrating our actual anniversary at a Mariners Game, in the pouring rain, but I still love him.


• Low Point – Gorgeous flowers out back, and then they got knocked down by a wind storm

Summer 09

• high point - Cruise to Alaska - as we mentioned, everything was great. Read the full details in our blog in Aug.


• Low point – The week the kids spend with grandparents flew by too fast

Fall 09

• high point – Hot air Balloon Ride


• Low point - Kent District teacher strike - The kids ended up starting school 10 days late, and we were all ready. We're paying for it now with missed vacation during Christmas break, and shortened mid-winter and Spring breaks (only 1 day).

Kipp

Winter 09

• High Point - Snow


• Low Point – Getting the cat declawed - We got new couches, and finally decided we had enough of her scratches. She has literally scratched every piece of furniture we own, and so we got her front claws removed. It was tough on us - she caught a cold on top of everything else, and recovery was slow.

Spring 09

• High Point – Father’s day air plane trip


• Low Point – Telling everyone that their jobs are going away because of outsourcing to India - It was rough even before that, because Kipp knew and couldn't tell them. Then you have to tell your friends the bad news, and that they have to train their replacements before they can get their severance packages. It was a rough six months.

Summer

• High Point - Cruise to Alaska


• Low point – Knowledge transfer/training people from India, and losing friends and co-workers as the termination dates were reached.

Fall 09

• high point – Hot air balloon trip


• Low point - Because Kipp got shingles in Aug, the virus made him ineligible to donate blood anymore. Kipp had donated around 96 pints of blood, and really enjoyed donating on a regular basis.

Burger King, Here we come!

OK, We haven't had very many good meals since, oh, um, Christmas, and I actually planned out the entire weeks menus. I got all the groceries. I even started tonight's meal LAST night, brining the meat in the fridge. I got this gourmet recipe from the chef at the Space Needle, and the simple recipe was called Mocha Braised Short Ribs. It was featured on the New Year's Eve special which I saw in my PJ's since Ilea and I were sick and we had to cancel our New Year's Eve party. The recipe seemed pretty simple, and I'm a reasonably good cook. I bought the meat, and I had the rest of the ingredients. I brined the meat in water, coffee, and salt all night. This afternoon I took the meat out, browned it, removed from pan, sauted onion and garlic, added wine and broth, put back the meat, bay leaves, sprinkled some chocolate chips, put a lid on it, and placed it in the oven like the recipe said, for 3 hours at 350. At 5:15 we came home and it smelled good even out in the garage! The kids were even excited! I put some potatoes in the oven, later added some bread, and at 6 we all excitedly took the pan out of the oven and took the lid off to find this:I think Kipp's reaction says it all.... Kyler wanted to know if we were really going to eat the leaves, which at this point, were the least of the problems....I tried to find the meatiest piece of shoeleather, I mean meat, to see what it tasted like....And we were off to Burger King! What a bummer! I may try again someday. Kipp is currently trying to save my cookware. At least the potatoes and rolls can be used tomorrow.

Pride Goeth before a fall?

Hopefully it wasn't my pride that caused this panel to fall, but I did love it!

We thought this was in place pretty well. We had to squeeze it in, and thought it was tight enough to just stay up without anything else holding it. Lesson learned. This was the first of 2 panels of similar design which I made, and are in opposite sides of our dining and living rooms. The other is currently being held up by silly putty, and we may pick up some moulding today...

I had just come into the kitchen from the garage, and the kids and Kipp were already in the kitchen when we all heard a whump and some glass tinkling. I was trying to figure out what ornaments we could have that were over there, and realized that there weren't any. It took Kipp a few seconds also, and then we all ran over to look. Kyler saw it first. He said, "Well Mom, at least it's not your favorite one!" (I do like the second one I made a little better). The bad news about our new carpet is it's really thick and really holds glass shards well! My panel went from about 20 pieces to 120 pieces, and we picked up what we could and vacuumed the rest. The good news is I now have a new window to fill!

Ilea the photographer

Ilea just won the best photograph at her school for Reflections program with the theme of "Beauty is...". Her picture goes to the district level now and we are very proud of her.

Kyler's Church Camp Adventure

One of the tasks that Kyler has to do for his cub scout bear badge is to write a story about something he has done. Below is Kyler's story:

In the summer I went to church camp. We did stuff like art, swimming, sports, and cabin time. My team was the green team. On the first night we played capture the flag. I got close to my opponents flag.

On the second night we played counselor hide and seek. My team found 1 counselor. The way we found him was he was howling. The one that we found was are own counselor.

On the very last night one counselor from every team was stolen without anyone knowing . Then at chapel a note came. It had 5 tasks and after finishing each task we got some puzzle pieces that made a map. After doing all the tasks, we could get the final puzzle piece. The tasks were archery, obstacle course, making a bridge, getting fake armor, and a slip-and-slid. Then we went to the chapel and got the final piece with the X and found where Andrew was. We found our counselor first so we won!

BY
KYLER HOWARD

Ilea's Prayer of Thanksgiving

Ilea wrote this:

I thanks the Lord for all I see,
for He has gone and made it for me,
and every blade of grass is precious to me.
I love Him and He loves me.

(below was a picture of cooked turkey. It was great, and we used it for our Thanksgiving prayer this year).

Newest Masterpiece!

OK, I really loved the last piece I made for myself. It's the one above with hills and a sunset (which still looks way better in person). But I did the hills wrong, and I wanted more sunset, and more layers of color.
So I made another! It's even better! Boy was it hard though....I went to Big M Stained Glass on Mon and got some glass, then back on Wed because I needed more of the zinc came to frame it. I was working Wed night, so excited, and hoping I could finish it that night. As I was framing it, I used a horseshoe nail to keep the pieces in place. But I forgot to put a little piece of lead as a bumper on the the top right sunset piece, and as I pounded the nail in it scraped along the piece and broke it right in half! I was so mad! I didn't have any more glass big enough to cut another. I was trying to break it up into a few pieces, and see if it would look good, and while I was doing that my elbow leaned too hard on that green triangle on the right, below the lavender, and I broke that one too! Now I was hopping mad! Maybe spitting mad! I couldn't beleive it! I've never broken a piece assembling a window! I DID have enough green, so I fixed that, and finally decided the extra pieces in the pink just wouldn't look right anyway. So Thrs I went back to Big M.....and they were OUT of my glass! Hundreds of pieces, but not the color I needed. So they added it to their order, and told me it would be in Mon. Now, I had lots of free time on Thrs, Fri, Sat, even some on Sun, but Mon was crazy busy day, morning to night, as was Tues....So it wasn't until Wed afternoon/eve that I was able to work on the panel. It took about 2 hours, and it was done! But now there was no light. So today I finally got to see the real thing. I love it! The pictures don't do it justice, so come on over to visit!

New Glass Panel

So here is what I risked life and limb for...well, at least limb! I've had it in my head to do something like this for a long time. The pic just doesn't do it justice! I think the light from the surrounding windows washed out the picture (click on the pic to make it larger, that might help). It's 45'' x 20.5", and I put it up in our living room. The trees are made of a vinyl sticker, and I love them! One thing I particularly love in the PNW are the beautiful sunsets with the trees silhouetted, and I wanted to try to recreate this. You can't see the panel at all from the front of the house (it's behind our lace leaf maple), so you need to come visit! It's above where I do my daily quiet time, so I will be able to see it light up as the sunsets get later in the winter. I am really going to enjoy this!

Ilea

Ilea went to a birthday party where they had an amazing face painter! She used the colors in Ilea's shirt, pink, white and lt orange to match her face in wonderful swirls. She also used silver sparkles to give it some pizazz. She looked great, and got lots of double looks for the rest of the day! And even after a shower, there were sparkles on her face the next morning!

Kyler

I think I've mentioned before that Kyler is one of the luckiest kids I know? While we were at the skating rink, a boy whom he'd just met gave him 50 cents. Since he couldn't buy any food for 50 cents, he went to the coin machines. His broke, and started spilling out 9 or 10 little containers with toys in them. Some had rubber animals and some had tattoos. Kyler had one of these small rubber animals before, a pig, and now he had a bunch more. 2 dogs, a pig, a cow, a hippo, a monkey, a bear, and an elephant. So he decided to make a home for them. He realized he needed 2 environments, and made one for each group. He put little platforms on the trees for the monkey to sit on, and vines hanging down. There is even a pond for the hippo and elephant, and mud hole for the pig. He always surprises me with how creative he can be!

Z is for....

Zip Zap Races! And Again, I am totally copying our friends! In fact, we even borrowed one of their cars to use! These remote controlled cars are called Zip Zaps. The kids enjoyed setting up the obstacle course and had fun with the cars even though the charges don't last long. Sorry these posts are so late...we did finish our alphabet activities last week, since that was supposed to be the last week of summer....we should be starting school next week, and hopefully things will get back to normal!