Key West!

Hello for yet another three week late post. I have been so busy having fun at home with my parents that my blog has been pushed to the back burner. We arrived in San Diego a couple of days ago, so I should hopefully be a little better. Before I jump forward to the present, I wanted to share a some of the highlights from our wonderful trip to Key West. Kelson sailed there in his ship, and I met him there. I felt very brave as I flew into Ft. Lauderdale and drove down to Key West all by myself.

This was the first beach we visited in Key West. The whole thing was about 100 feet long. The beaches in Key West were all pretty tiny. This happens to be the southernmost beach in the continental U.S. In case you were wondering, moonshine is not allowed. Just read the sign.

This guy was just standing on the end of the pier playing the guitar and singing. He looked like he had a pretty good life. From this pier, we saw a stingray, a shark, parrot fish, pipefish, and all kinds of other neat wildlife.

That night, we went on a ghost tour of Key West. Spooky!

The big event was on Saturday. Spruance became the newest commissioned destroyer in the US Navy. The ceremony was amazing.

In addition to friends and family of the crew, thousands of people from Key West were there.

The ship was looking fabulous. It was an awesome sight to see all of the sailors in their whites running up to man the rails of the ship.

It was the first time I had seen Kelson in his dress whites. What a handsome boy!

That's Kelson right above the "R" of Spruance. Sorry for the blurry picture.

We spent one whole afternoon snorkeling. It was so fun!

On Sunday, we drove up the Overseas Highway while we listened to General Conference. Beaches are in short supply in the Keys because there aren't big enough waves to make sand, so we had to settle for this concrete wall to eat our picnic on.

Beautiful!

Many of the houses in Key West have the underside of their porches blue. It is a Gullah superstition. Ghosts can't cross water, so the blue tricks them into staying away from houses.

Key West is crawling with scantily clad, drunk people. I felt like this poster was a fairly good synopsis of downtown Key West.

Key Lime Pie!!

We went out early on our last morning in Key West to snag a few more minutes on the beach. This is at the country's southernmost point, just 90 miles from Cuba.

We went swimming at South Beach again. There were schools of tiny fish swimming around our legs, which attracted pelicans. It was great to watch them fly in, scoop up some water, and then do a clumsy splash landing in the water and fall over backwards. They were not very graceful, but we had fun.

We had a great time in Key West. It was a treat to be able to spend a few days together in the middle of our two month separation. After Key West, I spent three more weeks at home, and Kelson sailed south to Colombia. From there, the ship sailed through the Panama Canal and then spent a few days in Panama before sailing up to San Diego. What adventures!

Farewell Maine, Hello Oregon

I have been a little remiss in my blog updates lately, so here is an update on the last three weeks of our lives...

On September 1st, Kelson, along with the rest of the crew of the Spruance, sailed away from Bath and down the Kennebec River to start the journey down the east coast, through the Panama Canal, and up to San Diego. Two days later, I also left Maine for good and flew home to stay with my parents in Oregon while Kelson is sailing around. We are, once again, living on opposite sides of the continent, which has pretty much been the story of our lives. It is even less fun now that we are married, so we are looking forward to being together again. Luckily, we get to talk or e-mail almost every day. In the last three weeks, Kelson has spent time in Newport, Rhode Island, Yorktown, Virginia, and Mayport, Florida. He arrived this weekend in Key West, where I will be joining him on Thursday for the ship's commissioning ceremony.  We are so excited!

This is the kind of amazing beauty I came home to. One Friday, my parents and I drove for an hour up a treacherous road to spend our afternoon relaxing by this beautiful creek. Maine was gorgeous, but I have missed the mountains. This is home.

I have never seen my dad more content than he was here in his water shoes, Hawaiian swim trunks, polo shirt, and panama hat fishing in the creek. What you can't see in the picture is that Arty, our chocolate lab, was also having the time of her life in the creek, which may have something to do with the fact that Dad had no luck with the fish.

Some families play board games for FHE. We play with power tools. My parents helped me build bedside tables for our new apartment in San Diego. Most of our furniture has been salvaged from yard sales and junk shops and refurbished. Stay tuned for some seriously fabulous before and after shots.  Post coming soon.

Last weekend, I went with my parents to the annual Jensen Distributing convention in Spokane. We have taken this trip to do buying for our hardware store as a family every year since before I was born. It was always one of our favorite events of the whole year. Believe it or not, hardware conventions can be pretty fun, especially if your grandparents and all of your cousins are along for the trip. I haven't been able to go since I graduated from high school, so I made sure I was home in time this year. We had a great weekend!

We stopped at a lot of thrift shops on the Spokane trip to look for treasures. This book was one of the funniest, most ridiculous things I have ever seen. It was a book of "nonracist, nonviolent, nonsexist, positive rhymes for all kinds of kids". Apparently all of our traditional nursery rhymes are inappropriate for children, so all of the rhymes in this book were rewritten. All of the king's men and women (rather than his horses) succeeded in putting humpty dumpty back together, Jack and Jill succeeded in bringing the water home, and the old lady (and old man) who lived in the shoe needed a lesson in birth control. It was so ridiculous I couldn't help but laugh.

Since we got back from Spokane, I have been very busy working on furniture. Yesterday, I went with my family to pick peaches at an orchard in Payette, and they were amazing! Mom and I are going to be preserving fruit this week. Yum!

Soon to come: furniture transformations & adventures in Key West!

Our Brush With Irene

The big news here on the east coast lately has of course been hurricane Irene. From the beginning, our area was forecast to be directly in her path, although she would only be a tropical storm when she got here. We got ready for inches of rain and serious winds. Kelson spent all weekend on the ship instead of doing fun things with me because of problems caused by the hurricane further down the coast that were messing with some of the systems on his ship. That made our last weekend here in Maine pretty lame. Kelson's ship almost had to sail away five days early, which made me really sad. We felt very blessed when he was able stay. We were also blessed on Sunday when Irene weakened and moved to the west, missing our area for the most part. Sunday was gloomy, windy, and a little bit rainy, but it definitely wasn't the huge storm we were afraid of. The big problem around here was power outages, and when we lost our power on Sunday afternoon we were sure we would be in the dark for a long time.

Since we couldn't heat up any food, we ate watermelon. As I was cutting it up so we could eat it like civilized people, Kelson dug in to half of the watermelon with a spoon. We love watermelon! It tastes like summer.

We were surprised and happy when the power company showed up to restore our power after only about an hour.

Still, we were a little bit disappointed that we didn't get to take advantage of any of our hurricane preparations, so we ate dinner by lamplight anyway. In the photo it looks like we lit the lamp when it was broad daylight, but it was in fact dark. 

I suppose we can't exactly say that we are hurricane survivors, but living in the potential path of a hurricane is definitely something neither of us have ever experienced growing up on the west coast. Our thoughts and prayers are with all of those who had much more devastating encounters with Irene.

Culinary Adventures Part Two: Grandma Would Be Proud!

Some of my fondest memories from childhood are of homemade bread, especially in my Grandma Baxter's house. When I was really little, before she stopped making bread, she would always let me make my own little loaf and bake it in a tiny pan. Grandma was such a dedicated bread baker that she even kneaded her bread on the front lawn while her house was burning down when my mom was a teenager. I have always wanted to be a bread baker, and I have tried out a few things this summer. I have been having quite a fun time.

My first attempt was French rolls.  They were delicious!

The only problem is that they were kind of flat. I am working on that.

The next time, I made them twice as big and we made french dip sandwiches with them.  They were so good!  One of our favorite things we have eaten this summer. I saved half of the dough and used it for a pizza. That was great too.

We have developed a taste for Greek food, so I decided to try making my own pitas. It is kind of like making rolls and then flattening them out like tortillas.

Then you bake them for 3 minutes in a 550 degree oven. If it works right, they puff up like balloons.  However, cooking in a 550 degree oven makes a very hot house, so I am not sure I would recommend this as the best activity for a toasty August day.

Delicious and fun! I cut up part of them and baked them until they were crispy, making my own yummy pita chips that we ate with our homemade hummus, which was also delicious.

Kelson's Date Planning Luck

Kelson hadn't planned a date in a while, so I told him last week that it was his turn. His planning got as far as picking up a pizza after work and then driving up a street we hadn't been to the end of before to scope out a good picnic spot. We drove by some neat houses, a cemetery, and the city landfill. Just as we were about to turn around to avoid the dead-end, we realized that the street ended at a recreational area in the woods called Thorne head. That looked interesting, so we got out to explore. We walked up a trail for about ten minutes, came to the top of a ridge and saw this:

I suppose this will make an okay picnic spot. It was one of the most beautiful views we have found yet in Maine.

Kelson tried to convince me he did all of this on purpose. Yeah right. He was lucky.

We enjoyed our delicious Hawaiian pizza on this giant concrete toadstool.

Afterwards, we played with this very sociable squirrel/chipmunk (we had some disagreement as to which it was). We named him Alvin. He was funny.

We stayed until sunset. Gorgeous! I thank Heavenly Father for moments like this. Maybe I should let Kelson accidentally plan our dates every week.  This one worked out beautifully.

Maine=Lobster=Happiness

We started our Saturday with the Lobster Festival parade in Rockland, which is about an hour east of us.  All of the floats were lobster-themed.  Yay for Maine!

We decided to skip the festival and do some exploring instead.  There were some incredible houses in Rockland.

Gummi bears are Kelson's favorite, so of course we had to try the gummi lobsters.  They tasted exactly like red jello.

We stopped at a reenactment of a British encampment from the Revolutionary War. We felt like we had stepped back in time.  They were even cooking prime rib on a spit over the fire, and it smelled delicious.

The encampment was behind the Henry Knox mansion. It is a museum, and we spent part of our afternoon touring it. That was one of our favorite things we have done here in Maine. Henry Knox was a fascinating man (you know, Fort Knox, first Secretary of War, etc.)  I didn't know anything about him before Saturday, but now I would like to read his biography.  History is so much fun! It just leaves you wanting more.

It would be a crime if we left Maine without eating lobster, so we decided to splurge. We asked the owner of the candy shop where we bought our gummi lobsters where we could find the best lobster, seeing as there are lobster places every ten feet here. He sent us here because it was authentic Maine lobster (apparently it is essential that it be cooked in ocean water). 

A little bit creepy, but completely delicious!

"Should I bite the hand that feeds me?" Oh, Kelson. You make me laugh.

Finally stepping foot in the Atlantic ocean.  This was the shortest beach I have ever seen-maybe 300 feet long.

Few things are better than wiggling your toes in the sand and letting waves splash on your feet.

Someone didn't wear his sandals, so he missed out. Of course, he wasn't left with sandy feet like me.

We passed through Camden to get to the lobster restaurant. We fell in love with its beautiful downtown. I think we drove by about 100 bed & breakfasts there too.  Tourism is huge around here.

We stopped for ice cream at The Helm. Great way to end our trip!