We’ve been dealing with the smoke and heat from some Canadian wildfires, which has given Washington the dubious honor of the worst air quality in the nation.
So I haven’t written in a while. Thursday the 27th of July we had a going-away party for the Baxters, a senior missionary couple that’d been serving in the area for the past nine months or so. Sad to see them go.
The next day I got to host the Thomases! We had lunch and a long tour of the office.
That evening I went to a friend’s BBQ/pool party birthday bash – they’re actually either twins or just decided to celebrate their parties on the same day.
The next day was spent galavanting around Washington with the Thomases. We went to the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, then drove off to Sammamish for a mini-hike, followed by a drive out to Snoqualmie Falls, and culminating in a trip to an old Bavarian-style chocolate shop.
I was pretty fried from all that, so I took a rest, then arrived late at a YSA block party at someone’s large house a half-hour drive away. I arrived just in time to hear about a friend in the ward who’d just been whisked away to the ER in Seattle for a busted knee, an injury sustained in the pool after someone landed on her or something. She needed a second person to give a blessing, so I went off with a couple friends and visited with her for a while. We then went off to do the Seattle ferris wheel, since it wasn’t quite midnight yet.
Sunday evening we had a few friends over to eat dinner and play games. Monday we had a portion of the ward over for FHE, where my roommate demonstrated the proper method of making omelettes, after which we chilled at our pool for a while. Tuesday was Institute. Wednesday I headed out with some friends to a showing of Dunkirk, and boy howdy was it amazing. Very stressful to watch though.
Thursday I went out with a friend to an art show in Seattle – tickets are normally like $100 each, but a guy at work offered free tickets to anyone who asked, as his wife ran the show. Sweet deal.
Friday evening I headed out for a cabin weekend. Someone in the ward invited a bunch of people over to her grandparents’ place. It was awesome, if a bit strange at first. When we pulled up, we were greeted with an imposing vast room of a building, very rectangular and lots of empty space. Turns out the entire structure was built to facilitate family reunions. The entire area is one big compound really, with the grandparents occupying the main cabin, and a few of their children having cabins of their own in the surrounding area. It’s a massive family – 12 children, 70 grandchildren, 46 great-grandchildren.
Here’s my last pic. I took it with a new toy I just picked up – very excited to be piloting a drone again. This is an entirely different beast than Andi’s machine, though. Very smart – almost too smart for its own good, at times. There is no way for me to exert full manual control over it – it’s always using sensors to adjust for wind speed and altitude. This very nearly resulted in me crashing the drone into a tree on my second outing with it. I’m good enough with the controls that I could guide it back to me through a relatively small gap in the trees. But it was having none of it – the moment I eased up on the altitude stick past a certain point it arrested its descent, interrupting its flight pattern and actually brushing against the tree’s needles. Very stressful moment. Definitely not suitable for close quarters maneuvering.
But, get it high in the sky and it’s a dream to fly.
