So as soon as Keith dropped Eric off at EFY in Tacoma this morning, I get the phone call, "We're empty nesters!  What do you want to do?"  Luckily I have it all planned out.  Lots of walks and movies!

I'll spend this week catching up on work and getting ready for the cruise mom and I are taking next week! It's even starting to get sunny, which is right on schedule, it's the 5th of July, the real start of Summer in these parts.

Should be a good week.  We miss all of the kids, but we're survivors!

Barkley Sound

We know a couple who have a floating cabin just off of Vancouver Island.  It's about a third of the way up the island in an inlet on the west side.  It takes about 7 hours to get there, about 3 hours in the truck, 2 hours on a really big, nice ferry, another hour in the truck and an hour by boat.  When you get to the cabin, it has walkways all around it, but you can't really go ashore because it's a steep, heavily wooded hillside.  So you either sit in the cabin or sit in the boat when it takes off to catch fish, or shrimp or crab.  I must have been tired, because my relaxing weekend of catching up on my reading turned into a lazy weekend falling asleep a lot!  But the good news is that Keith LOVES it up there, out in the open waters on a nice boat, AND we brought home cod, salmon and crab, so we should have a good meal or two coming up.  By the way, Peggy and Ron, who invited us, are the nicest people. It was good to get to know them.

Learning more about the Philippines

http://www.ldsmag.com/cebu/

Click on the link above to read lots of articles about the Philippines, the new temple in Cebu City, how the area was prepared to recieve the gospel, and how the members there are doing now.  Great stories!  I didn't realize that the Philippines is one of the fastest growing areas of the church. They have just created another mission there, it is the 16th mission in the Philippines!  Wow!

Isn't it fun to find cool things really close by?  One evening we dropped Eric off at Carlos' going away (back home to Brazil) party.  We just drove down the road in Conway and stopped at this pretty church.  The way the sunlight was glowing through the fancy windows was so beautiful. These old churches definitely had character!

Going, Going, Gone!

Our snazzy blue boat is ours no more, but the memories will never leave, I'm quite sure! Keith sold this boat to a buddy. Just for fun, lets hear some memories from Eric's point of view.  This was written when Eric was 13.

My family knows a lot of ways to have fun. We ski, fish, hunt, camp, go on hikes, and a lot more. When I am around them, it is easy to have fun. My top three ways to spend time with my family are inner tubing at Lake Samish, vacationing in Hawaii, and skiing at Sun Peaks in Canada (or anywhere else).

My family has gone inner tubing for a lot of years. We probably started even before I was born. Lack of technology never discouraged our family from having fun. We used to use an old fishing boat (The one pictured above) and actual tire inner tubes with a rope tied around them. For life jackets, we used bulky, un-sporty, fishing PFDs. Apparently, the tubes were not meant for tubing on a lake. They would randomly submerge for about four seconds at a time, but my siblings say it was about ten seconds underwater. Eventually, we got a large tube meant for tubing on a lake that could fit three people on it. Later on we upgraded to fancy water ski life jackets. This year my brother and dad bought a fancy water ski boat that came with water skis. We got another inner tube so we could play bumper tubes. The new tube was smaller and moved around a lot more so it would bump into our bigger tube. A couple of times, the new, blue tube collided with the other one really hard and the blue tube flipped over the big tube. There were two people on each tube and somehow someone from the blue tube knocked someone off the red tube. After that collision I was the only person still on the tube.

My Mother's Day

Yes, it was awhile ago, but I figured as long as I post about it before Father's Day, which is tomorrow, I'm still ok.  This is the beautiful hanging basket from the kids.  I love flowers,and a hanging basket is something to be enjoyed all summer long.  Devin picked this out at Walmart where he was working at the time, and I have to say, he's got good taste.  I happened to be shopping at WalMart a few days later, and this hanging basket was by far the one I liked best.  Thanks kids for remembering me and my love of flowers!  You are so sweet!

For breakfast on Mother's Day we had a lovely feast.  The boys really had this kitchen rockin' and rollin'!        But I couldn't resist taking a picture of these fabulous papayas and limes.  Every wonderful bite reminded me of Hawaii.  This is our standard breakfast food there.  It's quite rare to eat this here, but so fantastic!  Just love the flavor combination.  It's brilliant!