2015 coming to a close, well not on the verge of closing, but on the waning side

ha, what a difference 3 years make.  do people still blog?  i dont even recognize this interface.  i keep trying to touch the screen, but wait, i'm typing on the mac, not the surface.  in 5 years will a record of this blog even exist?  facebook has become my defacto storage of snippets but only as captions to photos shared for the grandparents.  

pues,
entonces,

snippets....

....went to lightning fields w/ j1.  its been on my bucket list and am so grateful to the mulies for kickstarting this outing.  our kid free weekend was bookended with nights at los poblanos.  as swanky a boutique hotel as we've ever stayed.  a historic inn on a working farm with a farm to table restaurant.  cozy. intimate.  just lovely.

....the trip to lightning fields starts off at a teeny strip of a town.  more like some empty storefronts that harkened to a time when there was much more happening in those parts.  we met our partners in this outing for the next 24 hrs in a sparse room with a locked door and a fax machine behind the adjacent storefront that just kept ringing.  a texan with little to say shuttled us into his suv.  a 40 minute off road trek and a few instructions on fixings for dinner and he left us with an eta for pickup the next day.  us, a few strangers, a 100+ yr old homestead and 400 lightning rods in a regular grid dotted across the landscape.  the terrain seemed to be just scrub, but upon closer inspection interspersed were lush green areas and areas of desert flowers.  throughout were more red winged crickets than we care to ever come across again.  the area is surrounded by mountains and it was calming to have my eyes focus on the distance.  the rods punctuating the space between the sky and the earth.  no lightning but it didnt seem to matter.  the best part for me was the overwhelming sky and the first point in the morning when the tips of all the rods glowed from first light.

....i am not a very good football mom.  i get j3 to football late to practice. i still dont know all the players names.  i give j3 a hard time about his schoolwork coming first and threaten taking away football when he doesnt get it done.  but its all worth it for this story he wrote

....one of my favorite things to do is karaoke with j1 at the red onion.  we dont go nearly as often as we'd like but when we do, i get to belt out a horrid version of whichever hs ballad i remember that day and the crowd there humors me by applauding like its the best rendition they've ever heard.  

....the year itself was peppered with outings.  a water park in oregon with a plane on top and the slides come out of the 747.   a trip east for me, ostensibly to visit ame at college but really just some mental down time for me.   camping - san juan, rainier, deception pass, fort flagler.  best trip of the summer was the san juans.  almost rained out but we held on and were rewarded with dogfish frenzy!  a local biologist shared her underwater gopro vids with the boys.  so cool.  and in answer to the crazy solstice flautist and singers or just to celebrate fathers day, the local orcas came by on our last morning.   san diego with the neighbors.   got to live on the beach for the week.  couldn't ask for better really.  boys could play catch on the beach until the last light.  zoo.  beach.  legoland.  beach.  aircraft carrier.  beach.   .... old friends at cama beach.  stayed a couple nights with mototown.  uncle michael and manny came by for a day with their pups.  more crab than we could shake a stick at.  (though afterwords found out we shouldve returned some of our haul).  our hands cramped from shelling them.  

....or as aunt nik likes to say, how does it feel to be the family in the frame?  love these guys.