Happy Fall!!

Well it looks like winter has arrived on Whidbey Island...and with winter comes the panic of people who arent used to the snow.

Something that really surprised me when I moved out here is that even though we're pretty far north, it really doesnt snow much in the Puget Sound area. Rain? Yes. But snow? Not so much. I had the joy of watching people freak out 2 winters ago when we had several feet of snow dumped on us, and it looks like it may be the same thing this winter.

It should be noted that this area lacks the ability to remove snow from the roads. There are no snow plows on the island and using salt is illegal in the state (something about affecting the salmon in the water, though I heard yesterday that they were using salt in Seattle so maybe this is something that has changed.)

Yesterday it snowed about 2 inches and you would have thought that the world came to an end. There were accidents everywhere. Everything starting shutting down. People who were on base were stranded there for a while because it was taking over an hour for everyone to leave through the only open gate. I can understand some of the panic. Without removing snow from the roads, the snow quickly becomes packed ice, so it makes sense that people would panic while driving.I think the best part about all of this is that in the middle of the snow panic, there was also an earthquake! Mr.V and I didnt feel it and I have to admit that Im a little disappointed. Earthquakes terrify me, but this was a small one, so I think I would have been ok feeling it. We were outside taking pictures when it happened, which is why I think we didnt feel it. Once we came back inside, Mr.V immediately got a text from his friend asking if we felt the earthquake, followed by several Facebook status updates about it. Meanwhile Mr. V and I were saying "what earthquake?" It seems that the general consensus is that it felt like a quick jolt. One guy said "It made my head sort of snap forward" while others described it as "It felt like something huge slammed into my house" Based on the fact that most people seemed to notice movement from inside their house, Mr. V and I assume we would have felt it had we been inside our house at the time. It figures that during the 5 minutes we spent outside we'd miss the 2nd exciting thing of the day. We actually doubted that the earthquake even happened but here's the map from the USGS earthquake site. I circled the quake in red. As you can see, the epicenter was right off the coast of the island, right in line with Oak Harbor. So apparently it really did happen and we just managed to miss it.And this is what the rest of fall is apparently going to look like. We've been experiencing below freezing temperatures for the past 2 days and it looks like that will continue for the rest of the week, so I doubt the snow is going anywhere any time soon. (And before anyone asks - my cats are indoor only cats that we occasionally let outside supervised. We weren't torturing them by putting them in the snow. We left the door open and the ones that wandered outside on their own seemed to really enjoy being in the snow.)

Canada Adventure Part 6

Well...we made it home safely from Canada. I promised some pictures back in my first post about the trip so I decided to write just a short post with some of my favorite, amusing pictures from the trip...(and by amusing, I mean pictures of things that I am not used to seeing from my apparent sheltered upbringing...)

(the snow at the Roger's Pass Visitor Centre in Revelstoke, BC - that's a lot of snow!)

(an avalanche tunnel covered by an avalanche - guess its a good thing the tunnel is there!)

(another view of the avalanche tunnel covered by an avalanche - this may actually be a completely different tunnel but I can't remember...)

(Avalanche Area - Do Not Stop! Oh...except to put chains on your tires...)

(over turned tractor trailer on the side of the highway)

(don't feed the mountain goats! - at the top of Sulpher Mountain in Banff)

(an overpass for wildlife to walk across the road)

(Did I mention we were in avalanche country?)

(just in case you are a stupid tourist - ALL bears are dangerous)

(a card left in our hotel room in Jasper...if you click on it to blow it up, you'll see that we were kindly asked to keep the door to our room shut so wildlife won't come in...)

(a small avalanche right next to some ski tracks - apparently people in Canada love heli-skiing, which involves a helicopter dropping them off at the top of a mountain and then skiing down the mountain - not in an actual ski resort. Heli-skiing comes with warnings about avalanches - which should probably be taken seriously as this picture shows...)

(Lake Louise - note the people walking across the thin ice)

(In case there was any doubt...rescues take time...so please don't fall into a crack on the glacier [you may need to blow this picture up too])

(crevass warning - don't fall into the glacier!)

(caribou crossing)

(for some reason I can't get this picture to upload in the right direction...but just in case you weren't aware of this - icy rocks can be slippery and parents should hold their children's hand.)

(an ice climber at Maligne Canyon. I think ice climbing is crazy to begin with, but what this picture doesn't show is that this is the day it started to warm up. As this guy is climbing, you can hear water running down behind the ice and small pieces of ice across the whole canyon were melting and falling off. So...who wants to climb up a melting waterfall? With no saftey rope?)

(our poor car at the end of the trip)

(another caribou crossing sign on the highway)

(watch out for caribou, bears and wolves crossing the road)

(I just thought the cartoon thief on this sign was funny)

(just in case the other signs didn't teach you a lesson, please don't approach the glacier - you may fall into it and die before someone can rescue you.)

I'll be creating a google photo album of all of our pictures within the next few days so I'll post a link to that when I have it.

Harry Potter, Horses, and Snow

Yesterday was a very exciting day. I grew up going to Broadway shows all the time. I used to see at least one show every 2 months or so. Since leaving New Jersey, my Broadway trips have been few and far between, so when I do come back home I always make a point of going to see a show in New York City.

A little over a year ago (or maybe more) I heard that Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, was starring in the London revival of Equus. Equus is a strange play. I encourage you to click on the link to find out more about it, but in short, the play is about a disturbed 17 year old boy, who has sexual fantasies about horses (and acts some of them out), which leads him to blind 7 horses with a pick, which causes him to end up in a mental hospital. Disturbing? Yes. Good? Amazing! I took a Contemporary Theatre class during my first year of college and we had read Equus in the class. So I was pretty darn excited when I found out over the summer that Equus would be leaving London, and opening on Broadway here in New York. Daniel Radcliffe would be coming here with the production to continue his role as Alan Strang.

When Mr. V and I heard that Daniel Radcliffe would be on Broadway in New York, we decided to see the show if we had a chance to. So yesterday we headed off to NYC, stopped at the TKTS booth where we bought half price tickets to the show, then sat in the 10th row (amazing seats!) and watched the play.

Both of us are huge Harry Potter fans, and while I understand that Daniel was preforming in this role to show that he can be someone other than Harry Potter, it still excited me to see "Harry Potter" live on stage. He is an amazing actor and even though I love the way he acts in the Harry Potter movies, I was still surprised to see how well he portrayed this disturbed young man in the play. The show has gotten very good reviews in both London and New York, and I have to agree with those reviews.

This play is definitely NOT for people looking to see Harry Potter. There is nothing cute about the play. Its a deeply disturbing story, which ends with a 10 minute scene of a naked Daniel Radcliffe. And yes, I have to admit I was very excited to see that part of the play. I realize I'm 27 years old and he is 19 (or is he 20 now?), but I still think he's pretty hot, so disturbing or not, seeing "Harry Potter" naked on stage was something not many people can say they have seen :-).

After the show we went outside to see if we could get an autograph and a picture. Thankfully, I insisted on racing out of the theatre to be at the stage door before the large crowd appeared. I have never in my life seen so much security for an actor on Broadway. I've stood at many stage doors and gotten many autographs and nothing even comes close to the security for the young Harry Potter star. A security guard outside checked ticket stubs to make sure we had seen the play on that very day and time. Then he checked off the stubs, and ushered us into a small barricaded area. Unfortunately, the area was small, so not everyone was able to get into it, and a small force of security guards and police officers ordered everyone else off of the street. We managed to get into the barricaded area, so we were there when he came outside to sign autographs. We got a few decent pictures of him, but were unable to get an autograph. He was ushered through the crowd into a car that was conveniently blocking any access to the stage door within minutes. He did sign autographs for the people he could reach, before his security team whisked him away.If we had been standing at the front of the barricade we would have easily gotten an autograph but we were blocked by a few people and couldn't reach through. However, the pictures we got make up for that. (Don't even get me started on the people who came to watch the play, then had Harry Potter books and pictures for him to sign. I personally found that rude since he was trying to break out of the Harry Potter role. I know a lot of people saw him because of Harry Potter, but to me it seemed insulting to have him autograph something for a show that he wasn't currently in. I would think he would want praise and excitement about Equus right now, not Harry Potter.)

Since I am clearly a pathetic obsessed fan, Mr. V and I are going to go back to New York tomorrow to buy cheap tickets for the show again. Now that we know how the barricade/autograph session works, we are convinced that we can get outside in time to get to the front of the barricade, and I think the price is worth it.

I am currently at my dad's house in New Jersey and his computer doesn't have a spot where I can plug in my camera's memory card, and we didn't bring the connection wire with us to do it, so pictures are going to have to wait until we get back to Washington in a little over a week.

Meanwhile, I keep getting emails and phone calls from friends that are still in Washington about all the snow that is there! I can't believe I'm home in a state where it does snow, and all I am seeing is rain. Yet in Oak Harbor, where it rarely snows, the street leading to my house is closed off, 8 inches of snow is in the yard and my petsitter took a bus to my house, then got stranded at my house overnight when the Whidbey busses stopped running.

I have to admit that I am pretty disappointed that I'm missing all of that snow. Mr. V is even more upset and has been following the Oak Harbor news since we've left. He's pretty upset to know that even more snow is supposed to be coming in the next few days, but by the time we get back it should all be melted.

In my opinion, seeing Daniel Radcliffe naked is 10 times better than seeing snow, but I do hope that some people who are still in Oak Harbor are taking pictures so I can see what it looks like! Apparently, the small amount of snow that I was excited about a few days before we left is nothing compared to whats there now.

On a completely random side note, while watching Equus last night it occurred to me that Mr. V will be deployed when the new Harry Potter movie comes out. Anyone feel like seeing it with me? :-)

A Big Kid's Christmas Party

Yesterday was the Wing Children's Christmas party on base. Since we have no children, I guess this technically wasn't for us, but we checked it out anyway. Each year at the party, games, food and activities are set up for the children. Then Santa arrives on a P3! The fact that Santa comes to the party on a plane, not a sleigh, was really intriguing to me because I'd really like to know how many children go through life arguing with non military children about what type of aircraft Santa flies. I can see it now "No silly. Santa does NOT fly in a sleigh with reindeer. He flies a P3."

I wanted to see this tradition of Santa in the P3 so Mr. V and I went off to the children's party. Before we left, he read the schedule for his squadron and saw that one of our friends was scheduled to fly Santa in. We got in touch with his fiance to see if she wanted to join us, and she did, so the 3 of us set out to go be big kids at a little kid's party.

We saw 2 P3s flying around when we got there and of course assumed that one of them had Santa in it, so we were trying to watch it land. We even took pictures of both planes, so that my friend could say that she saw her fiance actually flying (we planned to ask him which of the 2 planes he was flying). So after spending 15 minutes watching the planes fly around, we went inside to watch Santa arrive. It was really a neat tradition. The hanger doors open, and a P3 slowly drives up to the hanger, and Santa gets out, greeted by a crowd of cheering children. When my friend's fiance got out of the plane, we asked which plane he had been flying (the first one we saw land, or the second one) and we found out that we had been watching 2 planes, neither of which he had been in. I was somewhat disappointed to know that Santa is not actually flown around in the P3. He was just driven around for a while, but they never actually flew in the air. (so unfortunately, we had pictures of planes flying and landing, and my friend can't say that either of the planes was flown by her fiance.) Considering how often P3s break, I guess this actually makes sense though. I had been wondering what would happen if the plane was broken and Santa couldn't fly in ("Sorry kids, Santa won't be bringing presents this year. His plane broke."). I guess nothing much can go wrong driving around on the ground, which is why the plane never actually flew.

After watching Santa arrive, we got a tour of another P3. A plane was in the hanger for the kids to go into, so while they were busy waiting in line for Santa, my friend and I were given a tour of the plane our significant others fly. This was the first time I ever saw the inside of the plane Mr. V flies, and it was....interesting. I knew the planes were old, but they really LOOK old on the inside, so that was a little shocking. Interesting, but shocking. We took some pictures of us in the plane, then headed off to a quick lunch, then back home. (I'll post the pictures when I can figure out where Mr. V hid the camera.)

We had one last meeting with our petsitter yesterday afternoon, so we are all set to go on vacation in 2 days (if you can call going home a "vacation").

Then last night we had dinner at our friend's house, learned how to play Spades, and spent a few hours over there last night playing cards.

I am happy to report that while we were over there last night, snow started falling! I have been living in hot southern states for way too long because this is the first time in a long time that I have seen snow! In the time that we left out house, ate dinner, and played cards, at least a half an inch had fallen! Mr. V was beside himself with excitement and kept leaping up to look out the window every 5 minutes. It was a slippery drive home, and this morning we woke up to an inch of snow on the ground! I never thought I'd see the day when an inch of snow would excite me this much, but it looks so pretty outside, I can't help but be excited. Mr. V has been taking pictures of the snow since last night, so when I locate the camera I'll post again with those pictures!