Visiting the Fam

Hope your Memorial Day weekend is treating you well! Tobin and I decided to head to Ephrata to visit my fam this weekend. So far it’s been a blast!

Tobin had Friday off, so I took that day off too. We were going to head over to Ephrata Thursday night (Stephen’s 23rd birthday), however, Stephen needed us to pick up something from him to bring over to Ephrata, so we ended up meeting him at his work down in Tacoma. He gave us the grand tour of his plant (GP), which was super interesting! Tobin and I were both impressed. AND there was a boat in their dock unloading something. Stephen said in the time he’s worked there (3 years or so), this is only the 3rd boat to have docked in their dock. Cool. By the time we were ready to leave though, it was pretty late (about 9:30). Tobin wanted to go for it. I wanted to head over early Friday morning. He eventually caved when I informed him that my cousin, Carne Livingston, was going to be on the David Letterman show. Carne is in the Navy, and I guess it was Fleet-Week in NY, so they packed out the David Letterman audience with Navy guys. Carne came up with a song to stump the band. He stumped the band, and then he sang his song. It was great! Daddy recorded it on VHS (we’ve watched it several times this weekend), and I really wanted to get some frames from that up here on my site. (I don’t know if Daddy has the cables I need to do that.)

So we ended up heading over to the other side of the mts. (the right side IMHO) early Friday. We made it to Ellensburg at around 7:45 and parked the car at Jerrols. We wanted to buy Tobin a new Central hat, and I wanted a new pair of Central shorts. Well we didn’t find anything interesting there, but we left the car there, and walked over to campus. I visited my old prof, Dr. Gellenbeck, and we ended up chatting for an hour or so about work and stuff. It was neat. Then Tobin and I walked over to the new SUB building and were pretty impressed by its size (wish it would’ve been there when we were at college there!). Unfortunately the campus bookstore didn’t have any interesting hats or shorts either.

From Ellensburg we drove to Moses Lake where my mom teaches for Big Bend. We got to see her office and meet some of her students and then we went out to lunch at this awesome little Chinese Buffet place. Finally, we drove to Ephrata, and I took Tobin down to the High School to see the art show that was supposed to be going until 3. They’d taken it down early, so I took Tobin over to the art classroom and introduced him to Mrs. Parker, and she gave him the grand tour of her room. I think he was jealous. lol But she showed him some pretty cool projects that she had done this year, and he got some great ideas.

We capped out Friday night by going to the movie X-Men III. I liked it.

Saturday we drove up to Coulee City for their rodeo. It was a lot of fun. Daddy and I took our cameras (which are identical by the way), and got a BUNCH of shots. The professional photographers who were shooting the rodeo had Canon 20D’s (I took a shot of one of their cameras), AND the lense that Daddy wants (70-200 F2.8). Anyways, we got to see calf roping, bronco riding, barrel racing, and bull riding. It was great. ML and I saw a few people we knew. I ran into a girl I went to HS with (who has a husband and a baby). Wow, everyone’s growing up (I think kids are still a few years out for us!).

From Coulee City we drove to Moses Lake where M&D looked at cars. If you read my blog last week you’d know that their van was rather sickly. Well it’s totally kaput now, so they do need something new. They didn’t find anything though in Moses Lake (except for Chinese food – we went there the second day in a row). Good times! I sure miss this side of the mts – and my family. It’s good to be back (even if it’s only for a few days).

Check out the photos section for more pics from this weekend.