Playing Catch Up

After returning from Omak, we built a snowman:



Visited the elk feeding station near White Pass:



Visited relatives in Pasco, my folks in Lacey, and my aunt and grandfather outside of Portland:



Then we went to the beach with friends. We flew kites:



and it snowed. A lot:



After the snow began to melt, we lost power and were forced to play cribbage by candle light. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of that. We returned to Lacey for several more days after the beach, then we high tailed it back to Tokyo.

As a quick preview of the next installment, our friends from WSU Meredith and Eddie recently moved to Yokosuka, a city about 45 minutes South of Tokyo by train. We have done a couple of day trips with them to Kamakura and the Ueno Zoo... but this weekend we're heading up to Nagano to do some sightseeing and visit the Snow Monkeys!

Tag of fourths

Ok, the last few weeks have been a blur. I've been busy with work, but that's not much of an excuse. The larger issue has been with my PC. I've been engaged in a long and incredibly frustrating battle with Vista, raid drivers, and a pair of 1.5TB drives that will not format. But enough about that. Instead of catching you up on all of the interesting goings-on in our life since we left Omak, I'm going to latch on to a fun idea that I got from reading Gerry Cammy Reed & Spring's blog. The idea is simple: go into your photos folder, open the 4th folder, open the 4th folder within, and keep going until you run out of folders. Locate the 4th picture in this folder, post it, and put a bit of context around it. Without further ado, I give you:



This photo came from my "ETRL" folder, a cache of pictures related to my part-time job at WSU's Engineering, Teaching & Research Laboratory. The fellow on the treadmill is Chris T., a friend & colleague of mine from school who also lived near us when we were in Kenmore. What's strange about this photo is how little I remember about this day. ETRL was basically a media lab; we produced content for online university courses, as well as online/virtual components to traditional courses. For the most part, we digitized lectures and used Flash animation to create interactive examples, tutorials and the like.

Between my first and second senior years at WSU, I spent the summer in Pullman working full time at ETRL and taking a couple of classes. The head of our lab, Jane B., the gal in the white lab coat, was working on her PhD in exercise physiology. I can only assume that we were co-opted into assisting her with an experiment. What I failed to mention earlier is that Chris, the man on the treadmill, was our systems admin and I think it's fair to say that "systems admin" and "treadmill" don't appear in the same sentance very often! If I remember correctly, he was elected to be the man on the treadmill because he ran track in high school. I'm at the right of the picture controlling the speed and incline on the machine while a couple of other members of the ETRL crew look on.

That's about it. Remember to tune in next week when I catch you up on what we've been up to since that snowy trip from Omak to Yakima. Some quick highlights: Lacey, WA, Pacific Beach Winter Wonderland, Ueno Zoo, Yokosuka Japan.