I feel like I’ve been slightly lax with my updates. A lot has happened since my last posting, so I’ll try to catch you up with a quick photo essay. Read on past the jump to see the last week at a glance.
Chatting with my Family
While it may seem relatively innocent to the untrained eye, it’s rather unusual for me to sit down with extended family to have a chat. I grew up in Juneau, and while I had some opportunity to meet my mom’s side of the family during trips to Nebraska, it was fairly rare for me to have any interaction with my dad or his side of the family. This is from our recent trip to Anchorage and Soldotna. It was amazing to me to sit down and just soak up information about my dad’s side of the family. I have more family than I knew of, and it was great getting to see my uncle again after some 20 years. His wife, Ellen, is wonderful and oh-so-hospitable too! It was a real treat to introduce/reacquaint our family with more of my family!
Portage Glacier Cruise
Our trip was primarily a 2-day ordeal, where I spent a major portion of Thursday in a BBBS statewide board meeting. In our travels we made it down to Soldotna to see family, and then on the way back we took a more scenic approach and had a rainy cruise out to the Portage Glacier. This is a picture of us getting soaked with the glacier in the background.
Dinner with Rekann, Priya and more Anchorage'ites!
After our Soldotna-to-Portage-Glacier-with-no-sightings-of-moose-drive-back-to-Anchorage, we went out to dinner with some friends who are now in the Anchorage area. It was great to socialize and catch up with friends we don’t get to see too often, and we even made more friends in the process! Fun! We tried to get food at the Moose’s Tooth, but the wait was going to be upwards of an hour and fifteen minutes… Not something that any of us wanted to do before even getting the chance to order food. It may have been an amazing restaurant, but standing in line for an hour or more doesn’t appeal to me as a Friday night activity.
Fresh Salmon on the Grill!
So tasty!!
The trip was only made possible by the awesomeness of the Sugay family. I’ve known Oly for over 15 years now, and while we haven’t crossed paths in a while, he’s now in the Anchorage area with his family. He (and his lovely wife) were astonishingly generous. I can’t wait to return the favor! They gave us a place to crash for a couple days, a vehicle to use in the drive down to soldotna, and even some salmon to take home! This is our first sampling of it, the same day we returned, cooked over a campfire at Auke Rec. It was delish! I even made it into a salmon burger and it was to die for. I can’t thank them enough!!
Heather posing in front of most of our personal belongings (still in 50+ boxes)
We’re moved! With yet more undying thanks to the Anderson’s, we’ve finally given them back the space that we so unceremoniously overtook when we moved in months ago. Now we’re finally moved in to our new apartment over on Killewich Dr. It’s a nice one-bedroom apartment. Both Heather and I are excited to be in a place where we can call it our own, don’t have some substancial history, nor do we have any roommates. Kind of a neat idea. Granted, we still have a few boxes to unpack. Scratch that. In all honesty, it’s more than a few, and I have no idea where everything will go!
Heather excitedly opening a wedding gift!
Our last wedding gift to open!
As we have been unpacking our countless boxes, we took the chance to unpack our last wedding gift: a KitchenAid professional mixer! It’s pretty cool. I can’t wait to make something tasty with it. It’s adorning our mostly clear countertops just basking in the glow of amazingness. It’s so heavy duty, so professional. It’s one of those things we’ll have for a while and be thrilled about it for years to come!
Ohmygosh. Yes, that's me that got a 220!
Lastly, tonight, Tommy and I went bowling. I don’t think I’ve been socially bowling in over a year, most of the time it’s for the annual BBBS Bowl for Kids Sake. For the first time that I can recall, I broke 200! As a kid I used to bowl as a social past time with friends, but generally I didn’t get much past 180 or so. I’m pretty pleased with my 220, but also recognize that of all the skills that I want in the world, bowling has got to be closed to dead last. (Have you ever SEEN bowling as you were flipping through the channels? So boring.)
So, I think that’s it for the moment, but I’m excited for a new development in the neverending Bennett story. Tomorrow, I’ll aim to post our first efforts towards creating ongoing video posts as an easy way to keep folks (and our posterity) updated on the current goings-ons of our lives.
Till next time!
-Cody