tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21018785093911184582024-03-13T02:01:27.461-07:00The Curtis Family RepublicCurtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.comBlogger103125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-71389223564736061302014-12-04T18:38:00.002-08:002014-12-04T18:38:31.016-08:002014 Fire SeasonThis is a video about the 2014 fire season that was made. If you look closely around the 6 minute 35 second mark there might even be a picture of me giving a fire behavior forecast briefing on the Carlton Complex. I was actually supposed to be interviewed for this video, I got called by somebody from our region office and asked if I would agree to be interviewed about the Carlton Complex and the fire behavior that occurred on it. I said sure, but when we started talking about dates all the times they ran past me to come up and interview me were during the hiking trip with Dad and Michael and Jeremy, so I decided to go poke through the washes and the canyons of southern Utah instead. Here's the link, hope everybody's doing well. http://vimeo.com/111805663 Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-26114843934321098322014-09-11T05:26:00.005-07:002014-09-11T05:46:09.169-07:00Videos from Great Wolf Lodge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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These are videos from the water park at Great Wolf Lodge in outside of Centralia, WA. Check back later for videos from our adventures today, which will include more water slides I'm sure, as well as a ropes course, and some sort of obstacle course thing. I think. The videos were shot using a Sony action cam, which is a wearable camera, in this case worn attached to my head. <br />
EDIT: The video resolution is pretty crappy when you try to view the videos full screen. Here's a link to our youtube channel where the resolution is better: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnqy1Zafmk2Lp1wRBYGxhlg/videos Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-62018646060873428092014-03-30T17:09:00.000-07:002014-03-30T17:09:11.273-07:00The Shooting Challenge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Our friend Brian came to visit our friends Billy and Emily this weekend. We did an army challenge on Saturday that was more fun than you legally should be allowed to have. Gun safety was used at all times, even when it looks like it wasn't. The boys came out too, but only did a couple challenges.<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gPvAaEBN3zc/UziRIT-cH9I/AAAAAAAAAO4/Qanmzgb6mFk/s1600/14+-+3" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gPvAaEBN3zc/UziRIT-cH9I/AAAAAAAAAO4/Qanmzgb6mFk/s1600/14+-+3" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
These are 3 of the enemies we were battling for the army challenge. The 4th one wouldn't load for some reason, but it was a filthy communist. The one above is a generic bad guy, a drug dealer below, and an alien below that.<br />
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The group getting ready for the challenge.<br />
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So challenge one was a pistol challenge, here's the link to the you tube video. Ponder on Dylan's question at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuow9xdsQ0c<br />
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The 2nd challenge was a sniper shoot off. The targets are down in those smaller trees mid way up the slope in the back of the picture. Simon did this challenge with us. We were shooting a .22 with a scope. The 3rd challenge was with a .22 with open sites and you had to shoot from cover (a tree), move to and shoot from cover again (another tree), move to short cover and shoot from one knee (another smaller tree), then the 4th shot was up to you to decide. I didn't have the camera with me at the 3rd or 5th challenge, so no pictures from that. <br />
The 4th (and absolute best) challenge was with an old Enfield .303 that I have that has a bayonet! There were 4 bad guys to shoot, so for this challenge you got 3 bullets, then had to charge the last target and kill it with the bayonet. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4QXmNGMTjk The boys did this challenge as well, with an empty gun. Here's Dylan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i55C6Hkq2uk and Simon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i55C6Hkq2uk<br />
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Sorry, the videos look kind of pixelated, I uploaded them to you tube from my iPad, and I don't think it loaded very well. <br />
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The 5th challenge was Billy, Brian, and I lined up with the targets in front of us and shooting them as fast as we could. It was so fun we did it 3 times. Once that was done Dylan was screaming that he couldn't feel his toes anymore and it looked like it was about to rain, so we headed back to the van. We were on some property that Emily owns with her brother and sister, and it's adjacent to a state DOT gravel pit which is where we parked. There was a pile of sand that was about 25-30 feet tall. Simon climbed to the top of it and jumped off, then Emily did the same thing. It looked like fun so I decided to throw caution to the wind and do it as well. I jumped, landed about halfway down in the soft sand, immediately fell forward and landed on my chest, then slid the rest of the way to the bottom. Emily said "We know what happens when Ben does things like this, why weren't we filming that!?" I could feel I tweaked my back a little so I decided not to do it again. Dylan got out of the van and decided to jump off, then Billy joined Emily, Simon, and Dylan in jumping off it. It began to look like a 2nd jump would probably be more fun than the first one, so, again throwing caution (and good judgement) to the wind, I climbed up, got a good running start, and flew off the edge. I leaned back this time so I wouldn't fall forward again, but unfortunately physics decided I wasn't leaning back far enough and I fell forward, face planting this time, my legs came up over my back and head, and I rolled the rest of the way to the bottom. I had so much sand all over me that I could pull hand fulls out of my sweat shirt pockets. It was in my hair, beard and everyplace else. To quote Simon, "I have sand in places I didn't even know I had." Unfortunately, I also tweaked my back so bad that I've been laid up on the couch or in my hammock all day, and I had to miss a deer roast at our friend David and Arwen's house. They've been wanting to roast something in the ground, and decided the deer they got would work, so David dug a pit, started a big fire in it, and when it cooked down to coals threw the deer in, after it was all wrapped up. The boys decided to stay home as well, they had a couple of friends over that they were playing with. Faith went and hopefully she brings me home some pit roasted deer. <br />
I'm heading to Hood River, OR on Monday to a conference. I did a big analysis on a project my forest is working on that shows if and how much money we would save on fire suppression costs by doing fuels reduction treatments, and I did a presentation to some folks on the forest on the results. There was an ecologist at that presentation from the regional office, and after it was over he asked me to come down to a regional conference give that same presentation again. I'm only the 2nd person in the nation to complete that type of analysis for the project, and I did it differently than the 1st person that did it. The regional ecologist told me he would like to see other forest with similar projects do the analysis the same way I did it, so that's pretty cool. After that is over I drive home on Thursday, then Friday morning the family is heading to Portland for a long weekend to see my friend Mark and his wife and kids. We're going to OMSI and the zoo for sure, and whatever else we have time for. OMSI is the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, it's a pretty spectacular place. We went to a Star Wars exhibit there about 8 years ago. The exhibit this time is about what people from around the world eat. There's also tons of activities for kids, like a robotics room and some other kid centric stuff. That's about it, hope everybody's doing well!<br />
Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-70900869533075435602014-03-17T05:30:00.000-07:002014-03-17T05:30:07.077-07:00Grand Coulee Dam and Steamboat Rock State Park<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The boys and I went on a little trip on Saturday. Our original plan was to go Steamboat Rock State Park, but we decided to stop at the Grand Coulee Dam visitor center since we had never been there before. There is enough concrete in the dam to make a sidewalk that goes around the world twice.<br />
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They had a game sort of thing where you could fly a guy with a jet pack around the dam.<br />
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This is the picture Simon took of me and Dylan.<br />
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This is the picture Dylan took of me and Simon.<br />
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After the dam we headed to Steamboat rock to have lunch before going hiking.<br />
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The trail on the way up.<br />
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Taking a break after the first steep pitch.<br />
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Almost to the top, we hiked up that little valley.<br />
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At the top!<br />
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It was a really fun day, we went to Omak on the way home and got some pizza for dinner. On Sunday I went skiing with my friends Billy and Emily to set up some game cameras to see if I could get some pictures of a fox. I'd seen some tracks that I thought were fox tracks, but the wildlife biologist said there any foxes around Republic. He gave me some game cameras to set up though. We ended up ditching the skis about 1 mile in and hiking the rest of the way, but it was still a fun day. That's about it, hope everybody's doing well. Oh, I almost forgot, we saw a bigfoot on the way to Omak after leaving Steamboat Rock. Here's a link to the video: <a href="http://youtu.be/do1UFNKGdOU" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #2793e6; cursor: pointer; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://youtu.be/do1UFNKGdOU</a> Ben, Faith, Simon, and Dylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17964612150915983825noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-41032464492068899892014-03-11T22:45:00.001-07:002014-03-11T22:45:38.841-07:00Dylan's new toyHere's a link to a YouTube video of Dylan with his guitar. We bought him some pickups that fit inside the sound hole of the guitar and plug into a small battery powered amp. <br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vcQrSoyhYE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vcQrSoyhYE</a><br />
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<br />Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-74223074312298832642014-02-17T22:24:00.000-08:002014-02-17T22:24:11.412-08:00This youtube link will take you to a video of Dylan playing guitar. I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but a musician named Blake Noble came to Republic a couple of years ago and played at the brewery and he was spectacular. We played some of his music at home and Dylan loved it. He would sit and watch youtube videos of Blake playing for hours. The brewery booked Blake to play again, and Emily knew that whenever you mentioned Blake's name, Dylan would say "Blake Noble? I'm his biggest fan!". So Emily asked Blake if he would consider hanging out with Dylan for a little while. Blake agreed (we found out later he was a pre-school teacher and loves working with and spending time with kids), and spent about an hour and a half with Dylan, playing guitar, teaching him some things, and just talking. It was pretty awesome, and Dylan's been practicing playing like Blake ever since. The you tube link is the song Dylan wrote for Simon on his birthday. On Valentines Day Blake invited us to a invitation only "secret session" show that he was playing at in Okanogan, about an hour and a half from Republic, so we went over to see him. We showed him this video of Dylan and he was impressed, and said all sorts of nice things, that made Dylan grin from ear to ear when we told him. You should really check out Blake's music, he's got a youtube page that has a bunch of excellent stuff on it. A girl named Kate Lynn Logan was also playing at the show we went to. I liked her quite a bit, but I'm not sure that Faith did. I listened to some of her music online before we went to the show and I wasn't that impressed, but she was pretty good live. Anyway, here's the link to Dylan:<br />
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsvYO-5Kv8&feature=youtu.be <br />
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Well, maybe you'll need to copy and paste it, it doesn't seem to be coming up as a link. Not much else has been going on, I've been skiing a bit with some friends and by myself. My friend Landon and I went skiing on Saturday, we were doing an out and back trip on an 11 mile loop trail, though I think we ended up skiing around 8 miles. As we were heading up we found a big open patch that led down to the lower loop of the trail, and decided to ski down it on the way back. The trail we were on had a lot of up and down, and some kind of tight corners you had to make while going downhill, and I was doing pretty good at negotiating all the turns. So good that I thought skiing down that opening we found wouldn't be a problem at all. I got back to it and as I was waiting for Landon (he was skiing some new Altai Hok skis and they go a little slower on the down hill sections than my waxless skis) it was looking a lot more narrow and steep than it had when we first saw it. Landon caught up a minute later as I was shifting water bottles to the inside of my pack so I wouldn't lose them and muttering to myself about how I wished I had a case for my glasses so I wouldn't lose them when I fell. Landon said I wouldn't fall, just make wide, slow turns. He graciously allowed me to go first, and as I skiied over to where I wanted to drop into the opening, I fell down. Not a very promising start I thought, but I got up, pointed my skills downhill and took off. I then realized that the opening was in fact much, much more narrow than it had originally appeared, I was going much faster than I wanted to be, and the wall of trees was rapidly approaching. I shifted my weight on the skis and started to turn. There was no way I was going to turn in time at the rate I was currently going, so I dropped into the turn a little more, then my brain reminded my body that I have no idea how to correctly turn on skis while hurtling down a steep slope, my body reminded my brain that my glasses were in the pocket of my sweater and would likely fall out if I wrecked, so my brain and body decided the best course of action was to lean way back to protect my glasses. Then physics got involved and brought the whole thing a sliding, tumbling, snowy stop. Luckily I still had my glasses in my pocket so I sat up and watched Landon go zooming by making a nice turn, then he went to turn the other way and he fell down too. We proceeded down the hill taking turns falling down and narrowly avoiding running into trees. It was a whole lot of fun. We're going to go ski the whole loop next weekend and will probably do the same thing again. <br />
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Simon played basketball this winter. He had practice a couple of times a week, then scrimmages on Saturdays. For their last game they played at half time of the varsity girls highschool game, in front of all the people that came to watch the highschool game. He said he was pretty nervous, but did great when they started playing, he even managed to get the ball and shoot at the basket, but he missed. He had lots of fun. For those of you that don't know our AWD van broke down about 2 months ago. I was able to get it running again, then it died about 100 yards from the house. I could never get it to start again, so I had it towed to the shop. After it came back from the shop, costing significantly less money than I thought it would, we decided to buy a new to us car. We ended up getting a 2002 Subaru Forester. The day we got it Simon was in school and didn't know that the van was even fixed yet. I went to pick him up from school in the new forester. I met him at the front desk and as we walked outside I said that I had walked down to meet him, but I really didn't feel like walking home. "It's OK Dad", he said, "It won't take us too long." As we walked across the parking lot we were nearing the new Forester that Simon didn't know we now owned. "That's a nice car" I said. Simon agreed. "Come over here for a minute," I said walking over to the passenger side of the car. I looked around furtively, and asked Simon if he had ever stolen a car. His eyes got a little bigger and he stammered "N-nn-no?" I reached over and opened the passenger door. "It's unlocked!" I whispered, "Get in!" Simon's eyes got even bigger and he slowly sat down on the seat with his legs still outside the car. "Dad, is this our car?" he asked. "Get your feet inside! No it's not our car." I shut the door and ran over to the drivers side and got in. "I found the keys laying on the ground." I said. I started it up and reversed quickly out of the parking spot. "Dad, is this our car!?" Simon asked again with a hint of panic in his voice. I threw the car into drive and hit the gas. "No, it's not. Pick that purse up off the floor and see if there's any money in it." Simon picked up the purse and half yelled, "Dad, tell me the truth! Is. This. Our. Car?" "No," I replied, "Now what's in that purse?" Simon looked at the purse, then looked at me, then peered into the top of the purse. "Dad, this is Mom's purse." "It is?" "Yes, it is." "Oh," I said, "I guess we're not stealing this car then." Simon thought it was pretty funny, and so did I. Faith thought I probably destroyed 10 years of trust building with Simon, but I think she's wrong. That's about it, hope everyone is doing well.Ben, Faith, Simon, and Dylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17964612150915983825noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-5611440519336620682013-11-25T18:11:00.001-08:002013-11-25T18:11:51.107-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We went and checked out a ghost town called Bodie this past weekend with Mary, Faith's mom.<br />
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It was pretty neat, I'd driven by it a lot, but had never stopped. It's only a few buildings and a sign. It was a gold mining town, and between 1911 and 1940 they mined 1.3 million dollars worth of gold. The history of gold mining in Ferry County is pretty impressive, when the area was opened up to mining, something like 96% of all new mining patents that year were for Ferry County. </div>
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The link below will take you to a you tube video, the video uploader on the blog kept giving a an error message. It should be ready to view by late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. Dylan and I made a catapult today. The plans for it were to build a rather small catapult, that launched wadded up pieces of paper, but Dylan and I decided to "Go big or go home" and made a scaled up version that can launch a fist sized rock 20-30 feet.. Then we set up the playmobile castle they got for Christmas about 6 years ago and started the siege. Dylan kept the catapult (it's name is Dragon Bolt, by the way) a lot closer to the castle than it's maximum launching distance. It was pretty awesome. When Simon got home from school they continued the siege, then painted the catapult. Hope everybody's doing well.</div>
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<span class="watch-page-link" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://youtu.be/6cRA3ZQA9xY" style="border: 0px; color: #2793e6; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://youtu.be/6cRA3ZQA9xY</a></span></div>
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Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-27854842992474176742013-11-17T11:59:00.003-08:002013-11-19T08:11:43.254-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ6lrgXdsh5B1kIo2sBkLc4vuKPL08teuy4di-BAims3CwqaeVkkU6zmY7A3FYOjhBTbqQ3tzUFWxKjqmvl3UrlBfngBh4fAxnuUKbbrzU4CFK3npdoyuKqg-zNf8L8oWmDxTGy8tpL1sI/s1600/IMG_7401.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ6lrgXdsh5B1kIo2sBkLc4vuKPL08teuy4di-BAims3CwqaeVkkU6zmY7A3FYOjhBTbqQ3tzUFWxKjqmvl3UrlBfngBh4fAxnuUKbbrzU4CFK3npdoyuKqg-zNf8L8oWmDxTGy8tpL1sI/s320/IMG_7401.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
This is the awesome cake that Faith and her friend Shannon made for Dylan's birthday, it's a Skylanders cake, which is a game Dylan really likes.<br />
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About a month ago Dylan said he wanted a surprise party for his birthday. His party was on Saturday, so we sent him over to his friend Blake's house for the afternoon and got all set up, then waited for him to get home so we could all jump out and yell "Surprise!". It was really loud, I guess.<br />
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Dylan hugged every present he got.<br />
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All the kids kept edging closer and closer to Dylan as he was opening presents and he kept getting pushed back into the corner.<br />
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Here's Dylan and Mckinley blowing out his candle. She offered her help without even being asked.<br />
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The picture above is a cake our friend Arwen made for a themed dinner thing we did a year or two ago, I just found it on my camera and thought I'd show it off. It's supposed to look like a horse heart. It did not taste very good at all, I don't think anybody there finished their piece of it. <br />
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This is my wall tent that has been at my friend Mark's house in Portland since we moved to Republic. I went down and got it this summer for a guy on the fire crew to live in on some property he had bought. We got it back at the end of the summer and went camping on Halloween. I had to camp out for work, and Faith and the boys signed up as volunteers so they could come with me and ride in a work truck. I was unsure if the boys would be willing to miss trick or treating to go camping, and when I asked them if they would rather go trick or treating or camping Simon yelled "I don't care, cancel Halloween, we're going camping!". The reason I had to camp out for work is this:<br />
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The Capitol Christmas Tree came from the Colville National Forest this year. The Capitol Christmas tree goes on the lawn of the capitol building, not the white house. We found out in April of 2012 that we had been chosen for this "honor". We had to find a few candidate trees, as well as arrange for 80 companion trees, and coordinate the making of something like 8,000 ornaments. Candidate trees were selected by forest service employees, we were supposed to look for them while we were out working. Then the head groundskeeper for the capitol building came out and made the final selection, which was on the Newport Ranger District. The tree was an 88 foot tall spruce. The forest decided to put together a small incident management team to manage the whole operation of getting the area set up for the cutting ceremony, cutting the tree down, getting it loaded on the truck, and transported down to Newport, WA. In typical government fashion, they selected a guy named Brian to be the incident commander, then never told him. I heard about Brian being the IC in early September. Near the end of September, at least 3 weeks since I had heard that Brian would be the IC, my phone at work rang and it was Brian. He said "I'm not sure if you heard but they're setting up a team to manage the christmas tree ceremony, and I was told this morning that I was the IC." I stopped him and told him I had heard he was going to be the IC 3 weeks earlier. He was a little frustrated, because the government shutdown rumors were flying at the time, and there was only about a month until the cutting ceremony, and a lot of work to be done to get ready for it. Anyway, he asked me to be the operations section chief for the team, which meant I was in charge of getting the tree cut, put on the truck, secured to the truck, and transported down to Newport. I agreed and after a few meetings we decided that it would be best if I camped out at the tree site the night before the cutting ceremony. The tree is about a 3 hour drive from Republic and I had to be at the site the day before the tree was cut to get the cranes placed, go over how to cut the tree with the sawyers, make sure the climber and the crane company agreed on how to get the tree rigged, and make sure everything was ready to go. We got through that day, then I was working the next morning by 0630 finishing getting stuff ready. <br />
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The three folks in the picture above are Jim, who climbed the tree to set the rigging for the crane; John, who made the face cut on the tree; and Adam, who did the final cut on the tree. Everybody that was interested in cutting the tree that was a C-sawyer (the highest level of sawyers in the Forest Service) had their name put in a hat and John and Adam were selected. I'm the one who certifies the C sawyers on the forest, so I was assigned to make sure the guys knew how to cut a tree suspended from crane, and be the back up if necessary. None of us had ever cut a tree suspended from a crane before, so we kind of made it up as we went along, with some help from the crane company. The top of the tree was hooked to the crane, and once Adam cut it off the stump a second crane was hooked up near the bottom of the tree, that's the yellow crane in the picture above. It was then laid flat suspended about 20 feet above the ground and the truck backed in underneath it.<br />
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When the team we had set up first got involved the forest was planning on there being around 50 people in attendance at the cutting ceremony. Brian and I spent a lot of time convincing them that there would be way more than 50 people. They somewhat reluctantly agreed to let us plan for more than 200 people, but I don't think they believed that there would be that many. It ended up being just over 300 people that showed up. <br />
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Here's the tree laying on the truck. It rested on 8 cradles on the bed of the truck. Once it was laid down the branches were all dragging on the ground and we had to get them all tied off so they wouldn't drag. <br />
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Here's the truck, donated by Mack Trucks to transport the tree to Washington. The truck was so long it couldn't make it around all the corners to get down the dirt road to the highway, so we had a front end loader hook onto the back of the trailer and lift the rear wheels off the ground and move the trailer around the sharp corners. It took 2.5 hours to make it 25 miles into Newport. Once the tree got to Newport it got all packaged up so it fit on the trailer, then it headed for the Capitol. It's making a bunch of stops on the way, right now they're in San Antonio I think. I was going to sign up to travel with the tree, but then I found out it's a 5 week long road trip and I decided not to sign up. Overall it was a pretty neat experience, and the boys really enjoyed seeing the whole thing, but I sure don't want to do it again.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-83671685451250945032013-06-29T18:20:00.002-07:002013-06-29T18:22:05.443-07:00The Pain Gain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The boys and I went backpacking for the first time on Friday. The GPS program on my computer said the trail was 2.3 miles long, Google Earth said it was 2.8. My gps track after we got there said it was 3.5 miles. However long it was to get in there, it took us 4.5 hours to hike in. We stopped for breaks. A lot. But it was a nice hike along a ridge to a place called Emerald Lake. We got in and found the huge rock pictured above, the boys spent most of the time lifting rocks onto the top of the big rock and throwing them in. If you click on the picture to make it bigger you can see a fire ring out in the middle of the lake. Apparently it dries up in late summer. We got to the lake and started to set up camp, but it was bloody hot, so we decided to go swimming instead. The lake is mostly snow melt, so it was super cold. We swam for a few minutes, then decided to get out. I walked back up to camp barefoot and was getting dressed when I noticed blood all over the place where I had been walking. I then was lucky enough to discover a gash in my foot about 2 inches long and 1/4 in deep. Simon (who was very eager to help and very concerned) and I got it cleaned up and mostly held shut with a couple of bandaids (the butterfly bandages wouldn't stick on my foot for some reason). After the emergency room trip today, I discovered that if you come in more than 8 hours after getting a laceration, they won't give you stitches because bacteria has likely established and would have a greater chance of causing an infection. So, steri-strips and a huge bandaid are in my future for the next few weeks. Cue the next picture.<br />
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After assisting with first aid, Simon crawled up on the rock and fell asleep.<br />
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We brought hammocks and tarps in to sleep in. The blue hammock is mine. It took 100 feet of parachute cord to string up the tarps into a semblance of shelter when it looked like it would start raining. I was initially planning on using the p-cord to make a bear hang for the food, but shelter seemed more important at the time. I ended walking a few hundred yards from camp and sticking the food bag way up in the branches of a tree. We all went to sleep and I was awoken in the middle of the night by a strange noise. As I lay there listening for any follow up weird noises I heard what sounded like something splashing in the water at the edge of the lake. Then I heard a bunch of really strange noises that in the dark that at 1 in the morning I was sure was a bear snuffling around the camp. Turns out it was Dylan snoring and clicking his teeth together in his sleep. As I replayed the noise in my head I thought it sounded like a tree cracking, whooshing as it fell over, then hitting the lake. Thinking that was unlikely, I stayed awake straining my ears for the sound of a bear getting ready to tear us apart. I finally fell asleep again, and woke with the sunrise around 4. I got up and decided to walk along the shore of the lake to see if I could figure out what the noise was. Turned out my first guess was right, a big dead tree had tipped over in the middle of the night and fallen into the lake, the splashing I heard at the shore was branches that had broken off bumping against the rocks at the edge. Crisis narrowly averted.<br />
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Here's Dylan asleep in the morning.<br />
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Simon won the award for the best camp this weekend. He had the only open spot that allowed the tarp to be set up properly. We started hiking out at about 9, and started up a series of switch backs out of the canyon the lake was in. We stopped to take a break (one of several) and I was standing talking to the boys and looking up the hill. I saw a band of cliffs that we had hiked along the base of on the way in, and it looked like I could almost throw a rock and hit them. I convinced the boys to take a short cut, and we ended climbing 100 feet in elevation over about 300 feet distance (it had been raining and there were some tense moments on a fairly steep rock face), but we ended cutting over a 1/2 mile off the return trip. After many breaks we ended up getting back to the car at about 1 pm. Both kids promptly fell asleep as soon as the van was moving. It was a great backpacking trip. Dylan is a little power hiker, he didn't want to stop at all on the way in, while Simon needed a break every 10 minutes. On the way out they switched roles, with Simon charging down the trail and Dylan needing a break every 10 minutes. It was a lot of fun though, and while Simon is voting for car camping on the next trip, Dylan wants to go backpacking again next weekend. I may have created a monster, but that's OK, monsters are cool.<br />
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Edit: The boys named the hike the Pain Gain, after Dylan fell down a couple times on the way in and skinned his knee, I gashed my foot, and Simon convinced himself he had gotten poison ivy while standing the midst of a thimbleberry patch. Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-88909128951425935562013-05-16T20:05:00.000-07:002013-05-16T20:07:07.561-07:00If you want to see one of the coolest things that has ever been done, you should google "Chris Hadfield Space Oddity" and watch the awesomeness that the you tube video brings you. Chris Hadfield was the commander of the International Space Station for the past 5 months, and he did all sorts of great web demonstrations of different experiments on the space station, capping it all off with what you should be watching right now instead of reading this. Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-14493931969115979292013-04-21T13:39:00.003-07:002013-04-21T13:39:38.614-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Simon and I spent the day hiking and geocaching a couple weeks ago, all these pictures are from that day. We're still waiting for winter to be over up here, there's still a couple feet of snow once you get up out of the valleys. Not much else has been going on. At least there's picutres this time though. Oh, and if any of you were wondering, yes, I can in fact break into a house with a swiss army knife and a fencing stake thingy.<br />
One of the girls that works on the district lives in the bunkhouse, and there were a bunch of students from WSU staying there this weekend, so Tena (the girl that works here) was given the option of staying in one of the rental houses that is currently empty until the WSU students left. On Friday, my allergies were really bad and it kind of made me feel like crap, so I went to bed at around 9. Faith was already asleep, and the boys were watching a movie downstairs. I heard Oona start barking around 10, but I figured she was hearing the boys movie come up through the heat vents and I ignored here. Then I heard her charge to front door barking like there was a crazed murderer hacking down the door with an axe, so I figured I better go investigate. I crept down the hallway thinking about what I can grab as a weapon (the keys to the gun safe weren't in my room at the time, which is probably a good thing). I peer around the corner into the living room, and I can see out the front window someone is walking away from the house. It's dark outside and I can't tell who it is, but I see them turn the corner and start walking down the hill. I run over to the back door and look out the window there, and see the mysterious figure continue down the road towards the bunkhouse. I figured it was a college student wandering around. So, my adrenaline was up and I knew I wasn't going back to bed soon, and I thought I would watch TV for a bit. I turned on the TV and went into the kitchen to look for some allergy medicine and fill my water bottle. One of the cats was following me around trying to trip me, so I walked over to the front door to let him out. I opened the door while I was looking back towards the cat, and when I looked back toward the door there was the mysterious figure standing on my doorstep, with a clenched fist menacingly descending toward me! I had a full stainless steel water bottle in my hand and my initial thought was to smash in my opponents face before they punched me. My second thought (as the water bottle was starting to rush forward) was "Hey, that's Tena". So I stopped the water bottle from smashing her nose, and she stopped trying to knock on my door, as it was already open before she could knock. (As a side note, I'm always curious about fight or flight responses in those kind of situations, apparently mine was fight that time.) Anyway, I asked her what the hell she was doing wandering around my house in the dark, and she informed me she had locked herself out of the house she was staying in. I told her we'd go find some keys in the office, but the lady that keeps all the keys in her desk also keeps the codes to nuclear missiles in there, judging by the complex iron bars, loops, and padlocks securely keeping the world safe from spare bunkhouse keys and errant nuclear weapons. So we left the office and started walking down the hill to the houses. Tena asked what we were going to do, and I informed her we were going to go break into a house. I inspected the door, asking Tena if she had opened any windows, searched usual places for a spare key, and how hard it was turn the deadbolt mechanism. No windows had been opened, there was no spare key, and the deadbolt was easy to turn. Now this door appears to have been built sometime in the late 1800s, with an old style keyhole you could see through, and a deadbolt kind of thing, that you have to turn up to get out of the house, and flips back down on its own unless you hit a little button to keep it up, which Tena had not. So, after my inspection of the home's defenses were complete, we walked over to the fire cache and searched through the fencing supplies until I found a stake that could be bent with a little effort, and generally hold its shape after that. We walked back to the house and I tried to insert the stake into the key hole and reach the deadbolt, but the doorknob was in the way. So using my swiss army knife (that I got as an award at work about 2 weeks ago) I took the outer doorknob plate off, and was able to take the doorknob apart and poke the other half of the doorknob through into the house. Then I used the bent stake shoved in through the door knob hole to push the deadbolt up and get the door open. Tena was suitably impressed with my breaking and entering skills, then noted "Ben I watched you look at this door, come up with a plan, and break into a house in less than 15 minutes. Have you done this before?" I assured her I had not, then put the door back together with only part left over. It all seemed to close, open, and lock just fine, and since the left over part looked like a 22 bullet I figured it wasn't necessary. That's my Friday night adventure. We're going over to our friend David and Arwen's house in a little bit to burn down a green house and cook dinner in dutch ovens. The green house was demolished by a tree during the windstorm last summer. That's about it, hope everybody's doing well.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-52259780418822974842013-03-27T21:23:00.000-07:002013-03-27T21:23:17.180-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The first picture is a chess board that our friend David made for me for my birthday, using a marble chessboard Faith got for me in Mexico. The chess pieces Faith got for me for my birthday, they're really nice chess pieces from Italy. The next picture is from the end of our coast trip, playing disc golf in Yakima. Not much is going on, but I wanted to share that on Monday I was offered a 120 day detail to a Fire Management Officer position in Kettle Falls, which is about an hour east of Republic. I told the district ranger there that I wanted to apply for the detail, but I didn't want to move over there for 4 months, he said I could drive over every day and he'd give me a government rig to drive over in. So, April 21 I'll start driving over to do that job for 4 months. It should be pretty interesting, my friend Shane works over there, and I worked for Shane back when I worked in Sisters. That's about it, the boys have spring break next week, I'm taking most of the week off and hopefully we'll have some good adventures to write about that don't involve Simon falling in a creek, which is what happened last weekend.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-27102713898732472822013-03-11T11:53:00.001-07:002013-03-11T11:53:05.306-07:00We've been cooking a big Sunday dinner, ususally ham lately. Last night while we were eating I suggested we could maybe get a turkey one time. Dylan said "Like Thanksgiving!" Simon said "Actually they ate ham at Thanksgiving." I said "You mean at the very first Thanksgiving?" and Simon said "Yeah. Really." I said "Hmmm, what makes you say that?" and Simon replied "Because I don't like turkey but I like ham." Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-79043974320112233082013-03-04T19:16:00.000-08:002013-03-04T19:16:07.217-08:00Best (sort of) Family Trip Ever!Well, for some reason, my computer, freezes every time I try to load a picture from my phone. My comma button on the keyboard is broken as well...so excuse the elipse use in lieu of commas. Anyway...on with the best (sort of) family trip ever! It's (sort of) becuae Faith went to Portland this weekend for work...to buy the years line of clothes for the store she works at. Me and the boys went to the coast in Long Beach...in south western Washington to meet my friends Mark and Christina and their two kids...William and Weatherly. We left Republic after school last Thursday and drove to Yakima and stayed in a hotel there...then got up the next morning and drove the rest of the way to Long Beach. Mark and family were still about an hour out when we got there...so me and the boys found a beach so they could experience the ocean for the first time. The wind was blowing like crazy and there were huge waves...Dylan kept facing the wind and yelling "I'm the king of the world!" and "Freedom!" I have no idea when he saw Titanic or Braveheart. We wandered along the beach looking for sea shells and sand dollars...I found a live sand dollar...but we left it there. The kids filled their pockets with every seashell fragment they found...as well as picking up every piece of drift wood asking if they could keep it. After and hour we headed to the hotel to meet Mark and family. They've got a friend that owns a condo at this hotel...so we got to stay there free. We hung out for a bit and caught up...then headed to dinner at a place that a huge seafood menu...but informed us that no place in town serves fresh seafood...it's all shipped in. For a town on the coast that seemed pretty stupid to me...but who can turn down all you can eat fish and chips for $11? We left and went back to the condo and let the kids run around for awhile while we planned Saturdays activities. We woke up and had breakfast...then rode bikes into town and wandered around for a bit before going to race go karts! (picture Simon and Dylan sitting in go karts now..because I can't upload the picture or video.) My go kart broke down...started up again at full throttle with no brakes...broke down...started at full throttle again...then broke down...so I quit. The boys had so much fun...despite the fact that it started pouring down rain right when we started racing. We finished up and started walking to our picnic spot...but decided it was raining so hard we would put the kids in the truck and Mark and I would ride bikes back to the hotel (he had drove into town earlier to stage food then jogged back to the hotel). After lunch we went to a Lewis and Clark interpretive center and wandered around it was also an old army fort. Long Beach is where Clark first saw the pacific ocean and the interpretive center catalogued their whole trip with exhibits about their journal entries...it was really cool. Simon decided he would rather be at the hotel watching TV...so he pouted with his arms folded most of the time...but I got him out of it at the end and we did some of the fun activities they had there...like seeing how many wooden blocks we could load in a miniature canoe before it tipped over...sighting an old musket at pictures of animals 100 yards away...and getting imprints of animal tracks on the map they gave us. It was super fun. After that we went out to the old army fort... where you could run around inside the old bunkers and we all played army for awhile with the kids. After that it was dinner time and we went to the resteraunt on the resort we were staying at. I had "Devils on Horseback" which is scallops wrapped in bacon..and is freaking awesome! We went back to the room and had cake (it was Marks birthday...which is why we went down there). The next day we went and bought some stuff from a little museum for the boys...Dylan got a drum and two wooden knives...Simon got 3 geodes to break open and two wooden knives. Then we played mini golf..then went to Fort Columbia...another old army fort where we again played army in the old concrete bunkers...which was also tons of fun. We parted ways with the Ballaris' after that and headed to Yakima again...went swimming for a while in the pool..then ordered pizza and watched Tangled then went to bed. Woke up this morning and got some breakfast then went swimming again then went and played frisbee golf. We were going to go out to lunch at Red Robin but I realized I needed to pick the dogs up by 5 from the boarder...so we had to skedaddle and drive exactly the speed limit very quickly to get back to Republic in time. It was a great weekend...Dylans favorite things were frisbee golf and go karts...and Simons favorite thing was the whole weekend. We were going to go Mt. St. Helens on the way there and on the way back...but the the mountain was all socked in with clouds both ways so we didn't want to go up there and not be able to see anything. Sorry for no pictures...I'll get it figured out and try to add them soon. Hope everybody's doing well!Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-55866567598473464442013-01-12T10:47:00.000-08:002013-01-12T10:47:33.536-08:00Well, my photo uploader seems to be broken, so I guess no pictures. Not much has been happening here, Simon turned 9 on Wednesday. He got up at 4 am and asked if he could wake up Dylan and Faith so he could open presents. Melanie asked for a better explanation of the snowmobile roll over so here it is: We went to a sledding party a couple days before Christmas at our friend Billy and Emily's house. We had a bonfire and a bunch of kids there sledding down the the driveway, which is about a 1/4-1/2 mile sled run down to where the kids would get picked up by Gwen or TJ on the snowmobiles and carted back to the top of the driveway. Gwen came up and said she was cold and wanted to sit by the fire for awhile, and asked if I would take her new snowmobile to haul the kids up. I said I didn't think that was a good idea, as last time I drove a snowmobile I ran a little kid over. Everybody laughed and Gwen said I wouldn't run a kid over, just go get them. Again I protested. Again everybody laughed at me. Gwen said you're not going to hurt it, and we've got insurance on them, just go get the kids. I said OK, but it's on your head. So I drove down to where 4 kids were waiting, my 2 and Gwen and TJ's 2. Billy was down there as well, he'd been skiing down the road. I asked Lucas how many Gwen usually could take, and he said that everybody could fit. So, there were 3 kids behind me and Dylan in front of me, holding a runner sled. Billy grabbed on to the back and said to haul him up. I went to take off and we weren't really moving, Billy said I had to punch it to take off. So I punched it, we went about 10 feet, then the skiis came off the ground, the whole thing spun to the right and we tumbled over, breaking the runner sled in the process. So Billy and me checked on the kids, flipped the snow machine back over, then TJ pulled up, and I said sorry, I just flipped your new snowmobile. He said no big deal, helped me get it started again, and I drove back up to the bon fire and parked it. Gwen said I needed to turn it around and where are the kids. I said I'm not driving that thing anymore, and the kids refused to ride with me after I flipped it. Then Emily yelled at me for breaking her sled. Every time I go to their house I break something. Well, that's not entirely true, I've been there 2 times where nothing got broke. It's mostly been kitchen chairs and lawn furniture. I had been sitting in a chair in their kitchen the first time I went over there for about 30 minutes and the stupid thing shattered underneath me. Like all 4 legs just exploded. They never let me replace anything either, saying it was old and they were getting new stuff anyway. This time I bought a new runner sled and just had it shipped to her without saying anything, that way she couldn't refuse it. <br />
That's about it, we're going to go to Omak today to see The Hobbit, then tomorrow I'm going to Spokane with a bunch of people to see the Randy Rogers Band. That's about it. Picture uploader still isn't working. Sorry.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-69567664467318006682012-12-24T06:53:00.002-08:002012-12-24T06:53:53.173-08:00So, last time I drove a snowmobile I was like 13 and ran over a little kid. When I drove one last night I rolled with 4 kids on it and crushed a runnersled.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-86060681754976849892012-12-08T12:45:00.002-08:002012-12-08T12:45:34.195-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Simon and I duck hunting on opening weekend. <br />
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Dylan's birthday<br />
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Thanksgiving pictures<br />
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Not much is happening here. I was taking pictures off the camera and decided I should probably post a few. Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-5487468453525808302012-10-31T11:32:00.000-07:002012-10-31T11:32:01.067-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I went on a guided goose hunt with some other Ducks Unlimited volunteers last weekend, and this was the result. We got 18 geese with 5 hunters. The guide was getting the truck so we could load up, and my friend Kent was taking this picture, so that's why there's only 3 of us in the pit blind. Pretty fun morning. Not much else has been going on really, we got a call today asking how many sawyers we had available to send back east to help with the storm damage, so hopefully that will pan out and I can head out there, just waiting for a call back from our dispatch center. Hope everybody's doing good, I'll take some pictures of the kids tonight in costumes and post them on here some time in February probably. Happy Halloween!
Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-91828639765072684672012-08-19T13:33:00.000-07:002012-08-19T13:33:54.385-07:00My Natural Disaster is better than Jeremy's <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Sorry Jeremy, you have back surgery, a doctor tells me I'm going to die, you have flooding in your park, we get a windstorm that knocks out power to the entire county for 2 solid days, eventually takes 2 weeks to get power back to everybody, does an estimated 15 million dollars in damages, and smashes houses and cars all over the county. <br />
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We put an small airplane up the day after the wind storm to look for people and/or cars trapped behind roads that looked like the one above, which was essentially every main road on the forest, and at 12:00 the observer called to tell me they finished flying the district and didn't see anybody. Then at 12:30 a guy came crawling over the downed trees along a road and met one of our folks out surveying damage and said his car was trapped about 2 miles further up the road. So the next day we ordered a helicopter and had them fly the district again, but lower and slower, which is where most of the pictures came from. It was a pretty amazing storm, I've never seen the wind blow that hard in my life. They were predicting 60 mph gusts that day, but it had to be blowing harder than that, we've had 60 mph gust on the district before that didn't do that level of damage. I have a computer program for modeling the terrain's effect on wind, and I ran a 60 mph gust through it and it came up with 115-145 mph for it's top windspeed, which I find totally believable.<br />
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After the wind storm clean up was pretty much done I took a couple days off and took the kids camping. Breakfast on what was predicted to be the hottest day of the year.<br />
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How Simon and Dylan stayed cool on the hottest day of the year.<br />
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This was one of the funniest things I think I've seen the kids do, they were totally hamming it up trying to make me laugh harder, and it worked.<br />
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The inside of the wall tent on the first night. We brought the dogs with us. We went to sleep at about 10 pm that night. At 4:30 the next morning, I was woke up to the sound of dog barking like it was going to kill something, then heard the other one join in, then I saw a squirrel turn around and dart out of the wall tent, with the dogs in hot pursuit. They left the tent, came back through the tent, slamming into the cot the boys were sleeping on and bouncing off the center tent pole, over the top of me, out of the tent, then back through it again, the whole time the dogs are barking, I'm yelling at the dogs, the squirrel is shrieking in squirrel terror language, and the kids are dead asleep. I got up and went outside the tent to see Arlo catch the squirrel and give it a good death shake. Dylan was the first one awake about 2 hours later, and I think he may have thought I was making the whole thing up, he didn't hear any of it, neither did Simon when he woke up a couple hours after that. I can't believe what they'll sleep through. <br />
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This picture was supposed to be up with the other ones.<br />
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Did anybody watch the meteor showers last weekend? Simon and I stayed up til 2 am one night watching, it was awesome, we saw one meteor that I swear was going to hit the ground. It just kept getting bigger and brighter and lasted about 3-4 seconds, which if you count it off in your head and picture a meteor getting bigger and brighter, is pretty cool. They're apparently called fireballs, I read about them the next day. The next night of the meteor shower neither kid wanted to stay up and watch it, so I stayed up until about 4 am watching them, with the help of a couple pots of coffee. I decided that I would just sleep on the trampoline once the coffee wore off, since that's where I was watching from anyway. I left Faith a note, she had to be at work at 7 that morning. She left for work while the kids were still asleep, and when they woke up they didn't see my note, and grew rather concerned they were home alone. So, rather than enjoy it, they went over the district office and told my boss their mom was at work and their dad was supposed to be watching them but he wasn't anywhere to be found. Someone from work actually came over and looked around the house to make sure the kids didn't just miss me, then left me a note. The kids decided they'd be OK at home as long as they locked all the doors and sat on the couch watching a movie. The whole time this is going on, I'm sound asleep on the trampoline, which is in full view of the road every single person has to walk or drive up to get to the office. I'm sleeping in a gray and bright orange sleeping, and I don't if any of you have noticed, but I'm kind of hard to miss, especially outfitted in bright colors. I woke up and said good morning to somebody walking by, who looked startled by my apparently disembodied voice floating out of the bright orange mound on the trampoline and said "We've been looking everywhere for you!" I tried to get in the house, and found all the doors locked, except the sliding glass door on the deck, and went in to find about 30 messages on both my personal and work phone. It was pretty funny. That's about it, my boss is on a fire, so it appears that I get to work for 19 days straight, which will be nice. Hope everybody's doing well.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-7862325015683313172012-07-16T08:49:00.003-07:002012-07-16T08:49:46.050-07:00Finally, some pictures<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I got home from Montana on Thursday, and on Sunday we took the boys to Chewelah, WA to check out Chataqua Days, an annual carnival kind of thing. It's an hour and a half drive to Chewelah, but there was a planned power outage and flash flood warnings with quarter sized hail predicted for Republic, so we decided it would be worth it to get out of town for the day. It was pretty fun. They had a bunch of rides set up, and little booths that had a bunch of hand made jewelry and stuff, Faith had a watch made for her out of old silverware that is pretty neat. The boys had loads of fun eating cotton candy and snow cones, riding all the rides, and playing little carnival games for stuffed animals. The picture above is their last ride on the small roller coaster. I took the pictures with my phone, because we forgot the camera. You may recall me saying that I believed the camera had been stolen out of the van. I still believe it was, but the thief must have felt bad, broke into the house, and hung the camera and camera bag in the coat closet under the winter coats for Faith to find. <br />
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Hopefully you can see Simon's expression. This was the Sky Machine, it goes back and forth and eventually spins all the way around, and pauses at the top so you're completely upside down a couple of times and just hanging from the harness praying that this isn't the time the stupid thing breaks. Simon rode it 3 or 4 times by himself, and somehow managed to talk me into once. I did not enjoy it as much as he did.<br />
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Bumper cars. They did this one a lot, Faith and I sat in the shade for an hour while they just ran around and got in line again every time it ended. Simon got rather intense while driving the car, and if someone bumped into him he gave them a look like he was going to hunt them down and kill them slowly, then would follow them around ramming them until somebody else ran into him, then the whole process would start over. <br />
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This is the first ride on the roller coaster, notice that they're both smiling.<br />
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After the first lap, notice that Dylan doesn't look like he's enjoying himself, hopefully you can see the look on his face. He shrieked almost the entire time, to the point that the operator looked over at me in concern like he was thinking about stopping the ride to let Dylan get off. When the ride finally ended Dylan jumped off and ran over and said "Did you hear me, I screamed like a girl the whole time!" He was laughing while he said it, and he rode it again, so must not have been too bad for him. There was a couple rides he didn't ride because he said he was too scared, the Octopus and the Sky Machine, but Simon rode everything.<br />
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This is from Montana, we watched this fire start at about 730 in the evening from a powerline knocked down by a windstorm, this picture was taken at about 8 pm. We ended up catching it at about 530 the next morning, at 9,500 acres. I had a pretty good trip, I got stuck working on night shift for 7 or 8 shifts, but night shift can be kind of fun. As long as you get food and good sleep during the day, neither of which was readily available at times. As a joke I'd told the guy I was working for that I needed 4 things from the management team: Maps, Communication, Resources (like hand crews and fire engines), and some fire to fight, the team was good about getting me 2 out of the four pretty consistently, usually resources and fire. After a few shifts on night shift and discovering that they were out of food for breakfast or they hadn't started cooking dinner yet and wouldn't until we were already supposed to be on the line, and spending way too much time either trying to find us a place to sleep or chasing shade around a campground, I asked if we could negotiate to get food and sleep added to my list of things I needed. Overall it was a great time, I ran into a couple of park rangers who knew Michael, one was from the Grand Canyon and one was from Utah. That's about it, I've had the last 3 days off, but I go back to work tomorrow. Today the kids and I are going for a bike ride while Faith's at work, then I'm going to go fishing when she gets home. Oh, I bought the kids new bikes on Friday, they were getting to big for their old ones, and about 15 minutes after getting home, Dylan ran into a parked car, hard enough to make his bike slide most of the way underneath it. That's what I hear anyway, I was in the garage looking for something, one of the guys living in the bunkhouse heard it happen and helped Dylan get his bike out then pushed it back up to the house for him. Hope everybody's doing well, see ya later.</div>
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<br /></div>Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-87192147791379719112012-06-24T08:10:00.001-07:002012-06-24T08:10:20.804-07:00Spokane, fishing, and flat tiresWe went to Spokane this week and spent the night there, Simon had a couple of doctor appointments, and I had my appointment with a new cardiologist. Simon's appointments went fine, just routine check up stuff. My appointment went pretty good, I'm going to get a heart catheter in a few weeks to see about finding the cause and possibly fixing the tachycardia thing, I've got an extra node on my heart that could be sending wonky signals and causing the rapid heart rate, and if they find that's the case they can burn it off with the heart catheter. The cardiologist also thinks I would be a good candidate for heart valve repair surgery. Everything I've ever looked at for surgery was valve replacement, but he said if I got valve replacement neither him nor any cardiologist he knows would sign off on me fighting fire again. So he's going to do some more tests like the heart catheter thing and maybe a trans esophogeal echocardiogram (they knock me out and shove a camera down my throat to look at my heart), then he's going to present my case to the group of surgeons he works with and see if any of them think my valve could be repaired. If they say no he's going to refer my case to the Mayo Clinic. He stressed it wasn't an emergency to get it repaired, but thought it would be better to do it in a non-emergency situation. So we'll see what happens. After the doctor appointment I took the kids to the mall while Faith went to Michael's (the craft store, not her boyfriends house). The boys each had $20 to spend, and they insisted they were going to spend it all on video games at the arcade. They mostly play games that spit out tickets that they can trade in for cheap crap. I convinced them to go to a comic book store first that sells toys to see if there was anything they wanted. We all decided to spend $15 on new wallets. I got a Star Wars wallet, Simon got Batman and Dylan got Ironman. Their wallets have chains, mine doesn't. So then we went to the arcade and they spent their last $5 on games, got a bunch of tickets and traded it in for cheap crap. Dylan got a paddle ball that broke before we even left the arcade. Saturday Faith was going to go grocery shopping, and I was going to take the kids to the car races in town, but on the way home they saw that the movie "Brave" was playing in Colville, so Faith convinced them to go see the movie instead. I went fishing with Landon to a place called Empire Lake. I caught 8 or 9 fish, I lost track while we were trying to see the bear that was making weird noises at the edge of lake. We assumed it was a bear any way, whatever it was was making "whumpf" noises really loud at the edge of the lake, but the brush was so thick we couldn't see anything. We also saw a great blue heron getting attacked by a black bird, that was pretty neat. It was cold and raining, so after 3 hours we decided to call it quits and got out of the lake. I'd told Landon I wasn't sure if I was cold or if my waders were leaking, turns out they were leaking slightly. It also turned out that my van had a flat tire. It also turned out that my spare, while it looked fine when we got it out, was flat as well. Luckily I had met Landon at the lake, so he gave me and my tire a ride to Les Schwab to get it fixed, then dropped me off at home, Faith and I have to go get it put on the van today. That's about it, hope everybody's doing well. I think I mentioned in my last post that my camera got stolen out of the van, so no pictures for a while.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-66627249866462230642012-05-28T17:38:00.000-07:002012-05-28T17:38:53.822-07:00The cardiologist and campingSo I went to the cardiologist last Friday. He said "You have an interesting and complex heart, and an ER doctor that sees it for the first time is going to think you're having an acute medical emergency, but in reality, your heart looks the same as it did 5 years ago when I first looked at it. You can continue to do whatever activity you feel you're able to." The tachycardia is something that happens a couple times a year to me anyway, and I can usually get that to go away on its own, and the pains when I took a deep breath probably was the pericarditis. That continued until I took some ibuprofen when I got home from the ER and it went away and hasn't come back. So, back to normal for the Curtis family in Republic I guess. <br />
Friday night was my friend Billy's birthday. I went camping with him and his wife and his twin brother Gary (it was his birthday too) and Gary's girlfriend. We went camping in a campground because a friend of Billy and Gary's was coming up Saturday with a travel trailer to "camp" for the long weekend. I wasn't planning on camping, but when I woke up Saturday morning I decided to run home and grab the kids and come back up and camp. Faith chose to stay home and have a weekend to herself. A few of our other friends were camping for the weekend as well at the campground, so there would be other kids for the boys to play with. So, I got home at about 6:30 in the morning on Saturday, loaded up the old minivan with the necessary gear, including a wall tent my friend Jeremy had given me years ago and I hadn't used yet. I also brought our normal tent in case the wall tent didn't work out. So we headed up to Swan Lake campground and got a site right next to where everybody else was camped. The wall tent set up went surprisingly well with the boys helping hammer in stakes and tying things down while I held the poles steady. Having a tent you can stand up in to change clothes when you're wet is awesome, and both Simon and I ended up in the lake, but we'll talk about that later. So Billy's friend Brian showed up with his travel trailer and his family. We walked over to introduce ourselves and Simon met Violet, Brian's 7 year old daughter, and the two were instantly inseparable. Brian told me last night "If Simon was about 5 years older him and I would be having a long talk." They were pretty funny together, Violet said her chair was too heavy for her to move, so Simon assured her it wasn't to heavy for him and lifted it over his head as he moved to where she wanted it. Simon took her fishing down by the lake and was showing off by walking on a log jutting out into the water and fell in the lake. I had extra clothes, but not extra shoes, so Simon sat in a chair by the fire the rest of the night, and said he wanted to throw small pieces of wood into the fire. Violet then spent the next hour or so running between our campsite where there was a bunch of small pieces of wood the boys had chopped with the hatchet, and the campsite where we were sitting around the fire bringing Simon handfuls of wood to throw in the fire. Violet invited Simon to sleep in the trailer with her, but I said no. Dylan spent a lot of time playing with his friend Logan, they went fishing for awhile, but both ended up getting their line snagged, and Dylan tried to wade out to free their hooks, but didn't make it. So I now had two wet kids sitting by the fire with no shoes. After dinner and smores, Gary fed all the kids birthday cake at about 9:30 at night, except for Dylan, who informed the whole camp he "wants to eat more healthy stuff and less unhealthy stuff" so he didn't eat any cake. I think it was more from eating 6 hot dogs, 1/2 a bag of doritos, and 3 smores, but he assured me it wasn't, and sat down and ate another hotdog. Me and the boys spent a great night in the wall tent, got up the next morning and started a fire and ate some breakfast, and I got our friend Gwen to keep an eye on the boys while I ran home to grab dry shoes for the boys, and I got back and we went for a hike around the lake to do some fishing. As we took off, Gwen's son Lucas said he should take the lead, since he knew exactly where we were going to fish. So he took the lead, with Simon and me right behind him, and we ended up leaving everybody else way behind. We got about 3/4 of the way around the lake, and Lucas turned with an exasperated sigh and said "Ben, where are we going!?" I told him I'd been following him and I wasn't sure. So we found a place to fish, Violet, Dylan, and Lucas' brother Logan had caught up by then, and between all the boys we caught three trees about 30 feet up, numerous bushes behind us, one finger, and a downed log in the lake. We finished the hike around the lake and ate some lunch, and me and Billy and Brian started a cribbage tournament (which I won later that evening), when Brian said he'd always wanted to build a raft and paddle it across a lake. After some discussion about what supplies we had available, Billy, Brian, TJ (Gwen's husband), and I took off hiking to the other side of the lake with 50' of rope, a bow saw, and a hatchet. After cutting up a bunch of 9' long chunks of wood of varying diameters that a beaver had thoughtfully laid down right next to the lake for us, I suggested we have a discussion about design. About that time Gwen's dad Richard showed up with all the kids to watch us. We settled on a design and set to building. We quickly discovered that 50' feet of rope wasn't enough for the design we wanted to we figured out something else that we were fairly certain would work. Richard suggested handing anything over to him that we didn't want at the bottom of the lake, so I gave Simon my wallet and a knife and keys, which he ended up setting down next to a stump and trying to leave, but I noticed and got him to pick it up and take it with him. So we got the raft built and Brian and Billy got on. It wasn't looking too stable, and while it was technically floating, the weight of the two of them was keeping it just barely above the surface of the water. Billy had already made me swear I would get on it and paddle back across the lake with them, so I jumped on the raft, causing it to sink about a foot under the surface of the water. I was standing on it, and I was going to turn and jump back to shore, but every time I tried to shift my weight the darn thing almost tipped over, so I ended just jumping backwards off of it and wading back to shore. Richard thought it would work if I sat on the back of the raft with my legs in the water, Billy in the middle, and Brian in the front. Since I was already wet I waded back out and hopped back on. We all got situated and amazingly the raft stayed afloat, though all of us were wet and the "raft" was below the surface of the water. We had some "paddles" that were really 6" wide pieces of dead tree, and we set off paddling all the way back across the lake to camp. I spent some time thinking on a an article I had read in the paper a few weeks ago about the number of drownings this year already. The leading causes were alcohol, inflatable water craft, and a lack of life jackets. After I thinking that at least we weren't in an inflatable water craft I started to feel better. I spent most of the trip back convincing Billy that it would be much better if we made it without sinking, and Billy trying to convince Brian and me that it would be a much better story if the raft sank 1/2 way back and we had to swim the rest of the way. We ended up making it all the way back to camp, where quite a crowd had gathered. Richard had brought his wife and her parents, some of our other friends had showed, and some other kids camping at the campground had all gathered to watch us. The people in un adventurous store bought boats with their life jackets on gave us some pretty weird looks on the way across. Gwen took some video and a couple of pictures that I will hopefully get from her and post. My camera has disappeared, I am beginning to think it got stolen out of the van at some point, that was the last place I remember having. I've looked all through the house, and the van and it hasn't turned up. So we all got changed into dry clothes, though Brian didn't have any extra shoes and had to wear his wife's flip flops the rest of the trip. Another friend showed up with her son and a bunch of wood that somebody had cut up for the kids to hammer together to make boats, so we spent the rest of the evening doing that. Dylan said he was cold at about 630 and asked me to come into the tent with him to grab his coat, then told me he was tired and wanted to go to bed, and he was asleep about 5 minutes later. Simon and Billy both fell asleep sitting in camp chairs at about 8:30, and everybody else started drifting off to tents shortly after. I got up this morning and started a fire and made some coffee, the boys slept in for quite awhile. Everybody packed up pretty early, Brian had to drive back to Idaho, and they all wanted to go to a fireman's breakfast benefit they do every Memorial Day weekend here. Simon told me he was going to miss Violet, so I suggested he ask for her address so he could write her a letter. Me and the boys just came home though, ate some lunch and watched a movie while I took a nap. It was a pretty fun weekend overall. Hope everybody's doing well.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-26158653565030237372012-05-19T21:31:00.000-07:002012-05-19T21:31:30.750-07:00Bigfoot, a further explanation of Portland, and stealing glory from JeremySo, I've had a couple people ask me to explain what happened on the bigfoot hunting adventure, so here it goes. 1. I forgot my camera. 2. I broke a ski pole and a cell phone. 3. We didn't find bigfoot. That's the short version. The longer version is that we skiied about 7 miles, 1/2 of which was up hill on icy crap. The two guys I was with had skins on their skis, I did not. That means that they could move uphill a lot faster than I could, but through some herring bone duck walking I was able to keep up. We beat on some trees with a big stick, because that's supposed to be something bigfoots (bigfeet?) do to communicate, but nothing knocked back. FYI, though, the sound of tree being knocked on in the middle of the night when you're fairly certain you're the only people for miles around is still a kind of freaky noise. So, after we knocked on trees and hung out on the edge of a cliff after skiing to ridgetop, we decided to ski back down the icy mess we skiied up. Like I said, the two guys I was with had skins, which also helps them go slower on the way down. I did not go slow, hence the broken ski pole and cell phone. I eventually took my skis off and walked the rest of the way back to the truck. That's about it, we went and snowshoed up to another place at about 3 in the morning, but it was bloody cold, and we gave up and went back to Landon's and had breakfast and coffee. It was a lot fun though, skiing under a full moon made the broken gear worth it. <br />
The Portland trip: I feel there may be some further explanation needed, after Mom sounded concerned when she asked me "Did you really have a $530 bar tab?" That included dinener for about 12 people, at a rather fancy resteraunt, so it's not as cool as it may have sounded initially. Though the dragonfly balloon part is all true.<br />
Stealing glory from Jeremy: As you probably all know, Jeremy had back surgery on Monday. I hope he's doing well, we've been trading phone messages for a couple weeks now, I haven't been able to talk to him. Here goes the glory stealing: For those of you that remember, about 8 years ago I had to go the hospital in Bend because my heart was beating super fast and my chest hurt whenever I tried to take a breath. In Bend, they got the heart rate thing under control, then sent me on my way. Well, the same thing happened Wednesday night, and once they got my heart rate under control (it was 170 at it's highest while I was sitting up in a hospital bed) they thought it would be a good idea to figure out why I felt like I was getting stabbed in the chest with a knife everytime I tried to breathe. So, a lot of drugs and blood tests and x-rays and echo cardiograms later, they still weren't sure. The doctor thought I had pericarditis, an inflamation of the lining around my heart that can be caused by being sick (which I was with a 100 degree fever for 5 days prior to the epidsode), but the cardiologist didn't agree with him. The echo cardiogram guy thought I had endocarditis, an infection of the lining around the heart, but blood tests didn't support it. The echo did show that my tricuspid valve (the one that had never worked all that well from birth) was probably working less well than usual, leading to my heart being bigger than normal, though they were all confused by my lack of shortness of breath and my ability to keep up with everybody when we're hiking and working at work. So, the head doctor in Republic, with all his awesome bedside manner, came in said "your tricuspid valve is failing, and the enlargement of your heart will likely lead to heart failure soon, so you should get that fixed." Then he walked out. Awesome. So I've got an appointment with a regular cardiologist next Friday, and another appointment 2 weeks later with a cardiologist that specializes in adults with congenital heart defects. As such, I'm on light duty at work until I'm cleared by a cardiologist. Good times. In reality, my heart has mystified all my cardiologists for years now, they do tests and can't believe I do as well as I normally do. And I can't remember what my last echo and x-ray looked like to know if it's radically different than before, or if somebody that isn't used to looking at my heart is like "WTF is going on here?" without any background on how it normally looks. All that aside, though, I did spend about 24 hours not able to breathe really well with a heart rate of around 170 while I was resting, so I've been exhausted since then. We'll see what happens when I go to the cardiologist next week. Hope everybody's doing better than me! See ya.<br />Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-46135098482526999652012-04-20T00:06:00.001-07:002012-04-20T00:06:25.640-07:00So, I don't have much to say except this: If you've never settled a $530 bar tab while you're with with a regional leadership and development group, then packed a dragonfly balloon through downtown Portland, then walked into your hotel with said dragonfly baloon bumping the ceiling asking for a late checkout, you're missing out. We didn't get any clowns or mindreaders though, it was all on our own dime in case you're wondering about my affiliation with the GSA.Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2101878509391118458.post-54291495802425898862012-03-03T13:53:00.000-08:002012-03-03T13:53:29.202-08:00Pictures<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Simon attempting to snowboard a couple weeks ago while we were sledding<br />
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Dylan's birthday and some of his presents.<br />
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Snowshoeing up on the Kettle Crest.<br />
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The kids with spider web facepaint</div>
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Skiing above the Kettle River Valley. We started down along the river, and skied (and hiked some) to get up on this point. It was all down hill on the way back on some old roads. None of us can turn very well while going down hill, so we were all covered in snow and sporting some new bruises by the time we made it back to Landon's house. The two guys in this picture are Jason and Landon, on Tuesday night we're going....wait for it....Bigfoot hunting! In case you don't remember, in 2009 I posted a bigfoot story here, I don't want to retype it all, so if you're interested go read it. It's about 3/4's of the way down the 2009 page. Anyway, my friend Landon had a weird experience on a fire last summer, something was throwing rocks at trees when he was the only one around. So he talked to some other folks around the area, another guy we know is dating a native girl and has heard some crazy bigfoot stories from the elders down on the reservation. So Landon suggested a full moon nightime bigfoot hunt on skis. It should be pretty fun, we're going to start out skiing up a ridge above where my experience happened, stay up there for a few hours then go up on to the Kettle Crest and ski back into a big roadless area and get up on a ridge there as well. I think our plan is to just see if we can hear anything weird. I'm bringing a digital recorder and a huge spot light. And bear spray. And a large caliber handgun. Just in case, you know. <br />
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Faith getting ready to push Dylan down the sled hill we snow shoed to a couple weeks ago.</div>
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For some reason the blog is centering all my typing now. Oh well, that's about it. I'll post the story of our bigfoot hunt next week hopefully, Friday I'm leaving for Tucson. Due to "travel caps" (restrictions on how much we can spend on non-emergency travel whether we have the budget for it or not) we've gotten rather inventive at finding ways to send people to training and stay under our limit. For example, the way the agency is tracking travel spending, only the dollars that get put into our travel planning and reimbursement program get officially tracked as part of our travel cap. So, if I drive rather than fly down to Tucson, it appears that we spend $1200 less. I figured the out the cost of driving, it is actually cheaper by about $500 after you figure the cost of the ticket and a rental car. So I get to spend three days driving down and three days driving back. The class I'm taking is two weeks long, so I'll be gone for 18 days. I'll stop in Idaho Falls on my way down on the 9th of March, then drive to Boulder City, Nevada to stay with a friend there, then down to Tucson. On the way home I'm going back through Page and up to Idaho Falls, where I'll stay with mom and dad again. That's about it, hopefully everybody's doing well. </div>Curtis Family Republichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01393063877860994661noreply@blogger.com0