August 10th -- Already!

I woke up this morning with this silly blog on my mind. Everyone was still sleeping. Korin, slept all night under the stars; Nicholas made it until 5:30). I knew it had been a while since I'd posted anything. Well, I was right! Wow...like three weeks, or so.

Tera and I went to San Diego the last week of July. I had a training down there and we took the opportunity to run off together, without children, for the first time since our honeymoon. Unfortunately, I must say...it was a blast! Sorry kids.

The next week my dad called practically begging me to come to LaPush to fish with him and his old buddy Steve for a couple days of salmon fishing. Due to everything that's taken place over the last year (i.e. mom and dad splitting up) I was sure there would be no salmon fishing for me this year, and I wasn't really sure I wanted to go, to be honest. But after convincing my friend Bodie that he had a good chance to catch his first ever King Salmon, he came along and evened up the odds. So Monday night we made it to Ephrata, where Tera and the kids were already settled in for a week of swimming lessons. Tuesday we headed out and made it to LaPush in my big red truck by dinner time. We ate rib steaks cooked on our little gas grill and camp fire roasted potatoes, once they were finally done. The next day, Wednesday, we ran out 30 miles into the Pacific Ocean and started catching salmon. By the end of the day Bodie had indeed caught his first and second King. Both were nice, hefty fish. One was around 15lbs and the other more like 20lbs. It was a long day but we brought back 10 salmon, altogether: 3 kings, 3 pinks and 4 coho. Thursday, dad had to get to Port Townsend so we ran South along the coast toward Destruction Island trying to find some coho, but it was pretty dead for salmon. So we opted to head in to shore to get our rockfish. We ended up with our boat limit of 40 black bass. It was, like always, a blast pulling those things up one after the other. In about an hour we were limited out. We brought our booty back home on Friday and loaded up the freezer Saturday morning with plenty of fresh fish.

Meanwhile, the kids and Tera had a nice week in Ephrata. All the kids, except Annika, passed their respective levels. Korin is learned the crawl stroke. Nicholas and Emma are becoming like their big sister--some kind of mix between human and fish. This was the third year in a row of going down to Ephrata for lessons, and I don't see any change in that routine in the future.

And that's not all that happened over the past three weeks. There's a lost day or two in there. A trip to Spokane yesterday with Tera and Annika and visit to Uncle Del and Aunt Barb. The alfalfa finally dried out enough to bale. The barley looks pretty amazing to my untrained eye. Nicholson Field is finally all down and ready to be raked and baled after our storm passes through today.

Once again, I find myself saying: maybe now I'll stay caught up on this blog...

Don't hold your breath.