This is the 100th blog entry! It really slowed down–we were stuck at 99 for almost a month. Now there is too much to catch up on! Matt had a great trip to Norway. Carrie was artist of the month at the gallery and is trying to keep up with the tiles, while getting into her new job at NOAA (and enjoying helping host lots of kids out there during Seaweek(s)), Torsten is having fun, learning, and continuing to keep us on our toes! Juneau is facing a power “crisis” with an avalanche taking down our main transmission line between the hydro-generation at Snettisham and town–so we’ve gone to 98+% clean, carbon-free hydro power at ~11 centers/kWHr to almost solely diesel–more carbon and a new price tag of ~50 cents/kWHr. We had started hanging clothes up inside about three weeks before hand, so were ahead of the gun on that one, but we joined the “unplug the hot tub, do lots more grilling, swap out all the lightbulbs we hadn’t yet, enjoy the dark, anything else we can think of…” Juneau-power-saving-game. We have gone from approximately 40 kWHr/day on average to about 8 kWHr/day (and started reading our meter daily!). Carrie is pondering adding an “energy sur-charge” onto her tiles as she did her first firing of the kiln today–about 30 kWHr for a firing, and each tile gets fired twice. Other “stuff”: the semester finished up (it was a good one, and a good one to be done with!), Torsten has two more weeks of preschool, but we had a great BBQ/potluck/picnic at Auke Rec Friday afternoon–the streams and waterfalls were great playgrounds, as we set a new record with ~1.25 inches of rain that day (at the airport–1.5″ at the forecast office).
Juneautopia
This is what it’s about (living through other’s awesome adventures in your neighborhood–but the snow does ROCK!)
Go read Jill’s blog–I only managed the bike ride component today….
Torsten’s 4th Birthday!
What an amazing celebration Carrie put together! Torsten’s friends got together at Our Backyard for a Volcano party. The volcano cake was amazing and great hit–fantastic!
Carrie built a volcano and Matt got to make it erupt.
And of course, the whole gallery is available.
Hangin’ with Dad
Matt is in the midst of a semester of too much teaching and mixed in with a chunk of too much travel, so especially treasures family time. As usual, we don’t get pictures of all three of us very often, so here are some Dad and Torsten photos from the last month or so:
Out for a bike ride around the neighborhood, helping dad brew, taking a nap….
Busy times, but we do squeeze in a good amount of family time!
Recent Dance Class
Torsten has been having a great fall and winter of tap and jazz dance class with Ms. Mika. At the recent class, Torsten, Ava, Eva, McKenzie, and Annika were all part of the lesson:
They start with stretching, then get into some good dancing:
Of course, the whole gallery is available.
Easter Egg Hunt
Carrie and Torsten joined a big group of friends for “the best Easter Egg Hunt in town”* at Jessica and Mike’s. Kita and Suka got to go and be free amongst lots of kid and millions of eggs. Torsten enjoyed the hunt, the eggs, and the marshmallow roasting. I didn’t hear if anyone tried roasting peeps…
It was one of the earliest Easters possible and this is one of the latest “here’s our Easter pictures” blogs out there on the internet…. –Matt
“Camping” Adventure
Matt wasn’t around for this adventure, but based on reading the police reports and interviews with the unindicted minors present at the scene, this is his understanding of what took place on that fateful night of March 28. A camping trip was in the air, so Carrie, Kristen, Chip and Misty took the unindicted minors (Ava, Willa, Adellie, and Torsten) to the *closed* camping grounds at Mendenhall Lake. After battling with the tent setup, getting a fire started, and the all important marshmellow roasting underway, the forest service/homeland security strike force showed up to enforce the closed nature of the campground. These “innocent” parents were obviously a threat to the homeland and abusing federal services so must be promptly (and rudely) escorted off of the federal resource. It was apparent that the “unindicted minors” were acting out natural hazards (pretending to be “Krakatoa” for example) and so were part of the threat, due to their young age it was most likely that they were strongly influenced by the “responsible” adults. At one point, one of the adults approached the enforcing officer with hands raised (luckily–otherwise force may have been necessary).
OK, I can’t keep it up… But apparently after the kids roasted marshmellow, the “man” showed up and kicked everyone out. The retreat back to the “compound” for ice cream was accomplished with no injuries.
One important part of the evening for Torsten was that he got a spark on his fleece which burned a hole. I (Matt) have a fleece with a hole burned in it from a campfire, so Torsten was extremely excited to have a fleece like Dad’s (and was in fact, for Torsten, the saving grace of the evening). What an adventure…
All the pictures are in the gallery, of course.
Reading lots of books
Torsten’s preschool made the Juneau paper because they won the “read lots of books” contest (we don’t know if this was local, state, or national, or what..). We’re guessing they recorded reading the most books out of some group of preschools, so Scholastic gave them 1000 books to donate to someone else.
Adelie and Torsten climb
Another Thursday, and Matt is teaching, Carrie is at yoga, and Grams is watching Torsten at the gym. In addition to climbing with Adelie (and Chip), shown below (as usual, with blurry photos of Torsten in action!), the Biology club was showing an IMAX movie about deep sea submarines and black smokers–Torsten enjoyed the pizza and movie! (Adelie is a great safe climber, checking Torsten’s figure 8.)
Grams and Gramps visit
In mid-March (yep, catching up on blogging!), Grams and Gramps came for a visit–they got some great sunny weather on Saturday and we all went out to Eagle Beach. Here’s a great photo of them out on Eagle Beach:
Dad helped out with a few house projects (great in-cabinet trash can in the kitchen and help with the bedroom carpet tear-out and laminate floor installation and wall painting–thanks!)
Matt and Carrie got to go out on a date–woohoo! (movie: Vantage Point–pretty much non-stop action with an interesting take on the narrative)
Grams and Gramps both got some good play in with Torsten–if the blurry pictures don’t show the action well enough, we’ve got a movie as well:
And of course, you can check out the whole gallery of photos.
Did the grandparents do a good job of spoiling Torsten?
