September 2, 2002
Note on 4/6/03: I lost the pictures for this page because of a mistake I made. Sorry. The same is true for all the pages from 9/2/02 through 10/5/02, and again from 11/15/02 through all of 12/28/02. If I'm able to retrieve them, I'll replace them eventually. Again, I'm very sorry. HA!! Thanks to Greg (see 5/22/04) most these pictures were retrieved! Yaa Hoo!
YIKES! Time flies when you're having fun, eh? And we're having fun. Getting caught up with some friends, ex-coworkers, Doctors, storage locker and shopping. It's nice to be able to get around on familiar back roads and residential streets and avoid the main roads with all their traffic. This region has the third or fifth, in any event one of the worst, traffic situations in the country, and we're here to confirm that.
Hard to believe only one posting for the month of August. Surely proof that no news is good news. Except for the lack of interest in anyone buying our rig. There, no news is ....... well, it's wondrous to say the least. We wonder why not. And we wonder which of the three options we see now we'll actually act on. Buy (or trade for) a motorhome, secondly, a used converted bus (several in the late '80's match our $$ goal) or third, have a bus converted to our specifications. We like all three options for different reasons, and almost every day we talk about them, and almost every day Barb is leaning one way and I'm leaning another. And some days we both lean the same way. And yet other days we grumble about getting a hitch put on the back of the trailer and just towing the Jeep. That's not really an option for us, as I'm reluctant to subject myself to that much stress while towing.
But enough grousing about the questions in our lives, lets go harass some friends. In this case, it's Jim and his newest business. Jim's the big guy in the picture on the left with the rag in his hand. The fellow with his back to the camera is the first customer for this new business. It's a laser operated system that lets them put a 3-D picture inside a block of heavy crystal. Great for gifts or mementos of one sort or another. It's called Crystalix of Washington: Portraits In Crystal. They can do 2-D images from a photograph as well. Their "under construction" website is in process, and when it's up and running, I'll post the address. Pretty amazing stuff, actually.
This was their first day of operation, and it was fun for this old businessman to watch the anticipation. The blonde woman in the pictures above is Jim's step-daughter, Anemone, and as one of the computer operators for the laser, she had a question as to whether my beard would show up well in a crystal, so I dutifully posed. Anything to help a friend.
And there's some of the display images. It's kind of freaky, because as you turn the block of crystal around, you get the profile of the individual, and then you get the reverse image, and then the other side profile, and then back to the frontal view. We wish all concerned success with the venture. Barb remembers seeing some for sale at the Mandalay Bay Resort when we were in Las Vegas. And I'm not sure what Barb is doing all bent over there, but that's a view from our "porch" now that we've moved to Lake Retreat and the Lake Retreat Conference Center in Ravensdale, WA (south and east of Seattle). That's probably the biggest tire swing we've ever seen, and rather than being hung from a chain, it's hung by pretty good sized pipe. Kids get in the tire, others swing it and they seem to enjoy it. Behind that, in the lake, is this large yellow and blue "pillow" tied to a pier and anchored in position. The kids jump off a platform, land with a "thwack", crawl to the outer end and sit there. Then the next kid jumps off the platform, lands on one end of the pillow and sends the kid on the other end flying in the air. The first time we saw that happen (we had no idea what the pillow was for), we nearly split our sides laughing.
Nice homes surround the rather small lake, and of course here in the Pacific Northwest there are plenty of trees. That bridge goes to one of the lodges here at the center.
An outlet for the lake runs under that bridge, and then right by the end of the Road Abode. Pretty stark contrast from the environment of our last SOWERS project in Phoenix. See April 15 and you'll see what I mean. We haven't started work yet because of the Labor Day holiday, but tomorrow we'll have a clear picture of what exactly we'll be doing. Probably lots of minor maintenance, which is fun stuff for us to do. Rumor has it that there's a really old Ford diesel tractor that needs servicing, and that I'll have a chance to get grease under my fingernails and use some of my tools.
Now this picture is noteworthy for several reasons. Note the "Astroturf" we spread out on the ground. That keeps the trailer somewhat cleaner. I can't help but find it a bit ironic that people come to the great outdoors and bring their indoor stuff with them (we do like our creature comforts). Also noteworthy is the fact that we're eating dinner outside. And what's unusual about that is that we're mostly "inside" people. It matters too that this evening we were eating some of our Moses Lake trout and cooking outside is almost a requisite for fish. I've observed that there are "outside" people and "inside" people. I'd had the beginnings of that observation catching my interest when we met a fellow who owns an old bus and he asked us if we were inside people or outside people. We were talking to him about how he liked his 35' bus, and he said it was great because they spend very little time inside. They cook, eat, read, watch TV, and do most everything outside the bus. We admitted to being inside people and he said we should get a 40' bus. We intuitively already knew that, but it was neat to think about the distinctions between insiders and outsiders.