Oh my! So we have actually been doing a few things lately, but the ironic bit is that doing stuff doesn’t leave time for blogging! So here I am with a catch-up post of sorts. This probably won’t have a strong narrative, but at least I have a ton of photos that were sitting on my phone that I forgot about. That’s got to count for something, right?
First, remember how Kari visited a month ago? Do you also remember how we visited the Columbia Tower and got some great views? Yeah, me too. Here are some more pictures from up there:
Alright, maybe that last one wasn’t from “up there”, but it still counts. Oh, one more. Panorama (click for larger, but be warned – it’s really big)!
And one more from the Ferry we were on:
That’s all I’ve got from Kari’s visit.
Not soon after Kari visited though, Fremont had its annual Solstice parade. Fremont is a hippie neighborhood, so every year they have this fair and big parade for the summer solstice. We missed it last year because that was when we were moving, but we finally got to experience it this year!
We walked around the fair a bit before the parade. We were out and about at around 10AM, so it was fairly deserted. It was nice. One of the silliest things we saw was this car covered in Billy the Bass singing fish. I’m not kidding. It also have singing lobsters. It was weeeeeiiiiiird.
And yes, they were all wired up together. The guy could sit in the back and fire off every single one of them into a cacophony of singing sea life. It was weeeeeiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrdddddd.
The other big draw of the Fremont Solstice Parade is that before the actual parade, there’s a naked bike ride. Yes, this is a thing. People will strip down, paint themselves to look like superheros, animals, or any other weird thing that they come up with. Then they ride down the parade route. It’s so strange. It’s not legal at all, but they’ve been doing it for years, so everyone just kind of goes with it.
This is what the view was from where we were sitting. (Can you tell that I’ve been messing with the panorama feature too much?) Don’t worry, this was before the naked bike ride even started. 😀
We put our chairs out early, so we had a pretty decent view. The parade itself was fun as well. It was pretty long though, like over two hours. They really commit.
And that’s that. Next item: our recent trip to MN. This was a big one. We took a red eye flight Friday night, landing at 6AM Saturday. We drove out to my parents’ place and spent the day with them. Sunday morning we drove up Alexandria for a little family thing with my Mom’s family. After that ended, we continued on up north to Duluth to see Aaron and Addy. We played a ton of board games and Minecraft. It was great.
Oh, and Aaron proposed to Addy. EEEEEEEEEEEE! Yeah. That was awesome. They were pretty pleased about it too:
There’s some extra video, but I’m still working on that.
We never get to spend as much time as we want anywhere when we get back to MN, so before long we had to leave and drive over to Lisbon, ND. Ben and Jaci were baptizing Irena (Kit) there, and as godparents we were kinda expected to show up. 😀
We got to spend a few days chatting with family and eating, but the real event was the baptism:
Yeah, she’s a pretty cute baby. We didn’t get to spend enough time with them either.
On Friday (so a week after we flew out), we headed back into MN to see Joni’s family, celebrate Kari’s birthday, and go to Halie’s graduation (niece). It was a good time. I also finally played about with the spherical panorama app I downloaded. I just did a quick shot at the park where the graduation party was held.
Sunday afternoon we hopped on a plane and flew back to Seattle. The flight was pretty standard, but the landing was interesting. We hit a little harder than normal and this happened…
Yep, the bump on landing caused one of the emergency air supply panels to pop open. We all had a pretty good time of it. Lots of people took pictures… weirdos.
The girl sitting in that seat didn’t really know what to do with it.
And that was our big trip and all the random pictures I’ve got on my phone… well, not ALL. I’ve got a few more that I’ve got to put up over here, but that will have to wait until after we go see Pacific Rim. 😀
Wait a tic! I didn’t know that the baptism was in Lisbon! If we would have had our lives a bit more together I would have tried to squeeze some time in there for a hug. It has been a long time.
Katrina flies in Thursday but won’t be here in Fargo until Sunday. Saturday I finally move into my own place.
Pacific Rim gets my stamp of approval but it did leave me wanting more for some reason. Be sure to stay after for a bonus ending in the middle of the credits.