Day 193: Quiet In The Library!

 It was another very rainy day today and I've about had it. We needed a change of pace. 

So, we headed to the library!

Our library is small (albeit decent size for Kodiak), so we brought two large plastic bags full of books that we were done with to donate. I had the boys do all the talking (life skills and all that), and they said the donation drop off is at the grocery store, of all places. 

Ooookay. 

Spoiler alert: By donation drop off, they meant one of those small recycle tubs people have in their houses behind the cashier. I mentioned to the boys that a PROPER donation drop off bin/shack/whatever on site at the library would be a great Eagle Scout project....hint hint. 

Anyways. 

So back at the library, the boys wandered around the sections trying to find something decent to read. I required at least one chapter book from each of them for summer reading (even though we have a lot of chapter books at home, it's good to broaden their horizons a bit). 

It always cracks me up the books that they choose. Boys are funny. 

Day 192: Fake It Till You Make It

 It was kind of a weird day. 

It rained again, as usual. We did some household chores, and a lot of catch up on Boy Scout paperwork. 

Camden is working on his Tenderfoot rank for Boy Scouts, and the knots have been very hard for him to memorize (this is a thing, I think, because learning to tie his shoes was also extremely difficult for him). 

I found him sitting on the floor with my laptop, watching Youtube videos and practicing the two half-hitch knot over and over on the dining room chair until he figured it out. 

I mean, if he figured it out, who cares how he got it, right?

Day 191: Sanka, You Dead?

 It's Family Fun Sunday and we had all sorts of fun plans to do today. It's Family Game night, there's a new recipe box that came in the mail, AND we had a movie planned as well. 

All this rain can get wrecked. We know how to have fun. 

First, Brad and I had planned on working on a campaign together of a table top game called Gloomhaven. It's huge and complicated but we've been having a lot of fun learning it (attention: Nerd Alert). 

It was fun while it lasted

But, halfway through our campaign, Brad suddenly felt very ill. Like, running to the bathroom because he was going to vomit ill. I don't deal with vomit, so I sent him to bed (and he didn't argue). Our campaign will have to wait. 

But, that wasn't going to ruin the rest of our plans (mostly). 

The boys were in charge of the kitchen today! Their recipe box theme was Jamaica, and who doesn't like Jamaican food? It's almost as fun to make as it is to eat. 

Calen was in charge of the main course. His recipe was Jerk Chicken kabobs, which was as simple as cut up chicken breast, bell pepper, and pineapple on a kabob, brushed with some homemade jerk bbq sauce and put in the oven. 

Cam was in charge of the baking, as that's usually his favorite part of cooking anyways. He was making Jamaican coconut bread, which is a simple bread dough made with coconut milk.

Both of these recipes was HEAVENLY. The bread is sweet but in a natural way. The jerk chicken was MUAH *one of those put your fingers to your lips and kiss like a French chef moments*. I could eat this every week.  

So. Freaking. Good. 

Because the theme is Jamaica we HAD to watch Cool Runnings, one of the family's favorite movies. 

Sanka, you dead?

So even though Brad was sick all day, we still had a lot of fun and are extremely full because of it. 

Day 190: Get To High Ground

 We laid low for a good part of the day today since the kids and I were beat from the hike yesterday. Camden's buddy Malachi had a birthday party in the middle of the day at the bowling alley, which is so much fun to do on a rainy day. Cam is quite a billiards pool shark and said that's his favorite part. 

After we had a nice relaxing night at home, put the boys to bed and then at 11 finally put myself to bed. And wouldn't you know that the second I crawled into bed, the tsunami alarms went off. 

Of course they did. 

Actually, we've had three or four since we moved here, and NONE have been during regular business hours. Are natural disasters required to happen only at night?

Living on the hill up here, our neighborhood is a safe zone and actually considered an evacuation zone for lower base residents and even the Air Station's fuel trucks. I always make a post on social media that if anyone needs a house to hang out at, I have room, kid and dog friendly, etc, because these warnings usually take hours to clear. 

The culprit? a pretty good sized earthquake over at Dutch Harbor, the last island on the Aleutian chain (we are the first).

 

Brad immediately has to leave because he is the communications officer for incident command. The boys are asleep (Calen did wake up to the alarms going off initially - they are LOUD) and I stayed up in case anyone needed to come to the house to use the bathroom or something (it's happened before).

It finally cleared at 1am with a zero foot wave, so we could all finally go to bed. 

Well that was exciting. 

Day 189: Pyramid

 Day 3 of sunshine, although you can see the clouds coming in from the back mountains, so we needed to hurry and enjoy the nice weather while we can!

Because it looked like the weather was going to turn fast, we decided on a quicker mountain, so we headed up Pyramid!

Showing number 2 for the second summit! The summit is behind Camden's hand

Pyramid is short and STEEP. The foothills up to the plateau area are hot, steep and buggy, but the views are amazing. 

Once you hit the "shelf", we took a short break and then headed up the "scramble", a literal rocky, cliffy, sketchy scramble up to the summit. It's not for the feint of heart, and probably not for beginner hikers (though as long as you are careful you are perfectly safe). Camden has an "almost" crippling fear of heights, but he perservered (this is his third Pyramid summit) and we successfully made it to the top!

The money shot on the summit

Summit candy! We were sour today. Sour patch kids, sour Mike and Ikes, sour gushers

And you know what's more sketchy than climbing up? Going down. 

We made it! And now that we've had four adventures back to back to back to back, it can rain for the next week. 

Day 188: On The Sea

 You guys. It's been sunny two days in a row. 

Not just sunny, hot. Today it hit a whopping 72 degrees (which, the golden rule in Alaska is to always add 10 degrees to the current temp when it direct sunlight. The sun is literally closer to us than anywhere else). 

It's too hot for a mountain today, and we deserve a beach day!

So we loaded up, borrowed a neighbor boy friend and headed to our favorite beach, Boy Scout beach, to spend the day!

I mean we HAVE to have a beach day photo 

Calen is digging trenches to protect his sand fort, his favorite beach game

My favorite view!

Please let the record show that I'm in a tank top AND I'm not even cold

Cam doesn't feel the cold, ever. In the 50 degree water playing boats, his favorite

That grin! That hair flip 

We stayed for several hours, and then came home around 4 to make an early dinnerand collect Brad from work, and get ready for the next sunshine adventure, because it's Alaska and it doesn't get dark in the summer until around 10:30 these days. 

So after dinner, we piled all our inflatable kayaks into the car and took the short drive over to Sometimes Island (the beach/shore where we shot off fireworks on 4th of July), filled them with air and launched for a nice kayaking stint around Sometimes Island!

Off we go! 

Watching an eagle (to the right of the kayaks on the island) who was watching us

Brad, who hates climbing mountains, is all about kayaking. He said if there was some sort of kayaking challenge similar to the 7 Summit Challenge, he'd sign up. This is his element. 

The sunshine was warm, the wind was calm, and the seas were easy. It was a perfect day on the water. 

Also, super cool (and funny) that we were kayaking directly below Kashevaroff Mountain, which we summited yesterday. 

Calen watching a sea otter (above and to the left of his left paddle)

Sailing (or crusing, paddling?) directly underneath Kash, the mountain we summited yesterday

Day 187: The Kash

 Yes folks, I'm here to report that it IS sunny enough to go on an adventure outside!

Seeing as the climatologists have announced that Southwest Alaska (that's us) is having the cloudiest calendar year in over thirty years, this is a big deal. 

I'm moving. 

But not yet. 

We are taking nothing for granted whenit comes to weather this year. So, when I woke up this morning and saw a literal speck of blue sky and the promise of quite possibly an almost sunny day, I had the boys get ready for an adventure. 

Lock and load boys we're going up a mountain!

First I ran to the Ferry Terminal to get my 7 summit challenge sticker. It's $5, it's a great sticker, and it puts us in weekly contests and a prize if we finish. Plus it keeps me motivated. 

Well now that we're official 

We decided to start the 7 Summit Challenge season with Kashevaroff, also known as The Kash in my household. 

This was strategic for many reasons. For one, it gets one of the longer mountains out of the way. This beast is 7 miles round trip, but it's gradual and pretty chill and not at all cliffy at the top, so it's a good "starter" when it comes to big summits. 

Second, there's VERY little (if any) shade, so this mountain is HOT. And since it was mostly cloudy today, we decided to take advantage of not being stuck climbing a mountain in scorching Egyptian desert weather (i.e. 60 degrees). 

Be that as it may, the lower 1/3rd of this mountain was freaking miserably hot today. The vegetation is so starved of sunlight this year that the warm humid morning plus almost sunshine sent photosynthesis into overdrive, and we might as well have been hiking through a gosh darn jungle at the equator rather than a mountain in the Aleutian chain. 

I'm pretty sure Calen and I almost died of heat stroke. At 58 degrees. 

Cam held his hands up to make a camera and said "click click!" He really has a photographer's eye 

Cam on the other hand is a complete mountain goat. He doesn't feel sore muscles, or pain, or anything. He's only 60 pounds and he just zooms that little body up mountains as if it's nothing. We had to keep slowing him down. 

That's why he's in the neon green backpack, so that I can always see him. 

The long exposure on my phone is a lot of fun 

We put Calen in front of Cam to slow him down

Dat view though

Once we hit the higher elevation though, the temperature was perfect, the views were amazing, and the sun even came out on the summit. 

2,282 feet and the summit is ours, baby!

Cam wanted to take a photo of me! I'm not in photos ever so this is something new 

Summit muscles!

A summit pal took this photo of us! 

Generally, summits mean milkshakes for dinner, but since Soda Jerk isn't in town and McDonald's milkshake machine literally is always broken (lazy turds), we started something new this year that counts for bribery and immediate satisfaction. 

Summit candy! On the way we picked out a box of candy and hauled it up the mountain to enjoy on the summit. 

On the menu: Nerd clusters and Mike and Ike megas (and sour patch kids for me)

And then the long (albeit easy) hike down the mountain, which is the best part because it takes half the time. 

First mountain in the books! Until next summer, Kash! 

Day 186: You're Reading WHAT?

 It's July but I'm already getting ready for the next school year. I had promised the boys to do a World War II unit for the last two years, holding out on the slim hope that maybe a complete, in depth cookie cutter curriculum will fall out of the sky into my hands and tell me what to teach. 

But it's been two years and nothing is falling out of the sky. 

Fine. Fine, Fine. I'll do it myself. 

So I've been studying World War II in depth this summer, trying to build what I'm pretending to be a curriculum and hoping that it'll be enough to count for something, especially since part of it needs to count for a high school credit. 

Fake it till you make it, right? 

So I'm sitting on the couch reading a biography on Adolf Hitler, taking notes to corelate learning about him not only for World War II but also our Psychology unit (i.e. how Hitler used psychology to convince an entire nation to follow him, etc). 

Camden comes down stairs and sees me reading, the cover of this book plastered with photos of quite possibly the most hated human being of all time, and big H-I-T-L-E-R in red font on the front. 

"Mom. WHAT. Are. You. Reading?!?"

"A book about Adolf Hitler."

His eyes bug out out of his head, as if I had just spoken in evil tongues.

"WHY?"

"It's important to learn about leaders, even terrible ones. By learning about your enemies you have a lot of power over them. Besides, it's for school."

His eyes slant down thoughtfully in relief, albeit suspiciously. 

"Oh. Well thank goodness. I was really worried why you were reading a book about HIM. Like you were a fan or something."

And with that crisis averted, he left to get an Otter Pop or something and go outside to play dinosaurs with his neighbor friend. 

The Defender of Justice, making his rounds, making sure no one is doing anything sketchy around here.