Just a couple of pictures from my birthday festivus at Mission Ridge.

Clan Hewitt joined us for skiing and lunch.  Greg then grilled up some amazing steaks for dinner that night.

What a great blessing to have such great friends!

2 mature, 3 not so much, 1 without an excuse...

Some Thoughts on Winter

Greetings.

The recent Christmas Season has passed into memory.  And as with other years, the best parts were centered around family and eating.

And Christmas-crackers with very stylish headwear.*

It was a great, fun, and wonderful season.  Christa recited a poem to start the Christmas Eve service with the church and we did a fair bit of traveling.  We had different celebrations this year, lengthening the season to three big meals with friends and family.

Some odder than usual...

...and some more crowded.**

Again, it was awesome.
Lots of family time; great food, jokes, laughs, roughhousing with the nephews, etc. We made homemade cookies, eggnog, and pretzels, all with decent results.

When we weren't doing traditional Christmas things, we were in the snow.  That got me thinking (a dangerous habit), "Why snow?"

What follows is an answer of sorts.

Growing up, ours was a family that watched the Olympics.  At a very impressionable age, I watched the great Franz Klammer win the men's downhill in the 1976 Winter Games. It is regarded as the greatest downhill run in history.  Franz Klammer is the man.

So manly that Chuck Norris wears Franz Klammer PJs to bed.***

Really, you should read this:     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Klammer

And then watch this:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYj9kIxAL_o

I'll wait.





Pretty awesome, huh?  At any rate, this may have left an impression on me and my love of alpine skiing, mountains, winter sports, and snow.

Even better when you can share that love with your love.

There is nothing about skiing that isn't great.5*  The views, the adrenaline, the smells5*, the feel of the snow; all of it is fantastic.  It combines the rush of reaction-time athletics with calculating of risks as you plan your line down the mountain.  In this it is a little like auto-racing (in which, incidentally, Franz Klammer was also a champion6*).  It is a massively family-based activity.

Christa at "the wing"7*

Storm days are great 

Bluebird-poweder days are incredible

And some days are just beautiful

There is a feeling, as you push your skis into the run and carve out a turn, like you can accelerate at a rate faster than gravity alone.  It is addictive.  Skiing is a great sport, you can go fast, slow, turn a lot, or just bomb down the run.  You can do it at age 4 and (hopefully) at age 84.  In short, it combines the best of everything we love.

We have recently taken up a new winter activity.  This Christmas, my wise and generous father purchased the Cragos snowshoes.  In some ways it is the opposite of skiing- slow, contemplative, etc.  But they let you hike into some incredibly cool places.  Really, many of the aesthetics of skiing carry over to snowshoeing.  You can get to some very beautiful locations.

Like the aptly named Icicle River.

I would not call snowshoeing easy, but we were reasonably proficient in short order.

Reasonably

It has been a wonderful Winter.  Busy enough to keep me from blogging, anyway.8*  We are so very thankful for our family, extended and otherwise, and for our friends.  And given the readership for this blog, if you are reading this- then you are a friend!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and God Bless You.

* Dad wasn't too impressed with the headgear.

** That's our niece Amber and her kids at nephew Josh's home.  This was the slowest anyone moved all day.

*** Klammer has a bear rug in his home.  The bear isn't dead, it's just too afraid to move. 4*

4* I can do this all night (When Franz does push-ups, he's actually pushing the Earth down)

5* Except people smoking on the chairlift.

6* Franz once fought Superman.  The loser had to wear his underwear outside of his pants.

7* A B-24 went down in the 1940s at Mission Ridge.  There is a memorial marker at the top of a run (patting the wing brings good snow).

8* And that's your apology, 'Niecer.

Romans 8:28

Occasionally I am asked, "So how did you and Vangie meet?"

Here is our story:

All things work together, I believe, according to a plan.  Nothing is accidental*.

Back in a time when the world was young; men were real men, women were real women, and small furry otters were real small furry otters; a time known to mortal men as the Fall of 1994, Vangie and I had a mutual friend.

A wonderful lady named Aimee was a student of mine, and Vangie was house sitting for Aimee's parents while they were away.  Both Vangie and I had recently ended relationships with others.  This being Ephrata, it was of course, widespread knowledge at school**.

Aimee figured that, a) we were both single, b) we were both similar***, and c) Aimee was uniquely placed to help us- she made mutual introductions by exchanging phone numbers, sort of forcefully and without permission.

At this point, I had experienced many strange things in the classroom, but being set up on a blind date4* was novel, to be sure.  So I called Vangie (great voice, by the way) and asked her over for dinner.  I was too poor to take her out, so she came over and I cooked5*.  She wore a pink, long sleeved shirt and nicely fitting Levis.  She was amazed I was tall because of my car.

The wonderful 1993 Prelude.  I guess it made me look short.  Who knew?

We hit it off pretty well6*.


Starting the next night, dates were frequent and relaxed; Skippers for dinner, roadtrips, hiking, horses, that sort of thing.  In December we went on an overnight ski trip with Vangie's church to Schweitzer.  The camera-guy took a pretty random shot of us.  We think it is still the best pictures we have.

She looks the same, and I....I....    I don't own that jacket anymore.

By Christmas we were talking seriously about a long-term future together.  In the Spring, I asked her father for permission to request Vangie's hand.  He said yes, I kidnapped her one Friday in May, took her to the beach7*, and proposed at sunset.

That was pretty fun.

By July we were married at, what was now, our church.  It was 106°F that day, but it was still fun.

Wow.  Just look at her.

We went camping for a week, but had to wait a year for the real honeymoon- Scotland.

 The Highlands.  It was incredible (and incredibly windy that day).

A few wonderful years passed and then this happened8*.

45-minutes in labor.  My woman is a stud9*.

I could not imagine life getting any better.


But it has.


That is our story, all things working together for the good.

Whitefish Lake last Summer.

* Except that incident with the water-ballons and surgical tube in 8th grade English, totally an accident.
** This is one of the few things I don't miss about teaching.
*** Not in obvious ways, however.  Aimee is smart.
4* My first.  And last, it turns out.
5*  Szechuan stir fry.  Still a favorite.  
6* Ironic and/or sarcastic understatement to emphasize the successful working-out-ness.
7* The picture of the Prelude is at the beach cabin from that weekend.
8* Which feels like, yesterday.
9* Good story in itself getting to the hospital in time, etc.