Unsurance

In planning our move to Dallas, TX, we have researched several different moving options: U-haul, selling our items, and our most recent discovery; the POD. POD (Portable On Demand Storage) works like this: they drop off this huge box at your house, you pack it up, and they store it for you until you are ready to get your stuff out, when they will deliver it to your specified location. It's kind of perfect for us because we will be living with Tim's parents for a while and will not have anywhere to put this stuff- so rather than unloading it in a storage unit then loading it back up to move it into our house, we can just store it until we are ready. So this is the route we've decided to go. Today we were reading through our contract and the insurance coverage paperwork.

What would we do without insurance? Covered in our plan are:

• Federally Certified Acts of Terrorism, as long as its not chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorism

• Burglary, as long as its before it gets put into storage

• Damage due to ice, rain, snow, sleet, sand or dust, as long as the box isn't first damaged, causing an opening

After insuring all those robbed while the moving truck is in motion, caught in hail storms that damage contents but not packaging, and attacked by terrorists battling with their words only, there just weren't enough resources to cover ridiculous and unlikely events such as;

• Damage caused by improper packing, normal shifting or intentional acts.

Gotta love it. We are in good hands.

Ch-ch-ch-chili Cook-off

Our ward had a party with several activities for the kids...the usual stuff, and a chili cook-off. The Elder's Quorum was in charge of it, and since Tim was in the Elder's Quorum we got suckered into participating. We had a busy day that day so we came up with the fastest chili recipe we could find...turns out, it was kind of a hit. We got 3rd place in the contest (out of about 16) but the funniest part is that people still come up to us and talk to us about our chili (maybe we're just dull and there is nothing else to talk to us about...hmm) and this week at church I got a few requests for the recipe. I told them, there really isn't a recipe and that we just opened up all the cans in our cupboard and dumped them in...they asked me to do the best I could. So, for all who are interested in our Award Winning Chili, here you go.

1 can light red kidney beans
1 can dark red kidney beans
1 can black beans
1 can corn
1 can olives
1 can diced or stewed tomatoes
1 can tomato sauce

Ground beef (However much you want to get rid of. I usually say less is more and big chunks are better). Cook this through with onion, and peppers, and garlic if you like them. Add 1 package chili seasoning (or less to taste) to meat after you drain the grease off.

Bring all ingredients to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 20 minutes.

Serve with scoops corn chips and sour cream.

Spooky Scarey

For Halloween Tim and I (mostly Tim) wrote a murder mystery and had some friends over for dinner. Between courses each person would reveal something about their character or something they found out about someone else.
We invited several people, expecting about half to come...turns out all of them came. It ended up being a much larger project than we anticipated, but well worth it. We had a blast.

We wrote the characters around every one's costumes. We've got some creative friends so it made for a very interesting story. We had it all:

Little Red Riding Hood
A Snuggie Model
A Skeleton and Melanie Daniels from "The Birds"
S'more and the Flame (a personal favorite)
House and Cuttie from House
A Zombie
I was a mailman...mail woman
and even a Pez dispenser!

He had a fishing reel hooked onto his belt and a line draped over his shoulder. He attached Pez candies onto the strings so when he wound it up, Pez popped out his neck.
He never ceases to amaze me.


We didn't get around to carving pumpkins before Halloween. So we carved them when we got back from Dallas...better late than never. We'll take any chance we get to show them off.

Honda

Sometimes I make fun of Tim's car. It's so tiny. The silver streaker. It's been good to Tim. It's taken him from Texas to Idaho and Washington more than one time. Well, today, we broke a new record. We carried 1 long table and 11 folding chairs from the church in that thing. Very impressive!

We fit all the cargo just fine. I, on the other hand, had my knees back behind my head, one arm on the tables, and the other holding the dashboard for balance. Also impressive.

Seahawks

Here is a little piece of trivia for you. What kind of bird is a seahawk? Is it even a bird or did it just sound like a good team name?

Tim and I finally found a Seahawks game that wasn't on Sunday. We went to the preseason game against the Raiders. We were seated about 12 rows from the bottom by the end zone where all the action happened. It was a great game. The stadium is phenomenal. The crowds of people cheering, the smell of beer and stale hot dogs, our crude and tipsy fellow fans...makes for one great night.



Did you have time to think about it? Turns out a seahawk is one of the nicknames for the Osprey (Pandion haliaetus). It's a brown and white, long-winged raptor. (I guess the color scheme is a little different than the blue, teal and chartreuse of our new favorite NFL team)

Found: A Collection of Creatures and Curiosities

For the first time a few weeks ago, Tim had some of his artwork on display in a gallery on Capitol Hill in Seattle. I wish you all could have seen it. He did a really good job of it, not only the art he contributed, but he was in charge of organizing and arranging the show. My plan was to give you a virtual tour of the gallery, but some of my pictures (some of the better ones, might I add) wouldn't upload, so I'll do my best to paint the picture for you.
The theme for the exhibit was Found: A Collection of Creatures and Curiosities. The idea came from a project that Digital Kitchen (Tim's work) did earlier this year. They did the videos advertising SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival). This exhibit is made of the great ideas they came up with and weren't able to use in their final product.

Walking in the Vermillion gallery. It is long and skinny, you can see the art work on the walls.
The whole gallery was Tim and his Coworkers art. It is a nice but casual gallery where you
can hang out, check out the art, and get drinks in the back.

Wall of prints by one of Tim's coworkers. All of them were prints of different fluids she
mixed together. They would form crazy shapes and she would
zoom really close into it. I liked them quite a bit.

I think this is one of the coolest things at the exhibit. This is a stop motion animation rig. Here's how it works: it's kind of like a shelf with each layer made of glass. There is a light at the bottom. Each layer has a different part of the background. They take the pictures from the top to get a very 3D look to it. You can kind of see on the top row there are cutouts of the characters. Stop motion means they take a picture of the characters in one position, move their limbs, take another picture and so on. Amazing...and incredibly time consuming. That's how the whole SIFF video was made.

Tim's part of the exhibit (unfortunately those pictures are some that wouldn't upload) consisted of 4 awesome shadow prints of some of the characters he developed. Then above those, the following video was being projected. The video just circled onto itself and played continually. Everything you're about to see came from the mind of Timothy Michael Howe, my husband :) I think it's pretty impressive...enjoy.

Hell's Angels: our trip to the San Juan Islands

Now we will take a ride through Tim (aka DJ Dewey Decibel) and my (or should I say Radio Flyer) other life... our life on the streets. This is our tale of a cross country ride (well, across the 45-mile circumference of the San Juan island) we took with our gang (two of our friends, Jonny and Leslie) on our Harleys (actually the Mopeds we rented from Sally's) .
Hang on tight, this is going to be a wild ride.

The day started out with a 7am meeting at our driver Leslie's place. You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to be a member of Hell's Angels. We drove an hour north to catch a fairy over to the island. On the way over, we applied the markings of our rebelious nature (stick-on tattoos: skulls and crossbones, barbed wire...the works)
When we got there we picked up our moped rentals (complete with helmet and a cute little orange flag propped up in the back as to draw attention to our bad-ness). The rest of the day was spent riding around the island to various attractions. There are a few historical sights (Brittish and US camps where troops camped out for 12 years while trying to figure out who would get the land, battle never ensued), a lavender field, classic car show, Orca whale watching, hiking, and tons of beautiful scenery.

Hitting speeds as high as 38mph, this was not your mother's vacation!
We headed back that evening. It was a day well spent.

Bikers don't do diamonds. The symbol of our love has been stitched into the skin of our fingers...at least until we wash our hands.