#4

If you haven't heard, we are expecting baby #4, due February 15. Yes, I've been very sick and tired and I'm glad that now I can complain here. ;) Just kidding.

I love this girl...

and her sense of style. ☺

Birthday BBQ

So on July 13th it was Jenna's birthday, and on July 16th it was Kenneth's birthday, so on Sunday the 15th, we planned a little BBQ up in the mountains.

The plan was to meet a little earlier so that the food could start cooking and we could eat before everyone reached starvation mode. ;)

Well, someone forgot to give dad the memo and he had most of the food, fire stuff, drinks, etc... in the back of his truck. The rest of us waited (patiently) for almost an hour and a half. ☺

Luckily, Tom and Ben are good boy scouts so they scrounged up some firewood and kindling and Chandra hit up the campground host for a match and we had a fire. Tom and Janille brought the meat (short ribs) so we did that and ice cream! ☺

It ended up working out and we did eat some really good food and all was well. We even managed to shove some s'mores in our faces too.

The weather was perfect; nice and cool. It did rain on us for a second, but nothing too bad.

We should do that more often...

Fire, Fourth, Catch up....

 So on Saturday, June 30th, there was the "Lund Fire" that we were really seeing smoke from, and then on Monday afternoon another fire was started by Ely called the "Mosier Fire/ Range Fire`" and really that's as intense as the smoke got in these pictures, but it burned 8 power lines and that affected all the power in the valley. We were without power for about 18 hours, which seemed short after reports coming in at first that it could take days to get power restored. Naturally this happened while Cary was out of town, so the kids and I had no A/C, no water, no power, etc... Thankfully some of the men hooked up a generator to the well so we finally had some water about 4 hours after the power had been shut down. Brad and Cheryl, who live behind me, had a generator and they came and asked if I wanted to hook my fridge up so that I could feed the kids breakfast in the morning, so we had cold milk for breakfast, and I was able to hook up the toaster to make toast. The power was back on around 9:30 that morning. Yay!

 It was so dark that night and the moon was looking nice.

 The fourth of July is kind of big deal around here, and I usually take pictures of the events that happen. Well, the first event of the day was the Walk-a-Song Run early in the morning, and I walked out and took these pictures...

If you look closely enough, you can see two people running along the ridge, that's how high up they go. Anyway, that is the extent of the photos that I took. ☺ For whatever reason, business? laziness? I took a hiatus from my camera for almost two weeks. The fourth was fun with friends and family coming out. I got to visit with people I haven't seen for awhile. I may eventually do a blog post about the fourth and steal Janille and Sharon's pictures since I don't have any.

Hanks Picnic 2012

 We had our Hanks family picnic on June 30, 2012. Kenneth and I were over at the center around 4:00 PM setting stuff up when I looked out the window towards Mt. Wheeler and I saw a puffy cloud coming up over the mountain. "That cloud almost looks like smoke," I remarked and then thought nothing more of it until about an hour later when I looked out the window again and this time I was sure it was smoke.

 What it looked like around 6:30 PM

 and then 7:30 PM

 We had a great picnic with lots of good food and I wasn't able to get any pictures until almost everything was cleaned up and people had left. ☺

 Clean up

 and the slackers ;)

 The smoke made for a very interesting scene so there were a bunch of us out there taking pictures.

 Meanwhile, the guys were playing football.

My aunt Teresa out in the field taking pictures.

 Ella and Hector like to make silly faces at each other...

We found out later that the fire was the, "Lund Fire" and it was about 30-40 miles away, which for all the smoke we could see, it felt like the fire was much closer.