August Part I

I'm going to be real brief on this blog post because we have packing to do. We are heading out to Mt. Rainier again, this time for camping overnight to give Dan an idea of camping there before he and his brother Lon goes around Mt. Rainier for a week.

First off, a huge congrats to my hubby who passed the onsite interview with Microsoft on Wednesday and yesterday got an offer to work for them. We are super thrilled that his skills are good that a company like Microsoft wants him. They have another team that they want him to also interview for which will work out perfectly for him as far as timing goes as he is also interviewing with Zillow, Expedia, Tablaue, EnergySavy, and Uber. All of which are bringing him onsite to have interviews with them. Then he will take whichever one offers the most. He is so ready for something else new. 7 years at Amazon! They've been great, but it's time for a new adventure at work and hopefully a bigger raise. And it's healthy for your resume to have several good companies listed.

 

I left you off last time with camping at Engsign Ranch. On that same day we headed to Leavenworth to see if it was worth it to have Dan's family travel 2 hours from Seattle for a retreat in Leavenworth. We've always loved Leavenworth. We still have yet to tube down the Wenatchee River, but one of these days we will. We had some Bavarian food at Gustav for dinner and concluded that although nice, we ought to just stay closer to town as we might not have enough time to do everything on our list in town

 It was a very hot day.  95 degrees

 

On our way home we just had to stop and get some farm fresh peaches. $9 for a 18 lbs box. You just can't beat that, even with us and our own peach tree that did extremely well this year. We loved eating the peaches from our tree and canned/froze the peaches we bought

All sorts of peach dishes

 

Without further writing, I will let the pictures tell the stories

 I think we harvested 3 buckets full, not including all the others we just picked and ate and gave away to neighbors.  So many for such a small tree.  VERY SWEET TOO!!

 We drove all the way to Mercer Island for the blackberries.  Ok it was more for the beach but there were a tons of blackberries on the way

 Reena wanted to pick black berries so we could do blackberry peach pies.  So yum with ice cream!

We got one big cucumber, then came 4 more

 We took advantage of the dollar movie at the theaters twice. We saw Madagascar 3, which was pretty good and Dophin Tale 2 since Reena read the books.

 The girls are enjoying their violin and I had their violin teacher teach them piano as well.  I get too busy running around with Ronin and they don't take lessons quite as well from me.

We went to a Luau birthday party that our new set of friends put on for their son with yummy food, music and dancing and look who we ran into!  These guys are from Phoenix, AZ and they know Dan's parents and cousins! 

 Dan did an 8 mile hike to the top of Mt. Si as part of his training.  The kids and I just went shopping and ate, what we do best, then we helped the Stake run some games at the Stake BBQ

 

 We had a beach picnic day with a bunch of friends from the ward.  Always nice to do some beach hopping in the summer.

 Reena got excited and started writing letters to Santa

 Ro is still happily engaged in his engineering skill of train tracks building

 

Mt. Rainier was so cool.  These pictures say it all.  We did 2 hikes, one was Grove of the Patriarchs and the other one was Paradise.

 

 

 

 

 

 
Grapes starting ripening too and we harvested a lot more than last year

 We put our Captain membership to use and took a 2 hour cruise to the locks and ate at a restaurant near the Big Wheel

 Thanks for visiting our blog.  See you on the next blog entry for August!!!