August and September
I've been extremely lax in updating this blog! My only excuse is that I've become involved in doing genealogy and it's been taking up most of my computer time each day! I'm really enjoying delving into the past...it's amazing what you can find on the Internet these days, which is fortunate since I probably wouldn't get into genealogy so much if I had to travel all across the country to dig into old musty files.
Blaze has continued to go to doggy day care three times a week for half days. It's really made a huge improvement in him, both with meeting new dogs and new people. He's also much calmer around the house since he gets a chance to drain all that puppy energy! The picture below is kind of grainy because it's been encased in plastic:
The bank where we had our safety deposit box and savings account closed. Fortunately, it happened while we were still in Spokane and could retrieve the items from the safety deposit box...I don't know what would have happened had the bank's closure happened when we were in Arizona for the winter! The money, of course, is insured by FDIC, so I wasn't worried about it.
At the end of August, we loaded up the camper and headed west to visit with son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, Russ, Dani and Cameron in Tacoma. We were going to travel US-12, but we found out that there was road construction past the junction with WA-410 with up to 2-hour delays, so when we got to WA-410, we took that road instead, spending the night at one of the Forest Service campgrounds along the road. The next day, we followed 410 into Puyallup where we stayed at the Elks Lodge. We found out that this Elks Lodge is closing (in fact, the property had already been sold), and a new, smaller, lodge is going to be built a few miles away. The pictures below were taken from the rest area at Chinook Pass (except for the last one, which was taken along the road after we'd left the rest area):
We had a great time visiting with the kids. Dani fixed delicious meals and even gave me her recipe for crock pot meat loaf, which I made once we got back. We'll have to buy a different crock pot, though, because the small one we bought has a hot spot and one side of the bottom of the meat loaf got burned...that's what we get for spending only $9 for a crock pot!
Our good friends, Mike and Mary Michaels, invited us to their 50th wedding anniversary party...they'd rented the VFW lodge and had a grand party. They, in turn, joined us for our 36th wedding anniversary on the 20th of this month...ours was a much quieter get together at the Old Spaghetti Factory.
As part of doing genealogy, we've started making trips to cemeteries where relatives are buried. On Monday, we went to Pines Cemetery out in the Spokane Valley and were able to located my great grandmother, plus an uncle and aunt (my grandfather's brother and sister) and their spouses.
Today, we're going to make a trip out to Mica Cemetery to see if we can find the grave stones of two more uncles (brothers of my grandfather). This might be a harder task, even though the Mica Cemetery is much smaller. At Pines Cemetery, we were able to go into the office and ask where the graves were located...they gave us a map with each grave marked. There will be no such help at the Mica Cemetery...it is, evidently, in a state of disrepair and overgrown. There is no office to go to, nor, apparently, anyone to ask about locations of various headstones. So we'll just have to walk the cemetery and hope that the headstones are still there or that they're not hidden beneath a jungle of shrubbery.
I'm using Ancestry.com for my Family Tree and it's where I've been getting most of my information. I've also used FindAGrave.com, FamilySearch.com, and Interment.net to find information.
We're getting the house and the camper ready for our journey south, which will begin next week. We'll take our time heading to Arizona...we plan on being there by the end of October/first of November. We'll stop and visit my mother near Boise (where we'll take some trips to nearby cemeteries to look for relatives' graves) and then are planning on stopping by the HappiJac factory near Salt Lake to have them fix one of the camper jacks. We haven't called them yet, so don't know if this will happen.
Blaze has continued to go to doggy day care three times a week for half days. It's really made a huge improvement in him, both with meeting new dogs and new people. He's also much calmer around the house since he gets a chance to drain all that puppy energy! The picture below is kind of grainy because it's been encased in plastic:
 |
| I love this picture of Blaze at doggy day care and the expression on his face! That's one of his girlfriends, CiCi, "attacking" him. |
At the end of August, we loaded up the camper and headed west to visit with son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, Russ, Dani and Cameron in Tacoma. We were going to travel US-12, but we found out that there was road construction past the junction with WA-410 with up to 2-hour delays, so when we got to WA-410, we took that road instead, spending the night at one of the Forest Service campgrounds along the road. The next day, we followed 410 into Puyallup where we stayed at the Elks Lodge. We found out that this Elks Lodge is closing (in fact, the property had already been sold), and a new, smaller, lodge is going to be built a few miles away. The pictures below were taken from the rest area at Chinook Pass (except for the last one, which was taken along the road after we'd left the rest area):
We had a great time visiting with the kids. Dani fixed delicious meals and even gave me her recipe for crock pot meat loaf, which I made once we got back. We'll have to buy a different crock pot, though, because the small one we bought has a hot spot and one side of the bottom of the meat loaf got burned...that's what we get for spending only $9 for a crock pot!
Our good friends, Mike and Mary Michaels, invited us to their 50th wedding anniversary party...they'd rented the VFW lodge and had a grand party. They, in turn, joined us for our 36th wedding anniversary on the 20th of this month...ours was a much quieter get together at the Old Spaghetti Factory.
As part of doing genealogy, we've started making trips to cemeteries where relatives are buried. On Monday, we went to Pines Cemetery out in the Spokane Valley and were able to located my great grandmother, plus an uncle and aunt (my grandfather's brother and sister) and their spouses.
Today, we're going to make a trip out to Mica Cemetery to see if we can find the grave stones of two more uncles (brothers of my grandfather). This might be a harder task, even though the Mica Cemetery is much smaller. At Pines Cemetery, we were able to go into the office and ask where the graves were located...they gave us a map with each grave marked. There will be no such help at the Mica Cemetery...it is, evidently, in a state of disrepair and overgrown. There is no office to go to, nor, apparently, anyone to ask about locations of various headstones. So we'll just have to walk the cemetery and hope that the headstones are still there or that they're not hidden beneath a jungle of shrubbery.
I'm using Ancestry.com for my Family Tree and it's where I've been getting most of my information. I've also used FindAGrave.com, FamilySearch.com, and Interment.net to find information.
We're getting the house and the camper ready for our journey south, which will begin next week. We'll take our time heading to Arizona...we plan on being there by the end of October/first of November. We'll stop and visit my mother near Boise (where we'll take some trips to nearby cemeteries to look for relatives' graves) and then are planning on stopping by the HappiJac factory near Salt Lake to have them fix one of the camper jacks. We haven't called them yet, so don't know if this will happen.
posted by Earl and Linda at
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
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