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.
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.