Kitty's Scratch Pad

Summer Camping Kick-off

We are heading to Lake Chelan this weekend for some good ol’ American R&R. We successfully borrowed an additional child and head out Friday afternoon. The flight should be quick – maybe 30 minutes.  The plan is to camp at the State Park, make lots of S’mores, visit the water slides, lay around and be lazy while the kids run around and get tired. I picked up a couple of books to read while hopefully sunning at the lake:

For Alex – The Perfectionist

For Kat – Reefer Madness

Fathers Day Weekend

Plan A – Montana hiking in Glacier

Scratched – thunder storms throughout the weekend

Plan B – Napa

Scratched – raining and no sign of decreasing

Plan C – Portland

Game on! – 85 degrees and sunny

We flew down in just over 45 minutes, dropped our stuff off at the hotel and headed for the waterfront. We rented a couple of hybrid bikes and toured around the city checking out galleries. We headed back to the waterfront and rode for approximately 10 miles up and back down the river.

We like the idea of biking so much we went to Gregg’s Greenlake Cycle last Saturday and ordered a couple of folding bikes like these from Dahon. I am excited to see how they work.  How cool to be able to load our bikes in the plane and take off. This will make places Orcas so much easier to access.

Holy Growth Spurt Batman

I picked up the booger from his "Gamma's" yesterday and found out he grew 3/4 of an inch since they measured him five weeks ago.  He still has a foot before he catches up with me but if you calculate that same rate over the next year and half he will be as tall as me.  Let's hope that doesn't happen.  I am not sure I am ready to see eye to eye with my 9 year old.

Spaces

I just installed the newest version of MSN Messenger.  I entered my password and found all of my buddies and links to their Spaces.  In addition, they now try and get you to reset your home page and search tool to MSN...tricky.  I tried Spaces for a few months and got tired of the format and look.  I don't want my blog to look like MSN - it's dumb and I don't like it.  Funny thing is, the feature that allows you to put a link next to your name will send those messenger users away from MSN.  Since I had a Space I just left it alone.  In a weird way it worked out well for me.  My last entry simply says try me here at TypePad - when a fellow messenger clicks my picture they are simply redirected away from MSN.

I wonder if the MSN guys thought about that?

Stats

I was super excited to find out that FareStart has raised an additional $41K above and beyond the $20K commitment from Smith Barney.  As well, Tom Douglas confirmed that all of the food for the evening was donated by him. 

Cool!