Hitting the Road...

We spent a couple hours at the Alaska State Fair this afternoon/evening. Now we are heading out to catch our plane to the East Coast.

We'll be spending about a week and a half with family in OH and VA.

Yesterday, Bit had a run-in with a porcupine just before we were supposed to be leaving for work and school. We pulled about 15 quills out at home and then took her to the vet where she was sedated and they extracted another 10 quills.

Update in Photos

First day of school for our two seniors at Chugiak High School.

My view each afternoon as I turn off the highway towards home.

The front of our house in mid-summer with the trees full of green.

Alicia and Barbara warming up with some hot drinks before we watched the Sled Dog Rodeo last weekend.

My latest cake creation. This one's being picked up this morning for a little girl's birthday party.

Our last family photo for a while as Donald has moved to Provo, Utah with a group of friends.

Playing the Field

Tess had her first Varsity Flag Football game of the season last night against Eagle River.

Here she is taking a dive for someone's flag. Chugiak won 18-0. It was a perfect evening for a football game. Blue skies with white puffy clouds. New astro-turf field and brand new scoreboard. The bleachers were dry. What more can you want?

Welcome to Alaska, Babsy!

We picked up Babsy yesterday afternoon. She is one of 35 students placed in Alaska with the AFS student exchange program this school year. More than half of those are in the Anchorage area.



We went to Garcia's for an early dinner and then took her home to settle in for a little bit before going to her first American football game.

The evening was rainy and perhaps colder than she was expecting. Although, I think many of her friends in Germany have scared her with thoughts of freezing cold Alaska weather. I've tried to tell her that it really isn't that bad here in the Anchorage area. Places like Fairbanks and "interior Alaska" get much more extreme weather than we do.

Today we're going to look into having her play tennis at the high school. We'll also go shopping and watch the Sled Dog Rodeo this afternoon. It's still rainy, but what can you do?

Baking Up Something Fun

This week has been another whirlwind of activity.

After touring the homestead property last weekend, we had really hoped to find a way to make that happen. But someone beat us to it. Not surprising. The property is awesome, and the price was good. We're just hoping to get into a situation where we're financially prepared to pounce on the next great opportunity.

We did spend a little time in Talkeetna once we left the homestead. We always enjoy strolling around Talkeetna and visiting some of our favorite shops. My personal favorite is the Chocolate Cache which is a log cabin selling all sorts of imported chocolates. My favorite is a dark chocolate bar made by Cote d'Or of Belgium. That's the BEST dark chocolate I've ever had.

We also spent some time exploring the rocky shore of the Talkeetna River which is located at the end of Main Street. We like to look for interesting rocks. Alicia loves to hurl them into the swiftly moving river. But she also likes to bring some home that are particulary pretty to her. We always leave there with several pockets full of stones.

In the meantime, we've also been working on completing our application process to be a host family for a foreign exchange student. We kind of waited till the last minute to finally decide to host. So the whole process has been a little rushed on our end. However, we have a lovely German girl who will be placed with us for the entire school year. She arrives this coming Friday, Aug 14th.

We are all pretty excited. We've been preparing her bedroom and trying to smooth the process for getting her registered for classes and signed up for a sport or extracurricular activity so she can make friends quickly.

Her room is Donald's old room which is across the hall from Tess's room. It has nice views of the tree tops. We just repainted the walls kind of a coffee ice cream color. We still need to put up the curtain rods so I can hang the drapes, and we picked up a nice new light fixture which Stephen will install.

Donald moved out back in April. He's now converted to Mormonism and has plans to move to Utah on August 20th. For the record, we are 100% opposed to that whole situation. But he's technically an adult and has never actually paid any attention to our opinions anyway.

On the cake front, I've been whipping up cakes to use tomorrow when I do a 2nd cake decorating workshop at the house. I just crumb-coated 4 little 6" two-layer cakes. Two chocolate and two white. I've got 4 women scheduled to come over tomorrow and learn about working with buttercream, fondant, and gum paste. It should be a lot of fun.

Last week I made a yummy banana cake with a cream cheese type icing for a girl at work's birthday. It was scrumptious...
Not to mention lovely! (if i do say so myself... :o)

We've had a fairly steady stream of lodgers in our little Bear's Den. We'll probably stop taking reservations as we'll be needing the regular use of that bathroom for the teens once school starts.

Homestead

We're headed into the wilderness to scope out a homestead property near Talkeetna this morning.

A couple other parties are also interested in the same property. So we'll see how it goes.

The cabin is one over 100 acres and has a couple creeks and a small lake bordering the property. It is "almost" on the road system. But not quite. So there'll be a short hike involved.