Memories of Sunshine

Now that Summer is over in the Northwest here are some memories from our sunnytime/summertime. I realized how it's kind of lame much I talk about the weather with family and friends, but it's just so opposite from what I've experienced before that it's still interesting to me... I think it also means I'm a boring adult. Whatever.

I know we're cool because we took an archery class through Redmond Parks & Rec. Maybe this just increases our dork factor, since we did make many references to LOTR and perfecting our Legolas form (you know where he shoots an arrow and then loads another one in one gracious motion? Never quite got that down).

This is my artsy shot. Those fluffy looking arrows are called "floo floos". They are for shooting "pizza boxes". All of these terms are extremely official.

Pizza boxes. This was the part where we got to shoot up in the air at a moving target. This one always impressed the people driving by. In fact, we had multiple cars stop and watch our amazing-ness.

I didn't just pose with that bow, I also used it to massacre unassuming balloons. Don't be led astray by my demure smile.
Look at that form! Henry is one hot archer.

We also had another visit from family, this time from Henry's sister and her family. We had lots of fun visiting with these adorable girls:

And of course enjoying the beauty of Seattle. Clare's husband Dan did his residency here, so he knows the in's and out's of the city (but especially the hospital cafeterias).

Hidden underneath the cutie in pink is another baby due to come out very soon!

We also spent a weekend in Vancouver BC. It's great to be able to go to an exotic country like Canada with less than a 3-hour drive! In Canada, we had many strange new experiences including eating poutine (think french fries on steroids, if steroids were cheese curds and gravy), using coins instead of $1 bills, streets with no left-turn lanes, and... that's about it. But we did have a good time.

We went to the Richmond Night Market and enjoyed the culinary delights of Asia, as well as all of the cheap Chinese goods you can fathom. Don't mind the weird picture, something happened with the flash and Henry's hand.

Our marriage once again survived the test of riding a tandem bike. We did this once before in Provo and I almost killed us by trying to take one-armed pictures while we were riding. It wasn't pretty. This time I think we did much better. We successfully road our bike around Stanley Park without crashing or fighting for control.

At the Puyallup (pronounced Pee-oo-awl-up) Fair we found SpiderPig (think the Simpson's movie)...

...and a bunny with a good Dungeons and Dragons name (not that we do dorky things like play D&D...)

Oh yeah. And last but not least, I turned into an underwater explorer AND an octopus.

PS These photos are for my niece, Lucy who saw this photo (4th one down) and promptly began to exclaim with awe "Aunt Tori went to SPACE?!?!?!". Hopefully she'll think I am the coolest aunt now.

Parentals

Over the past few months we had visits from both of our parents! Looks like they didn't forget about us all the way up here in Washington. They did happen to remember our existence when our weather is nice and theirs is nasty... how convenient :)

My parents came over Memorial Day weekend. Their favorite part of the trip was seeing all of the beautiful scenery and seeing how ridiculously priced houses are in our area (Seattle was all like, "housing crisis? whatever!").

We went and visited Forks (the home of Twilight) and my mom was oh so excited! The city of Forks welcomed us - all of the residents were anticipating our arrival and setting up souvenir shops so we would spend our money. Luckily for them, my mom had promised a number of female co-workers some Twilight gear. I also had a very tasty philly cheese steak sandwich. Thank you City of Forks.

Henry was pretty ecstatic about this whole Forks thing, obviously.

The obligatory Twilight paraphernalia was everywhere. I don't think Forks had much going for it before Stephanie Meyer. She should have an elementary school named after her or something.

My best Bella impression. All you have to do is look disinterested and then speak in short, forced, awkward sentences.

We also went and explored some of the scenery around the Olympic peninsula. My dad got some really good action shots of Henry pushing me off of this log right after he took this one.

We were lucky enough to have some beautiful sunny days and my parents came away disappointed that they didn't get rained on (silly Arizonians).
Here I am telling my mom, "Those are buildings, that tall one is actually a space ship."

Henry's parents came in for the 4th of July weekend, and it turns out I didn't take many pictures while they were here! Their favorite part of the trip was taking a bus into Seattle (Senior disounts!) and eating fresh salmon and Dungeness crab.

We went on hikes, explored the city, and had a great time! It's nice to not have to cram everything in because we know they'll be back again.

Summertime?

Hello everyone! Here are some things we've been up to lately. We haven't done too many "summer" things yet because the weather has been too cold! But we will hopefully be doing more and not blogging about it... like usual. I mean, we will faithfully report on our lives every week and bore you to death with posts about meetings, work drama, primary children, and our latest TV show on Netflix! How exciting!

Last weekend I got it in my head that I wanted to get some worms and start a worm bin as a way to compost our organic waste. I was pretty excited (and still am) and I think of it as a kind of science project. Here is the worm bin and the worms that arrived in the mail on Thursday:

(Don't mind my awkwardly held hands... they were dirty from wetting newspaper so of course I had to hold them like that.)

They are now busy eating away at our trash (including compostable Microsoft cups!) and making us some good soil. I just hope they live.... Henry thinks we don't eat enough vegetables to keep them alive :(

We also had a Reese's taste test with some friends of ours, Elena and Aaron. They bought a bunch of different Reese's products and we rated them based on texture, chocolate quality, PB quality, chocolate/PB ratio, and then gave each an overall rating. The results: everything pretty much sucks except the original Reese's and the minis. Reese's should stop branching out and trying to make versions of everything else! Just stick to what you're good at, sillies.

Prodigious amounts of milk were also consumed.
Here is Aaron dutifully entering in our ratings (on a scale of 1 to 10) into a spreadsheet to tabulate the results. Yeah, we're cool like that.

Another fun thing we did was shoot some guns! This was my first time shooting a gun and it was kinda fun, but we won't be purchasing our own any time soon.
Here's Henry shooting some gun.

Sandra and I both thought is was very loud! Even with earplugs. This is also me rocking the double-glasses look. I like to call it "six-eyes".

Here is me shooting some gun. I hit the target and that's what matters.

Gator hunting

While in Florida we really wanted to see some gators, so we headed out to the nearby wetlands (sanitation water re-usage zone) to get up close and personal with the Florida native. We saw a total of 16 gators (tallied by a professional gator-hunter, our 10-year-old nephew) and even spooked a huge one which made a scary splash back underwater.

It was love-bug mating season... so this was the state of the minivan after our 20-min. drive. Lovely.

Just a little warning not to go traipsing around shallow waters. This is the real thing baby! No fences for us! And we did not harass the alligators, unless you count staring and yelling, "gator! gator!"

It was a beautiful, bright, sunny Florida day. Here are our 3 Tappen nephews.
And our beautiful Tappen niece. She's the princess of the family, as evidenced by her elevated position.

And last but not least, the footage! They didn't move around too much because of the heat, so this was the only one I caught on tape.

Later in the week, we had the opportunity to EAT some gator in the form of a gatorburger. And not to be trite, but it really does taste like chicken.