What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Part I--JUNE

It is 58 degrees and raining right now, and IT IS STILL AUGUST! Ugh. I love Seattle, but this is ridiculous. However, it does reinforce the fact that summer is, inexorably, coming to a close (schools are starting, pears are falling off the trees, and--gasp!--are those maples going a bit reddish over there?) and I realized that I have not posted anything to the blog in about two months.

Thankfully, this is because we have been extremely busy doing lots of fun stuff. Liam finished his first year of pre-school, which was celebrated with a school camping trip to Vashon Island. The Kaplans visited towards the beginning of the month, meeting up with us on the island, and then immediately thereafter we made an unexpected, short, and hastily planned trip to Phoenix to visit Amy's grandmother who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was good to see her, but obviously, the circumstances were pretty sad. Fortunately she is still hanging in there and has a few more months left. During our visit, she was pretty lucid, and was able to visit with our boys and the other grand kids and socialize for a couple of hours at a stretch.

We made it up to the mountains for a beautiful hike to Twin Lakes near Snoqualmie Pass--Liam absolutely loved having a snowball fight in summer. At the very end of the month we visited with Ben Heumann, one of my students from McGill, during a stop on his epic bike journey from Portland OR to Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory before his PhD started in August. It was great fun catching up with Ben and hearing about his adventures. You can read a lot more about his voyage and check out some cool pictures on his travel blog here .