Another winter break tradition

As last year (and the year before?), we made one last trip to the Oregon coast. The weather in Wilsonville was frightful - foggy and bleak. The weather in Neskowin - delightful!

Boxing day

It's been a while since we've been in Molalla - swampy, but always beautiful...

Christmas 2016

It's Christmas time and we have Maggie and Sailor visiting.
Taking a 'family' Christmas picture in front of the tree with all seven of us in 10 seconds (the timer on the camera) turned out to be rather tricky - this is as close as we got:

But for most of the day, things were very relaxed.

This year's presents were very much coffee centric: Michaela got me a fancy 'Vertuo Line' Nespresso maker and she got a burr grinder (until now, we have still been using our blade grinder from Rochester days) and bean storage container. Now we are all set for weekends (French press coffee) and work weeks (Nespresso coffee)!

 

 


Dinner was the obligatory fondue, of course.









We started out with some Lego afterwards...

Michaela enjoyed her new ring...

... and I more comfortable ear plugs (which are brilliant!)!

More Lego happened on Christmas Day, everyone was trying to help:

The collection is starting to grow:

 (This one is obviously not done, yet.)

October, November, December...

Last update has been a while. Time flies when you are having fun...
On September 19th Neil deGrasse Tysson visited Portland and gave a lecture on Physics in the movies, from classics like '2001' and 'Back to the Future' to recent block busters like 'Gravity'. Good fun! He is one of the very few Physicists who made it into pop culture (he made it into DC Comic's Superman) and embraced it:


Less than two weeks later, Trevor Noah of 'The Daily Show' fame was in town - not to be missed, either! He found a very receptive audience in liberal, hipster Portland, of course. At that point, everyone was still laughing, given how the election was expected to go...

And finally, in early October, Roxane Gay ('Bad Feminist', also the first black female lead writer for Marvel Comics) gave the Atkinson lecture at Willamette.

Michaela was dismayed that - once again - I missed Halloween: this year's excuse was an invitation to give a talk at the ASSL/LAC conference in Boston...

November - Thanksgiving! As in all of the past few years, Billie and Rod invited us to a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner at their place. Good times!


As winter is coming, Michaela and I have started playing with Lego again. Helps to decompress and we continue to be delighted by the smart building strategies and tricks of the new Lego Modular sets:

iFLY

Jan had another birthday present up his sleeve: A trip to iFLY in Portland for some indoor skydiving. Oh boy! It was SO MUCH FUN! Each of us got only 2 minutes in the wind tunnel (in two sessions), so there was a lot of waiting while others in our group had their turn, but it was definitely worth it. We had a blast!

As part of the package we could download two of the four videos. Here is us on our second minute in the wind tunnel. Since it was my birthday today I got a bonus high-fly for the last 30 seconds. Very cool! 

Timothy and little crater lake hike

As fall is coming, it's time to get some hiking in before the eternal rain starts. Hence, Labor Day weekend is prime hiking time! Originally we planned to make it a two day backpacking trip, but we were both so tired on Saturday, that we mostly slept through it. That left more hiking for Sunday!

We started out close to little crater lake, the origins of which are somewhat different than its bigger brother (artesian spring vs. volcano crater), but the water is equally amazing:

A short hike from little crater lake is Timothy lake - considerably larger (a couple of miles across).

 PGE has a dam here (compared to Bonneville, it's very tiny). Below is where some of the water is released:

 While hiking around Timothy lake, we came across some curious trees, the only thing alive on them appears to be some moss. We'll prod a biologist to learn more about that story...

 Pepper was all fired up, the last long hike was 2 months ago, after all. He maintained a very good pace throughout our 13+ mile hike.

 Timothy lake in the - partial - sun (morning had a complete cloud cover).

 Me on our second breakfast break: it's good to have breakfast!

 The trail is very well maintained. As always, a lot of people around when there is direct road access, but the density falls off a cliff as soon as you are at least one mile away from any access road. We did meet a few horse riders, though.

 Fall is coming...

 In the early afternoon the sun came finally out in earnest, but it never got really hot. (More than 3000 feet elevation helps...)

 After completing the loop around Timothy lake, we circled back to little crater lake. With the sun out, the water was even bluer!