Doing it... The iPhone Photo Dump!

So my friend recently added a few pictures that she had taken with her iPhone and challenged all of her readers to do the same. I thought about it the day of and looked at my pictures and was a bit overwhelmed... which of the 756 pictures do I chose? How many pictures of my dogs can I show?

I decided to only put one of my favorite photo's of Oak and Scout, but found a bunch of other random fun ones.

When I was working at Brookstone, they introduced the iGallop and this was the marketing packet for the product. I still don't know why I kept this, but I'm sure glad I did...  Yes, I rode on it. Yes, I felt dirty as all get out!!! 

This ball thing was one of Tyler's Christmas presents this year. It took over an hour to blow up using some machine... and it was used once for all of 5 minutes...  But it was pretty funny to listen to Tyler yell as he went down the hill... and yes, there is a kid in the ball.

When I was in San Francisco, I went to Macy's... They were hot... or something... 

Thank you work Halloween party, I have never felt so pretty in my life... No, I am not grabbing my boobies, but showing off my oh so fabulous press on nails!!!

My absolute favorite picture of Scout. If you haven't met Scout yet, you just have. This is what you will see of Scout. He loves to get his neck rubbed and will place himself perfectly to get his neck rubbed and he will give you those eyes that say, 'please, please scratch my neck. it feels sooo good'.

My best idea EVER!!!! And yes, it was delicious!!!!

 

My garden this year before it was completely overwhelming me and I wasn't so done with tomatoes. It looked like a disaster at the end of the summer.

Huntington Ravine on Mount Washington. One of the coolest/scariest hikes we have ever done. We got to about the hershey kiss rock in the lower part where it looks snow covered. Then from there on, it was all ice pack. I can't remember why, but we had our skies and boards on our backs and were hiking up from that point. I was wearing my snowboard boots which have ZERO traction... I probably got about 5 steps higher than the hershey kiss rock and slid on my stomach right back to the hershey kiss rock. I'm pretty sure I cried. But obviously the hike up was BEAUTIFUL and the Sherburne trail on the way back to the car was awesome so all in all, it was a sweet day! 

Hurricane Bill... Pretty stinking rad!!! There's someone in that barrel.

Sweet, crazy Oakley

My beautiful hibiscus plant that I have since killed because it hasn't been flowering for a while and I decided it would be WAY more fun to start with new plants in my new house!! :-)

And, we are closing on our new house on February 4... It's OFFICIAL!!!!

Achey....

I have no pictures from any weekend warrior trip b/c there was no weekend warrior trip this weekend... As the last post explained, I hurt myself badly on Saturday. My poor bum aches and aches. Then to top it off... Tuesday afternoon, Nater got sick. He slept all day and slept all night and woke up chipper and went to work. Thursday afternoon, I left work early and ended up getting sick as well. Friday was just a chill day at home doing nothing. Saturday, we spent the whole day cleaning out closets and throwing stuff away. We made two trips to the dump... mostly recycling paper and throwing away stuff that did not need to move to a new location. I had almost 10 years of cooking light magazines + 9 years of cooking light books... Not sure I needed both, especially since 9 times out of 10, I go online and find a recipe!! We also made a trip to the goodwill with a car load full of old clothes and old toys!! YEA for cleaning out!! Nate is going to bring home boxes this week and we should be all set to roll!!! Now if only my bum didn't ache so dang bad...

Let the next adventure begin already!!! 

Oh, my aching tusch!!!

After the big snow fall on Wednesday of this week, we decided to head up to the Washington to have a little fun. There was about 2 feet of fresh fun stuff all around and there is no other word to describe it other than AWESOME!!!! The alarm went off at 4:30am on a Saturday... we are hard core... and we packed up our friend Sam's car (he's moved past just real estate agent) and we headed up to the big mountain. We got there before the sun had risen over the mountains and it was a blazing 2 degrees outside. It was COLD stuff!! However, once you start hiking up a mountain with a pack on your back, it warms up real quick. Here are some pics from the day:

Nate and I as we started off. Thankfully we took this before everything started freezing.

Pretty snow on the trees. I was trying to be all artistic, because you could see the snow flake crystals, but my camara didn't want to be as artistic as I wanted it to be. And there was a guy with snow shoes coming up behind me so I had to get moving. This is the best one that I got! :-(

Nate skinning up along the Cog Railway with Bretton Woods in the background. We should've stopped by the Woods on the way home to see our friend, Buck... but we didn't know he was there... Sorry Buck, next time!

Sam dredging up the hill. You can see Jacob's ladder behind Sam. That's as far as we got the last time we went because I was a huge pansy. We made it much further this time. Still no observation deck, but we are getitng closer!

Nate and Sam at Jacob's ladder. Pretty dope!!

Jacob's Ladder sign...

The other side of Jacob's ladder.

Nate's pack and you can see where we ended up in the middle of the screen. Those aren't our tracks but that's where we ended up going down.

Scout, as king of the mountain!!

Nate waiting to rip it up!

 

Nate shredding the gnar gnar!!!

After we came down to the middle, we had to go back up a litte. We booted it up and I gave up after a bit.  I felt like I was on an eliptical machine and I was getting a little frustrated. I need to get some traction on my snowboard boots or carry some snowshoes with me... Nate and Sam are the little people near the rocks in the middle of the picture.

That's my traverse line and the doggies tracks as they bounded towards me from where the boys were.

Oakley trying to seek cover from the winds. It was probably 1 degree at the top of the mountain by the time we got up there and the wind was cooking, so with the wind chill it was definitely below freezing. Plus with all their goofing around, they got snow in their jackets. When we took off their jackets at the bottom of the mountain, we discovered that the underbellies were completely frozen. :-( Poor things!!!

From the top-ish... There's Bretton Woods again!!

After all the fun we had coming down the top of the mountain, the real mis-adventure came at the end of the day. Today, there were 3 parts of our journey. The first part, you hike along the right side of the train tracks near the trees. Then, the tracks start to turn off to the right a bit, and you cross the tracks and head left over a narrow steepish trail. Then we crossed under Jacob's ladder and hiked up a bowl area. As we were coming down, I got through bowl fine. I think Sam tried to huck over a rock and landed on another rock and hurt himself. Then through the narrow part, Nate made a sharp turn and went down. He hurt his ankle pretty good. Then at the last part, Nate and Sam stayed to skiiers right of the tracks and went to the left to play on the left side of the trail because I'm goofy footed and the left side is always best. I was having a splendid time until I dried to do a jump and landed completely wrong and ended up eating it. I wasn't hurt and I laid in the snow for a bit, but I was like, 'huh, where are those boys?' I got up and saw that they were on the other side of the tracks. I saw a way to get over the tracks and went to go hang out on their side. I hit the track COMPLETELY wrong and did a very unintentional rail slide. My board flew out from under me and I hit the track squarely on the top of my bum!! It hurt like all goodness. Thankfully, I was wearing my backpack so I didn't hit my tusch as hard as I could have and my head never even got close. I had to ride about another 1/2 mile to the car.  I tried my hardest not to fall again because getting up was extremely painful. I ended up getting to the car and only fell twice... With how bad it was hurting, I thought it was definitely broken. It was a long 2 hour ride home, but we got home, I looked in the mirror and the bruise is definitely all muscle!! Thank freaking goodness!!!

All in all, it was an awesome day of riding in 2 feet of freshies! I would love it if every time could be like that. I also learned to stay away from that track or maybe learn how to rail slide on something other than a piece of frozen iron.

New kind of adventure

Nate & I put in an offer on a house and it was accepted. Excited, YES! Nervous, YES! Trying to wrap our heads around this... trying to find all the stuff we need to process a loan and trying to find time to get a home inspection, an appraisal, and all that good stuff. Here are the finer points:

It has an acre of land and it's 1,700 square feet. All hard wood floors and a fireplace. It has a section that could be used as a climbing wall and a hidden section that will be cool for a fort. It's a long mile and a half from our current location so we don't have to change too much and we'll be able to visit our neighbors all the time!! It's not on the beach and it's not in the mountains, but it's extremely close to both. It's pretty much perfect and we are sooo insanely excited!!

It's gonna be a great 2011!!!

Ending the year with a Bang!

After a week of not playing enough, Nate & I decided to head up to Mount Washington on Friday, December 31, to enjoy the recent dumping of snow. Since we hadn't hung out enough with our real estate agent, Sam, during the week, we decided to bring him along too. It's a good thing because the snow sucked and he provided a lot of entertainment.

As stated in recent posts, we got a blizzard over the previous weekend and supposedly the the west side of Mount Washington got 30+ inches of snow during the snow storm. However, the forecasted temperature for Mount Washington was 35 degrees on Friday. Therefore all the fresh snow turned into soupy mashed potatoes. It's fine in April to play in soupy mashed potatoes, because by that time, I've had enough runs in me that I remember all the fine aspects of snowboarding. It was my first time out and it was a doozey!!

We hiked up the cog railway and made it easily to Jacob's ladder. The cog railway is a railroad that was built on the west side of Mount Washington. You can take a train to summit the mountain during the summer. Jacob's Ladder is about 4,725 feet up the mountain. The summit as at 6,288 feet. Nate really wanted to make it to the summit and after getting down, letting the skies clearing and seeing how far we made, we could've done it... However, I was a pansy. Here's the deal. We got to Jacob's ladder and kept going up. At this point, there was a cloud nestled around the top of Mount Washington and visibility was about 20 feet. We started heading up and the grade was really steep. Where we were hiking was all wind-blown and icey. The more we were going up, the more I was freaking out because I would take 4 steps, slide down some, take a few more steps, slide more, etc. I was having a really hard time getting up, but looking around, I was going to have a really hard time going down too (mostly because I couldn't see anything other than cloud). I didn't want to summit, just to summit, only to walk down. So, we stopped, made our way back towards the start of Jacob's ladder, put our stuff on and started skiing/snowboarding down.

It was slop!! Sticky, warm, wet, soupy slop!!! I was having a hard time riding because I was trying to keep my front tip out of the slop but also trying to turn so that I wouldn't fly down the mountain. Plus, I haven't snowboarded since April of last year. So basically, I would make a turn, try to make another turn and fall on my bum. It was pathetic and I was frustrated!

All in all, it was nice to get up there. We ran into our friend Ted and it was great to see him again. Nate & I got some exercise. The dogs got some exercise and Sam got to play on the various obstacles around the parking lot. You can see some of the videos of Sam & Nate playing here.

This is by far my favorite video. It shows how well the boys work together:



And my other favorite.  Thank you to the kind man who drove his friend's subaru up the drive way to pull Sam over the jump: