Then we went to Costco. McKay LOVES Costco. We didn't even have to feed him lunch when we got back to the house. Here he has a sample in one hand while he's asking for another.
Mostly thanks to the example of fellow bloggers Brandon (an old missionary companion) and his wife Marci who participated in the Newport Marathon, Suzanne's friend Megan who ran the L.A. marathon, and my sister Angie who has raced for a while, I have been running for about a month following the Couch to 5k program on coolrunning.com. I'm signed up for a 5k in Lincoln City in October, but in the meantime I'm still kind of restless. Bored in the early morning on the day after arriving, I was web surfing and found a run in Redding that very night: the Moonlight Madness 2 mile race across Shasta Dam and back.
The race started at 8 pm, so here I am, decked out and warmed up at 7:30.
It turns out that 30 minutes is a long time to wait when you are nervous about running your first race since junior high, so my dad and I walked to where we saw a deer earlier. The deer tried to hypnotize us with his eye beams, but I was focused for the race and could not be hypnotized.
There was a guy with a bag of baby carrots who threw them out to the deer to coax him closer. At the same time, Dad figured out he could cover the flash with his finger and avoid the robo-deer look. This was probably the closest I've ever been to a deer without a pane of glass between us - about 12 feet!
I finished in 17:15, which would have made me ashamed in high school, but was 12 minutes, 45 seconds faster than what I told Suzanne my time would be. It was a good experience. If I didn't have to pay an entry fee, I'd run in a lot more of these.
It turns out that 30 minutes is a long time to wait when you are nervous about running your first race since junior high, so my dad and I walked to where we saw a deer earlier. The deer tried to hypnotize us with his eye beams, but I was focused for the race and could not be hypnotized.There was a guy with a bag of baby carrots who threw them out to the deer to coax him closer. At the same time, Dad figured out he could cover the flash with his finger and avoid the robo-deer look. This was probably the closest I've ever been to a deer without a pane of glass between us - about 12 feet!
Finally it was time to start, so I ran the race.
It was harder than I expected - I haven't done more than 5 minutes non-stop running since before my mission (about 11 years) but I've been jogging for a month and I knew I could just slow down and keep going. At first my goal was to see how fast I could go. But soon my goal was to run the whole thing, not walking at all, even though it was really tempting after the first 10 minutes. This picture was taken at the end of the dam, about 1.8 miles into the 2 mile run. I was tired and sore, but I didn't walk a single step of it.
I finished in 17:15, which would have made me ashamed in high school, but was 12 minutes, 45 seconds faster than what I told Suzanne my time would be. It was a good experience. If I didn't have to pay an entry fee, I'd run in a lot more of these.
Sherene (Suzanne's sister) came for a visit and introduced us to a new addiction: Catan! We can't stop playing and we've bought almost all the expansion packs for it - basic game of Settlers of Catan + Seafarers of Catan pictured here after an AWESOME game... which I won.
Our good friend Rachel took us to her favorite blackberry/blueberry picking spot one day. We left the boys with her husband Russ and brought all the buckets we could find, thus the Trick-or-Treat pumpkin. We brought home enough berries to make us sick of berries for a couple of months. We made enough jam to fill the rest of the freezer but still had berries on cereal, ice cream and by the handful for snacks for a week and a half. Just one more benefit of living on the Oregon Coast - Berry Country, Yum!
To appease the Spirits of the Berry Bushes, Suzanne gave them a blood sacrifice - MY blood, to be specific. I got her the biggest berries though, usually with a smarmy comment like, "For you, my love - the biggest, juiciest berry on the bush!" 
For "Before & After" effect: The old, condemned, rotten deck....
The old, chipping paint job...
...our new, sleek, modern look! Tah-dah!
The inside of said yurt. Like I said, this is not camping.
The next several pictures are of the boys on the playground in the campsite. When I think of camping as a boy, we played with sticks and rocks and leaves, and we liked it!
Carter pretended not to notice me there with the camera, then... "Roar!"
Can you believe this is in a campground?
Sitting around the campfire after a dinner of hot dogs, chips, and grapes and still happy we're camping (except there was no barrier between our camp and the next. See the lady at her campfire behind Suzanne? There ought to be some bushes or something.)
The next morning and no longer happy campers. We didn't sleep very well. The boys woke up several times, the baby next door woke up several times, the bathrooms were 30 yards away and had to be visited at midnight, the sun shone through the yurt's skylight earlier than Suzanne would have liked, and I accidentally set off the car alarm at 6:30.
The boys went back inside the yurt after breakfast because they were cold, and there's a heater inside the yurt. A heater.
Since we were "camping" at Beverly Beach State Park (less than 5 miles from home) we had to go to the beach. But it was cold and foggy and the boys just wanted to hide inside my jacket. Since I was the only one who appeared to want to stay out, I gave in and we all went home for baths and naps.
The boys swinging on the swingset that I couldn't have put together without help from Russ. And in answer to your question, it IS level. It's the yard that's not.
