Last I blogged was quite some time ago, so I’ll try to cover a couple highlights...


Christmas: Excellent. Came and went before I had time to blink. I vaguely remember enjoying it. Naturally, the thing that comes after Christmas is my birthday. Sorta.
That was a highlight. Even though I didn’t end up making a cake. I had drawn up a design, figured out a plan and color scheme, and then I thought “I don’t have the energy to first make a giant mess, then clean up a giant mess.” So, I put away anything I had out, and enjoyed not making a cake. Unfortunately, that means I had to also enjoy not getting to eat a cake.
Camera Highlights: Speedlight. SB-700 (Sorry, I won’t spend hundreds more on the SB-900!) So amazing for inside my house. Also... Nikon 50mm f/1.4g AF-SW fixed portrait lens. Absolutely incredible. Worth it. Gathers so much light in miserable lighting conditions as to make you astonished at the results. It also has forced me to learn a lot more in order to utilize it to it’s maximum potential, and that has been a definite benefit.

Seabrook. Or rather, SEABROOK!!! I had someone tell me that I automatically started smiling when I said that word. It was weird to find that it was true. And I couldn’t stop... because it was amazing! Pictures from this grand adventure may be seen here:
http://emilierae.smugmug.com/Other/January-2013/28195861_gRsgRT#!i=2384481084&k=WTWHdTD

I had never stayed there before, but a few other members of my family had, with various groups of people. Never our family though. Honestly, I had (before now) been one of the biggest objectors to staying at Seabrook, afraid it would replace the all-important, traditional Sandpiper. Our family has gone there for nigh on forty years, and I am too much anti-change to vote to go there. Now, however, I am considering hoping that seabrook will replace it. I got highly sentimental when we walked down to the Sandpiper one day, because I have thousands of memories there. Huge moments, and minute things have all happened there, and when I see a picture (or stand in front) of that building, memories flash through my mind like I am looking through a photo album. It has been the constant family vacation. Going to california or oregon is fun, but our whole family doesn’t do that anymore. But we do all go to the sandpiper. It’s a pretty big thing, and I’ve loved it. They have no tv, no internet, no phones. The place is literally ON the beach. You go out your room and down the stairs, and you are just about on the sand. You can hear the ocean, and see for miles, and smell the salt air. (or the occasional beached whale. Yes, that happened once. I seem to remember that someone in our family had a jacket that stunk for weeks after that encounter...)
We’ve played countless hands of rummy there, hundreds of rounds of boggle, and who knows how many other games. Endless walks on the beach, and quite a few sandcastles. We have thousands of pictures taken there, and it’s fun to look through the years and see what we did there. Fun to see a picture of a grown up Clark standing in the same place we have a picture of my Grandpa in-- and wearing the same jacket. Have a picture of my parents standing in front of one of the doors the very first year they were dating... Caught my first (and last) clam there... dug by hand by clark and I! I could go on for literally a dozen pages, so I’ll cut line now... and skip back to Seabrook.
We stayed in a beautiful house, with an ocean view, close to the beach access. It was stormy the night we got there, but it was an excellent excuse to be inside and play endless games of Dominion and Settlers of Catan with a new expansion pack... Both those games are intensely addicting, and only a few games of cards were played as a result. The house was lovely, and... (drumroll) I got to have my own room! That was truly a novel experience. Typically, when on Pacific Beach, we are staying at the Sandpiper. I happen to be lowest on the totem pole, and the limited number of rooms means that I have slept on the couch/twin bed thingamajig in the front room. The very front room. Which means that I am awake latest and earliest. It also means that if anyone comes out at all, I hear it. The plus side of that? I wake up, sit up, and am immediately looking at (and hearing the roar of) the ocean. Fabulous, that. However, I’m not sure that single benefit outweighs everything else. Such as lack of sleep! My room at Seabrook was beautiful... and I ended up only spending one night in it. Ironically enough, I ended up staying two of the nights up in the carriage house with rachel and the kiddos. Abigail, as it turns out, can have some pretty severe dreams. Woke up one night and she was traumatized, weeping, and still very much asleep. Tried to wake her up and comfort her, and could barely hold her with how much she was kicking around. Very sad. Thankfully, she didn’t remember a thing the next morning! “Me no has dreams!”
The weather was slightly inclement, but we still took walks on the beach. Clark, Jacob, and I redirected the course of a river! The river was in the way of our walk... So we attempted to build a dam. By the time that afternoon was over, I couldn’t feel too much from my knees down, as the result of slogging about in ice cold january pacific ocean water. Ouch. And yet so much fun... It was a good excuse to come in and change, then go up to the pool. Oops, did I not mention that we had access to a pool? So amazing! There was no one there. I think Clark spent a total of ten hours in the pool over three days. I swam a lap or two. This was the first time I’d been to the ocean in a number of years and not done any swimming or wave diving or at least knee-wading in it!
Seabrook was the most relaxing time I’ve had in quite a while.
We celebrated my birthday there, as well as Hannah’s, who is almost exactly twenty years younger than me, and I guess you could say it was the best birthday ever. Three days with the family make for some good memories. There is something beautiful too, about getting up and being able to relax with your bible and a cup of tea with an ocean and a forest both in view.
Food was fun! Taco salad one night, spaghetti another. Lobster bisque the night we celebrated my birthday... Clark did bacon, eggs, and other stuff for breakfast one morning, while mom and I did crepes suzette for another. Rachel made french toast the last morning. Have I mentioned that food is something I get excited about when we all go somewhere overnight?? :-)
The pictures can give you a more full and accurate description, and may succeed where my thousand words have failed.

www.emilierae.smugmug.com
They will be in the January 2013 gallery previously linked.

Meghann’s baby is due in about two weeks! Extremely exciting. Therefore, you will also see pictures from two different baby showers. One, hosted by a friend of Meghann’s family, had lovely pink cupcakes and a view of the Narrows Bridge. The other was hosted by us and had lovely pink party favors and a view of.... well, just a neighborhood, actually. But it was lovely. :-) They will be in the February 2013 gallery, which has yet to be put up.

The REAL update. (The photo one, that is.)

Alrighty...

Pictures are now posted at  "  emilierae.smugmug.com "

The link to the most recent gallery is: December 2012


And that, ladies and gentleman, is the update.
:-)

By the way, you can comment on the photos. And I am bound to be highly disappointed if they are never commented on.


Have a lovely evening.

The Update.

Here's the deal.
I have pictures ready to go up. They have nowhere to go. Tonight, when I have a few free hours, I will start a new blog or figure something else out.
This is just to promise that I haven't forgotten my blog. I will make something work tonight...
In the meantime, I am going to take my tea, my toast, and a good book to watch the snow fall before I have to face the cold breeze and go places the rest of the day.

Enjoy the wintry day.

Blogger is ridiculous. And it won't let me publish any pictures... says I've used up my limit.
So.... We'll see what happens. I'm trying to figure out a better plan, one that does NOT include getting back on facebook.

Misadventures and Exploits: Or, the King Tut Mummy who wasn’t.

“Wanna go with a homeschool group to see the King Tut exhibit?”

“Yes! it’s the last time he’ll be on display in North America!” (Which I think is weird, by the way. If you’re going to go to the trouble to preserve someone, shouldn’t they be displayed all over the place for longer? All this “last time” stuff seems to hint at shoddy mummification, if you ask me)

That’s how it started. A discounted ticket rate and a couple weeks later, I found myself speeding toward Seattle on a Friday morning after work. Speeding in the best sense, of course. Entirely within the legal parameters…. Since the exhibit would include free entry to the rest of the science center, and more especially the butterfly house, I jumped (inwardly. I refrain at all times from outward displays of untoward emotion. Mostly. On occasion) at the opportunity to see it with the nieces and nephew, hoping to see joy in their childish eyes as they beheld butterflies and cool displays of water power. I think, though, that they were more interested in the sandwiches that got brought with. Every few minutes inside the exhibit, one or the other would pipe up with “We go now?” “Mo more!” or something along those lines.

Getting there was rather an adventure. I’d never “done” seattle driving by myself. So, I googled some directions, and tossed aside my mother’s warning about “Mercer madness!” Turns out there was construction on Mercer, confusing me to the point of downing three shots of espresso posthaste and wailing into my steering wheel about being lost in the great metropolis. By some miracle (And not by any help from the angry people who yelled and gestured at me for merely turning my blinker on), I found the same parking garage that my sister had installed her car in, and gamely turned in, not caring what it cost me to get off these one way streets. And here I find another problem with Seattle. The arrows in their parking garages are faint. Barely there, in fact. It seems to me that if they are going to make a road or path ONE WAY, they should go to extra trouble to plaster signs about it all over the place. But nope, no such luck. I realized I was going the wrong way in this dratted parking garage at the same time the valet did. He started waving at me and saying (in a rather thick accent), “Mem, you’re going de wrrrong vay!” I knew that. I did. I just hadn’t had a chance to fix it yet! So I roll down my window and half-weep out that “I KNOW! Can I turn around here?” “No, no, too hard.” Clearly the man read the despair in my face and had pity, because he moved the car directly in front of me out of the way so I could park there. Bless. His. Heart. People with keys to all the vehicles really come in handy sometimes. So, I pull in, and realize he’s disappeared. I wait. And wait. Call my sister to assure her I’ve made it into the big scary city, and wait some more. Aha! He reappears. I get out to ask him what to do next and he sighs and says, “Just pay me.” Umm…. That’s not something I’m likely to do. But he produced a magical little valet parking ticket and handed it to me, and I promptly turned over the first bill I found in my purse. I find my sister, only because she’s on the phone saying things like, “Are you on 2nd ave? Going uphill? Do you see that Bus? Follow it.” We make it inside, and prepare to enter the Egyptian lair.

But before I go on… Here’s the thing about museums. Or at least museums in America. You just never know if it’s real. I have this vague paranoia that what I’m seeing in American museums is not legitimate. They probably slip a million replicas in there without stating it. Then, they put up a glass case with, say, the little golden pharaoh-shaped sarcophagus that at one point held the Boy King’s theoretical mummified extracted stomach in it, and I believe that it really did come out of a tomb somewhere in Egypt. But the unlabeled statue of a standing King nepher-shepsut-hammeha-kemud-something or other just doesn’t convince me. Replica? Probably. But they don’t TELL you that! Then you go through the rest of the hushed, dimly lit rooms wondering if you are being duped into believing that you’ve seen the secrets of the Nile… or a plaster sphinx suit that some teenage intern carved. And even now, he’s watching, giggling behind his work worn hand, while you “ooh” and “aah” over a plaster coated styrofoam pharaoh face that’s barely a year old. When I was tramping across Trafalgar Square, about to enter the National Gallery, I had very little doubt that the Picasso painting I would see was really and truly painted by Pablo. Oh my, clearly that “Fruit Dish, Bottle, and Violin” came from the hand of that man himself. And oddly enough, it is a neat experience. When I was in the British Museum agog at the Rosetta Stone, thinking about all the incredible linguistic ramifications of its discovery, I never once thought it was a replica. Could it have been? Yes. The English could have just been pulling a fast one with a more genteel accent. (Speaking of which, have you ever noticed that when cultured British accents state facts, it’s much more believable? Why is that?) So maybe I believed that what I saw in the British Museum was real merely because I read the labels in a refined accent in my head.

However, the jewelry room of the King Tut exhibit seemed rather legit to me. Obviously jewelry is a partiality of mine, and after seeing what the Egyptian wanna-be-deities were wearing back in the day, I am dying to hit up Fuego and Forever 21 to see what I can pull off in this century that looks like it came from that century.

But here is my main problem with that day. The exhibit is called “King Tut.” The stuff that you see came (possibly) from the tomb of “King Tut.” So clearly you believe that you will at some point see “King Tut.” (Or at least the mummified remains, which have now been tested and x-rayed enough to render them practically radioactive) But here’s the thing. He is not there. He. Is. Not. There. I kept going around corners, wondering if “this will be the one.” And it never was. I wasn’t really convinced until I got to the end of the exhibit, past the “no re-entry” sign, and saw a (you guessed it) replica of the remains. And there you have it. My advice to you? Go online, google image search for Egyptian Pharaoh jewelry, and look at pictures to your heart’s content. You’ll save yourself some traumatic driving, a parking cost, and the pressure of wondering if everything you’re seeing is fake or not. I felt rather hoodwinked, and next time I go to a museum, it won’t be in America.

Lately. (The photo-catch-up)

Though my camera goes with me everywhere, I often forget to take the pictures off the camera, and do that camera-computer-blog transfer that is SO important. The last several months have been busy and sometimes fun, so it turns out that I have lots of pictures that have never seen the light of day, as it were. Not from any particular event, just the ones that are jumping out of my computer.
The next post will be Whitney's wedding, then after that... the last two weeks that I haven't even looked at yet!