Day 206: Conversations With Cam

 It's been, believe it or not, sunny the last couple of days, and my favorite morning tradition is to take my morning coffee outside on the back porch (where we get fabulous morning sun) and read or peruse facebook or whatever for the first hour or two a day. 

Camden has taken a liking to join me in the mornings, since he takes 1273 years to eat meals, he take his breakfast outside and sits on the patio with me. 

This is probably the only other time in the day he has an opportunity to get a word in with me, since Calen is already occupied and his word quota of the morning has already been filled. 

Today, Cam had a burning desire to discuss just what a crime to humanity it is to have those dreams where your legs or actions are in slow motion. 

I mean, the audacity of it all. 

Day 205: Family Flamecraft Night

 It's Sunday and that means family snack board and game night!

Last week Camden and I had perused our local game shop (Grand Slam) to pick up a new game or two for family game nights, as our current selection, while, good, was running a bit redundant. 

We picked out a totally different kind of game, a 4 player city building artisan game called Flamecraft. So, I made some cheeseburger macaroni bites and french fries for our snack board dinner, and we busted out this new game. 

Basically, it's a non-combat game where you are building an artisan city with dragons running the shops, and the more you gather resources and "enchant" the stores the more "reputation" points you get. 

So it's not really a destroy the other players type of game, it's more a have a good time and maybe you'll win and maybe you won't game. 

And asthetically, from the cloth game board to the adorable art of the dragons on each card, was beautiful. 

Cinnabun! Pocus! I can't even

I mean, there are baker dragons named Pan, Hot dog, and Loaf. Loaf!!

5 out of 5 stars. Highly recommend. 

Day 204: Lego Explosion

 I don't know what's going on here, but at least it's kept them busy all day.

Something about a dragon village with a bakery and a blacksmith and who else knows what. 

They'll have fun cleaning that up tomorrow. 

Day 203: Dueling Drawers

 Back in March, Calen receieved a digital drawing pad for his birthday. He's been using it here and there, but for some reason this week Calen really got into it, especially since Brad has one too. 

Please appreciate Calen's pizza socks

And thus these two spent the entire day on the dining room table drawing all sorts of things. 

And it was perfect. 

Day 202: That's No Moon Pie - It's a Death Star

 Since we got all our exercise done yesterday climbing mountains and all that nonsense, today is a baking day!

Cam really wanted to make these chocolate moon pies out of his Star Wars baking book, and I finally got around to getting the ingredients for them so that he could make them today. 

Devil's food cake is great and all, but it definitely tastes better if it takes the shape of a Death Star. I mean obviously. 

I mean isn't that just perfect there

Fittingly, we finished off the Star Wars: Andor series tonight to end a nice low key day. 

Day 201: The Big B (Barometer)

 Phew, this is a big one guys!

Barometer is the jerk mountain that taunts me out the kitchen window and the front porch every (clear) day. It builds it's own weather (or so we say, because clouds will literally form at the top of the peak and just sit there for hours), and then it disappears for weeks at a time when the cloud ceiling is super low, only to reappear on a sunny day like someone had magicked there or something. 

The problem with climbing Barometer is that the trail is straight. Up. There are no switchbacks or gradual slopes, that trail is the actual, literal ridgeline straight up the mountain. 

No mercy from this mountain. 

Barometer yesterday from my dining room window. You can see the trail going straight up the middle on the ridgeline

A friend of mine had texted me the other day and asked if I wanted to climb Barometer today, and of course I said yes, because it's still on my 7 summit challenge for the summer. This year Cam is doing the challenge with me, so we got up this morning ready to go. 

And of course, instead of it being a clear and glorious sunny morning like it was yesterday, it looked like this.

Where's the mountain?!

Well, normally I'd scrub the mission, but we had friends that were going, so Cam and I (Calen and Brad resolutely refused to climb Barometer this year) packed up and headed to the trailhead, not 90 seconds away by car. 

The good news about it being stupidly cloudy was that it was delightfully cool. Normally on sunny days, Barometer's trail has direct sunlight ALL day, and very little tree cover, so that mountain is stupidly hot. But today it was very cool and made the uphill climb very tolerable. 

Into the fog!

As usual, Cam is so fast going up that I felt like I needed a retractable leash to keep him from running full sprint up to the summit, leaving us heaving out of shape adults struggling to breathe down below. 

Waiting for us at the summit!

Maybe I'm in better shape than I used to be, or maybe it really was the cloudy skies, but I remember Barometer being a LOT harder the last two times I went up it. This was a breeze (I mean, in a straight up the mountain sort of breeze). 

This is also the first time either of the kids have summited Barometer, which is kind of a household rite of passage. 

Just as we headed down the summit, a few patches of fog cleared and Cam and I got a little bit of a view, which is the only good reason to climb a mountain, after all. 

Kodiak airport directly below us, and our neighborhood in the circle of houses to the right 

That's the fifth summit of the summer! We are almost done!

Day 200: Everything is Just Beachy

I'm here to report to you that it's been sunny for like, five entire days in a row!!

What is this, Texas?

We've done a lot of hikes lately, and Brad wasn't going to get off work early enough to do a kayaking trip, so the boys and I did the next best thing (which might actually be the first best thing): spending the afternoon at the beach!

The tide was out, the water was shockingly warm (for Alaska, anyways. I'm sure extended exposure will still give you frost bite and/or hypothermia), and the kids, for once, didn't want to go home. 

Cam and I did a little tidepooling and found tons of starfish, bottom feeder fish and hermit crabs. 

Calen did his favorite thing: building large fortresses near where the tide will come in and try to "defend" it from the tide with trenches and blockades. 

 
Cam did his favorite thing and played with boats in the waves. 

Then the boys (and their friends that they bumped into) found a tidepool that was so warm from sitting in the sun all day it felt like bath water, so they spent an hour playing in it. 

It was a perfect beach day. 

Day 199: Shite Pancakes

 It was a well-earned rest day today, and I didn't even want to do anything that labor intensive for dinner. 

I had this random box of protein pancake mix that I got on clearance a month ago hanging out in the pantry waiting for an opportune moment. 

Protein pancakes are a lot denser and weirder tasting than normal pancakes, so I dug onto Pinterest for a clever new way to make these.

Pinterest always delivers. 

And here I present to you: sheet pancakes! Which someday when the boys are allowed to swear in front of me, we'll call them SHITE pancakes because it sounds too close to not take the opportunity to call them something inappropriate. 

This is a hail mary right here

I cranked the oven to 425, threw in some frozen berries for good measure, said a prayer and put it in for half an hour. This was the result:

They were actually a smash hit. They were like eating a pancake brownie, crispy on the outside and fluffy in the middle. The berries prevented it from being too dense, and the kids devoured them. 

A Pinterest fail, this was not!

Day 198: North Sister

 Well it's been 48 hours since the last mountain, so it's time for another one!

Now since it's a weekend and Brad owes me a "birthday summit" this summer, I convinced Bradley Mack to come along with us!

North Sister is all of our favorites because it's short (well, all mountains are short compared to Heitman) and has arguably the best views of any summit. The cut out of an old glacier in the back mountains, downtown Kodiak and the ocean, White Sands beach and the bay. It's a 360 degree panoramic bowl of eye candy. 

The summit push is pretty steep but nothing sketchy like Pyramid or Heitman. Even though it was a bright sunny day, little puffy clouds kept creeping up on us like a wall of white and made it look very dramatic. And after a short hour and a half or so, we made it to the summit. 

The final steps to the summit!

On the summit!

We had lunch on the summit and of course, summit snacks. 

The way down, as usual, is beautiful and far easier than going up. 

Where's Camden?

Into the fog!

The fourth summit is complete! 3.17 miles, 1,821 feet!

Day 197: Saturday Cartoons

 It's the little things for me. 

For instance, even though the boys are 14 and 12, they still love to watch animated movies. 

Every year we have a checklist of Disney movies we *need* to watch before we go to Disney. I am open minded and half expect them to cut some of these movies by now. 

But they don't! Make no mistake - there is no force feeding here. They love watching them. 

And I'm glad I have just a tiny bit of innocence left around here. 

Mickey's Three Musketeers

Day 196: Heitman Mountain

 Well we had a great time doing nothing yesterday, and it's sunny again today, and you know what that means? 

Today we go on an adventure.

The boys and I got up early, headed to the Exchange to get summit snacks, and headed to Heitman Mountain!

Heitman is a long, and I mean long, mountain. 9.5 miles round trip, basically. But, once you get past the first third of it (past Heitman Lake), it's very pleasant, gradual, and not at all difficult. 

Until the summit push. But we'll get to that later. 

That first third though, it's a doozy. It's steep, swampy (see: super deep squelchy mud that completely covers the trail and forces you to either crash through thick underbrush to make your own trail or flood your boots with mud and water and go right through), and due to the thick undergrowth, HOT. 

But past the lake? It's easy, it's gradual, it's FREAKING LONG. 

But it's not straight up, so I'm a fan of it. 

Heitman Lake, with the Pacific in the horizon

The boys and I have the best conversations while hiking. There's no distractions, so screens, no headphones. So we can just have a nice chat about random things, like our favorite super powers we'll never have, inventions we might create, and how it would be great if they put a chair lift from the tree line across the gully to the summit. 

Honestly the conversations are my favorite part of these hikes. 

The summit push is a little sketch city, which neither kid is really a fan of heights (even though this is their third time summiting Heitman), so we took our time and had a conversation about fear versus phobia. 

We made it! We ceremoniously placed our rocks on this year's summit rock tower, had lunch and our celebratory summit snacks.

Apparently there was a Haribo theme today

 The summit is fun, but that's only the halfway mark. Now it's time for the long hike down the mountain. 

I'd rather go down than up any day. 

At one point, Cam set his pocketknife down and walked away, then realized half a mile further down the hill. Luckily he somehow knew exactly where he had left it, so he took off at a sprint back up the mountain half a mile to grab it, and then sprinted back. 

And yes, he found it. 

And after? He said "Wow, that run was refreshing!"

This was after a 7 mile out of 9 mile hike. I should put a daily step counter on that kid. 

Three summits down! 9.5 miles (thanks to that bonus mile from Camden's lost knife adventure), 2,270 elevation gain. We are tired and happy!