The bear necessities (Ba-dum *tish)

Well, I created this posting a few weeks ago when Lyzz and I went to the Woodland Park Zoo with some of her siblings and then forgot to finish since we hadn't loaded up the pictures yet. All that has been rectified.

We started our day fairly early and met up at Michelle's house in Mt. Vernon. Everyone traveled caravan style down to the zoo and we managed to not get totally lost in Seattle. Lyzz's oldest brother, Chris, his wife, Karima, and their little girl, Zaira were in town and basically the reason for the family zoo trip. Michelle and her boys, and Bonnie with her little girl rounded out the group. All the little kids running around just reminded me of what Lyzz and I get to look forward to in December. Tanner, Zaira, and Foster
Really, this post is mostly and excuse to put up a few pictures of the cool critters we saw that day.
Komodo Dragons, while neat, are hardly fire-breathers. Disappointing.
Meerkats are one of the newest additions to the Woodland Park Zoo. I hope there was one named Timon.


Here's an otter looking about as majestic as an otter is capable of looking.



The bird enclosure of course has a "feed the birds" option available. The birds are definitely not shy at this point.



Orangutans are allegedly a distant relative of mine (thanks, Dad). A joke that Lyzz enjoys perpetuating.



This is Simon the siamang. I know his name because I spent every week at the zoo watching him for several hours for a 300 level Behavioral Psychology class. He's slightly blind in one eye thanks to a cataract, and he can shriek like a demon.

The trip was a ton of fun. Afterwards, we headed to Dick's Drive-in and had some ridiculously cheap burgers (good though) and hung out for a little while with the rest of the Ashinhurst family. All in all, it was a neat trip. I've always enjoyed the zoo in the past, ever since I was a kid running around the San Francisco zoo, and now Lyzz and I are contemplating a membership. We'll see.

A new beginning, but one that is remarkably familiar

So, I'll try to keep this fairly concise since I'm due in to work tomorrow morning at 8am and it's nearly an hour drive to La Conner (yuck). I've been working at Wave cable/broadband now for a whole week, and to no one's surprise, it's almost the same thing that I was doing with Comcast for the last year and a half. I knock on doors and try to get people to add services or become new customers. It's pretty simple and not particularly exciting, though today I spent my afternoon on Blue Heron Dr. in Bow, WA looking across the bay towards Bellingham. It was beautiful. I also sold two telephones (Ka-ching! $100!), so that's always good.

Aside from work being work, life is treating us pretty well, all things considered. Although I understand how weird Lyzz feels staying at my parents' place for a while, it's kinda comforting to be back in the place I called home before I set out into the "real world" to be a "grown up" nearly a decade ago. In my near decade venturing forth into the wilds, I have come to realize that growing up pretty much sucks. Having to think about things like car insurance, medical insurance, car payments, cell phone bills, rent, gas money, power bills, grocery shopping, and all that is really not very exciting or interesting. Thank goodness for Lyzz. She keeps us both excited about life and its mysteries and adventures, while I keep us grounded when stress starts to catch up with us (or at least I hope that I manage that). Lucky for both of us, we're soon going to have a little reminder of what it means to be a kid again.

July 14th draws closer and I'm getting more and more impatient to know the gender of our bundle of joy. I honestly don't have a preference, but I do just really want to know what this new person is, that way I can decide whether to steal my little sister's old Barbies or root around in my closet and see how many old GI Joes I have left. Some people may think that getting gender neutral toys is important for teaching our child to be a balanced person or something like that (aka "wuss"), but I think that a little socially reinforced stereotypes of gender roles can be useful in showing a child how things are not. If my little girl wants the GI Joes and the BB gun, that's fine with me. And if my son wants to cook food, learn to sew, and all the other "girly" things that have been the social standard for generations then I have no problem with that. So long as it's their choice. I've spent 17+ years now doing something that I really love, Dungeons and Dragons, despite the fact that it has a less than stellar public image. We're not all basement dwelling mouth breathers who live on Cheetos and Mt. Dew (Dr. Pepper is way better), some of us are as "normal" as can be expected when the term has no real definition. I'm aware of what it's like to be seen as a little bit of an oddball, so I have no qualms about my child/children following their own interests and supporting them in their endeavors.

I'm not quite sure how I got onto the subject of my nerdiness, but I think my point has something to do with acceptance....or maybe it was about playing dinosaurs in the front yard with my kid. Whichever. I'll have fun.

Move, Oregon, and other things....

So the move went smoothly. And as with most moves, there are a few things we can't find. A box probably got mislabeled and now resides in the garage instead of being in our room. But we'll find everything when we move into our own place. Right? Well that's the hope anyways. I don't think we'd be too happy if we had to buy Sam a new pair of nice black shoes.

Living with the in-laws has been.... different. Their family works so differently than mine it's hard to get a grip on what's supposed to happen, and what exactly is going on from day to day. On days that Sam and I aren't running to Bellingham for something, I usually just sit in our room drawing, planning out paintings, facebook, updating everyone on things, or just watching TV. Maybe I'll go through Twilight Princess again, or take my chances at Super Mario Bros. Wii. Other than that, Sam's been going to work, or today he's got a job interview, and I'll have more on that later. And other than my car insurance going up by $60 just because we moved to Ferndale, life here has been pretty simple. We occasionally hear the coyotes howling, that was awesome, or the wind howls so loudly it scares me awake. Sam's used to it though since this was his room in high school. The kitties don't seem to mind it too much, although Miyuki refuses to go downstairs. She's a bit of a chicken. Yume is our more adventurous kitty, and she seems to like the extra space to find even more awkward places to sprawl out on and be a spaz. Rei is not with us at the moment. Brendan and Brian are watching her until Friday or Saturday. Mary didn't want all three cats here (and honestly she hasn't really been able to tell that there are two cats). Luckily we did find someone else to watch Rei temporarily, James Stewart. I think that's Matt Stewart's little brother, and if my memory serves me right, he just got married about a year ago? Something like that. Well he lives in Burlington and has two cats already, but he and his wife have graciously agreed to keep Rei until the end of July. Which is nice. That gives us time to save money and either find a new place to live, or find another temporary home for Rei. And no, we are not getting rid of her. That would break Sam's heart. She's very much Sam's little kitty.

So Oregon. The Hancock's (plus Amy's boyfriend Enoch) went on a trip Memorial Day Weekend to Pacific City, Oregon. It's pretty much an annual event now. Not the place so much as meeting up with the Nielsen's. Richard and Kaylene are long time friends of Mary and Kim from way back in California, and their kids are around the same age of the Hancocks, their kids range from 23-17. And they've been friends forever. Enoch and I were kind of in the same boat. We both had no idea what to expect. While he's never met them, I had never been around them for more than a few hours. But things turned out really fun and really cool. Definitely exhausting, but really fun. And I don't think we were too Caucasian for Enoch. Ha ha. And yes he was worried about that. There was this huge sandy hill (Haystack) blocking our total view of the ocean, but that's okay, we could still see the Gray Whale that was chilling out around Haystack for the first 3 days. That was amazing. Sadly we didn't get any good pictures of it. But it was amazing. we would see his spout, and then his little dorsal fin, and then sometimes his tail. My theory is that the rocks at the bottom of the cove are smooth, so whales come and like to rub their bellies on them. Orcas do it in the Sound and in the Islands. It really cool. So we hiked down to the beach and saw all the HUGE sea anemones that when they were closed and out of the water looked like giant boogers. Gross.


We also got some really good landscape shots too from the beach


From the top of Haystack




And from the deck of the rental house


Again, sadly we didn't get any good pictures of the Gray Whale. But it was definitely a great Family Vacation.

Back to Sam's job interview today. We finally got a hold of the motel owners, and they already filled the position, but neglected to call us. Jerks. We still haven't heard back from the government internship, which we probably wont for another month or so, but we did get a call from Sam's co-"manager" Chris Tull about a job opportunity that he thought Sam would be interested in. It's still selling Cable services, but it's for another cable company called Wave. They work in more rural areas than Comcast does, and the perks of this job sound really good. $1300/mo salary + commission, after a year you ear paid time off, medical and dental benefits, and all he has to do is sell. No more of this managing garbage that doesn't ever pan out, although with this company I bet being a manager wouldn't be so bad. Oh, and Sam gets paid on the sale and the install because he'll be able to do it himself. He'll use their trucks and equipment, so we might be able to go back down to one car instead of two. Yay for lowering bills! And since Sam has been doing the whole selling cable stuff for the past year and a half, and doing it well, we're thinking he's definitely got this one in the bag. Yay for w-2 jobs with reliable income that I can budget! Finally!

On the baby side of things, we have another visit with Dr. Mora on the 10th, probably to discuss my blood tests and such. Make sure I'm still healthy for the baby. And in july sometime will be the gender ultra sound! I'm really not patient enough to wait until the baby comes to find out the gender, because then we get all the ambiguous gender gifts and that's just annoying. Sam doesn't show it much, but I can tell he's getting giddier and giddier every day. And the look on his face when we go in for ultrasounds is so great. He's really excited to be a dad. And while I'm kind of excited, I think I'm still at the point of, "Really? What the hell am I doing?!" I'm sure that feeling wont ever completely go away, and honestly I don't think it should. I think all parents should never be to over confident about parenting, because ever kid is different and you can't treat them all the same. And every one of them is going to throw a wrench into your little I'm-A-Great-Parent Plan. So Sam and I have decided to at least never let a small part of the "what are we doing?!" get to far away from us. Because as my sister Michelle says, "That feeling never goes away, Tanner is 10, and I still feel that way."

All in all it's been a pretty good few weeks. Lets just hope this streak continues.