idaho trip

this past week we drove to idaho to spend some time with shawn's family and to see mountains and trees again! :) on the drive down our dog, denali, had a hard time staying in the back of my car and instead wanted to snuggle up to shawn. shawn had just got off a 12 hour work shift that morning and all he wanted to do was to sleep. having a dog that constantly wanted to sleep with him kept waking him up and he'd push denali away. give her two minutes and she was right back where she had been before.
we were down in driggs, idaho for halloween and so i grabbed all my wiggs before we left north dakota. i thought that they just might come in handy. and they did! shawn's parents got to go to a "trunk or treat" (where families will meet in the church parking lot and kids will trick or treat from car to car.) and halloween party. luckily, i happened to have all of my wigs and we had fun dressing gary and marlene up. marlene even found one of her daughter's old drill team hair pieces which we turned into a striking beard for gary. gary even won the award for the best adult costume!
our primary reason for going to idaho was to see shawn's grandma kay. she had had a stroke three weeks previous. she's doing great and making progress in recovering the use of her body. we had a great time spending time with her. :)
we also got to spend some time with shawn's nephew and neice - linkin and linlee. the kids love riding "horses" and drafted shawn to be their horse several times.
and here's my other wig that i brought. the kids thought that it was a lot of fun to wear. so here's linkin:
and linlee:happy halloween!

Fall has flung...

it's fall and i thought i'd up a picture of our back yard. the leaves took forever to actually fall off the trees and i was kind of excited to rake the leaves and jump in them. but i never did. for some odd reason having a dog takes away all that excitement - the possibility of landing in dog poop convinced me that i better not. ewwwh! so shawn was raked them up instead. anticlimatic.
early this fall (or was it late summer?) shawn decided to get his very first bow. he hasn't actually hunted with it yet but he has done some target practice. he's not bad! not bad at all!
we went and found a field that did not have "no trespassing" signs posted and found a hay bale for shawn to practice on. here he is in deep concentration.
i love all of shawn't facial expressions! here is his "giddy" face. i'll ask him to smile for the camera and so he'll give me a fake smile (which i can't complain because i have a hard time having a real looking smile when i'm told to smile - it's a deKay thing) and then i'll ask him to really smile for me. and then he'll pull one of these faces. i love it! when we took our engagement pictures everytime right before the picture took, shawn would chuckle under his breath to get that perfect smile. i thought it was just so darn cute!
and here we are together. awwwh! :) can you tell i'm freezing from the wind?

i'm back!!!

ok, ok, satisfied?! :) so yeah, it's been a while and i suppose not many of you are too updated since i have taken an internet break. it's been sooo nice to not have the internet black hole tempt me to steal my time away. yet here i am again... although this is a pretty good purpose for getting back on.

anyhow, here's a summary of the past two months or so. below is a pic of shawn and denali on their daily run. this is how shawn runs denali and she loves it! she pulls shawn on the bike until she's too tired and then he pedals and keeps her going. on this particular trip i went with them on our family bike ride and denali got a hold of a road-kill squirrel. she was so proud of her catch and it took some coaxing to get her to release it. she's quite the huntress. in our backyard she's caught one bird and one squirrel already.
about a mile or so from our house is a Scandinavian heritage park. it's awesome! a lot of the people from this area are from norway. every october there's a huge norsk hostfest that celebrates the norwegian heritage here. here is one of my favorite statues at the park: it's hans christian andersen - a celebrated norwegian. i love this statue as it portrays such a lovable guy that is hard not to want to know what he's thinking.
and here's a building at the park. i think it's a church. i've never been to the park when the building is open, so i've never been inside, but i will make it eventually.
some friends that we've made while here had a wedding reception and i got to make the cake! they were married this spring, right before chris got deployed, and then had their wedding reception when he got back. i happened to get to know this couple through becky's sister, who was in my same ward when i was at rick's college, a million years ago. cool, huh! anyhow, i was nosey and asked if they were going to have a cake, they said no and so i offered to make it. i love making cakes and want more practice at making them so i'm glad they accepted my offering. :) it turned out great! angel food cake with whipped cream frosting - not your traditional wedding cake. mmmm! it was delicious!

a few weeks ago me and shawn and denali (or rather shawn, denali and i...) went to explore Theodore Roosevelt national park. we loved it!! we only had a day to experience the park so we went for the quick overview and want to go back to explore it more thoroughly. while there we saw a ton of wildlife! we saw plains bison, mule deer, antelope, prairie dogs, elk, wild horses... it was awesome!! here's some of the bison that we saw. it amazes me every time i run into them that they could care less about anyone or anything nearby. they walked right next to our car - if i was a more daring and brainless person i could've put my hand out the window and touched some of them. there were even two males that did a bit head butting. really cool!
shawn wanted to try and call in the elk so we went on a wild elk chase. we had heard the males bugling and the females calling all night long and that morning shawn was able to call some females in but they didn't come all the way in. so we crossed the river that meanders through the park, randomly found a trail on the other side, followed it for a while and then headed out off the trail trying to find elk. there never were any that answered back but we did blunder into some females and they paused for a bit when shawn did his bugle but decided that we weren't worth the effort so they left. i guess shawn needs to work on getting a more "manly" bugle. tee hee.
this is shawn's tool for his bugle - and it really sounds real! it's a plastic accordion straw that he bends to make the noise right. this particular straw we got free from someplace and it has hearts around it that say "love" and other such un-manly words. i think the pink and red color might've clued the females in to thinking that they wanted someone with a deeper bugle. we'll have to search out restaurants that give away blue or green straws next. i'm sure those'll work better. :) haha!
and here's me chewing on a piece of grass...
and us together! we rarely have pictures of us together since i'm usually snapping all the pictures. we just need to get a photographer to follow us, just so we can be in a picture once together, a picture of us doing something other than posing for the camera that i cleverly hold in my outstretched hand.
here's onto my latest projects: honey!!! people at church have befriended one of the beekeepers around here and so our ward gets a super good deal on raw honey for people to fill up for food storage. this guy owns 4,000 hives, spends the summer here in north dakota and the winter in california renting his bees out to pollinate the crops down there. he gets a lot of honey in the summer and so a friend invited me to go help to fill all the honey orders for our ward. i have no idea how many gallons we filled, but it was a lot!! there were possibly about 20 5-gallon buckets we filled up, plus all the other miscellaneous containers. i personally took home three gallons and i'm so glad i did. it tastes delicious and it's super good for you! i've been trying to substitute honey in for things that require sugar, like my breads.
i took lots of pictures of the honey as we poured it from the vat. when we'd get down to the bottom of the vat the different types of honey would mix (from different flowers) and awesome shapes would appear in the honey. i also asked a billion questions about bees and learned so much that really makes me appreciate the little guys. like, have you ever heard of bee sting therapy? some people claim that they've been cured from multiple sclerosis because of it. and did you know that the bees determine what type of bee a larvae will be (worker, drone, queen) depending on how much food they feed the larvae? it's amazing!
another project i've been working on is making anything and everything out of crab apples. for those of you that don't know or that are in denial, crab apples make some of the best applesauce i've ever had. and the sad thing is that people think that they're just ornamental and that there's no purpose for them other than making a mess of their yard and driveway every fall. that's the wrong attitude! make them into applesauce, apple jelly, fruit leather, apple cider additions and you can substitute applesauce for fat in breads, cookies... they're great! me and some friends did the first batch and then i continued on alone. i wanted a lot because it's soooo good!
shawn got off work early one day and came and helped me pick apples on base. no one wants their crab apples so you just have to knock on doors and ask to take the apples from their yard. and presto! the apples are yours!
there was also a tree on base of normal apples (i don't know what kind these are) that hadn't been pruned so there were tons of little apples. i picked a box of those - they were delicious!
all in all i processed four boxes on my own and it's a lot of work! here's my stash that i ended up with. i'm quite pleased with myself. :)
and for those of you that have asked, here is my house. this is the backyard, which is the only way we go in our house. the front door is reserved for those that don't know better. haha! i'll take a picture of that later for you. the blue thing is a tarp hung on my clothes lines as an awning for the dog when it rains or drizzles. we're working on getting her a dog house. and we rent the main floor and basement. someone else lives upstairs, so we don't quite have a house to ourselves yet.
last weekend my grandparents came up from phoenix to iowa, where they were both born and raised. and since iowa is just a short jaunt away (11 hour drive) i decided i wanted to see and experience the land of my forefathers. here's my grandpa, bob deKay, in front of his name on a monument to all those from griswold, iowa that have served in wars. grandpa served in the korean war.
i got to go to three of the cemeteries around town to see where my ancestors are buried. here my grandparents are standing next to my grandpa's parents (far right) and my grandma's parents and brother (to the left of grandma and grandpa).
g and g took me to a park right out of town and there we found lots of walnut trees with tons of walnuts on the ground. it was fantastic! we had a ball picking them up. i ended up going back on my way back home and got a whole bunch more. they're now sitting in my basement drying so that i can crack them open and get the wonderful black walnuts from inside, as grandma (helen deKay) is demonstrating here. black walnuts are so much harder than those that you get in the store (english walnuts?) and so a nut cracker doesn't really cut it. a hammer works much better but it takes a lot of skill not to blow the nut to pieces when you get frustrated, as i found out the hard way. he he.
all in all it was a wonderful trip. i love my grandparents so much for the people they are and the person that they created in my father. going to griswold helped me to understand them and where they came from better, as well as made me appreciate those who have gone on before me, that i have never met, but have forged the path for me to be.
and to close this rather lengthy entry, a last picture. north dakota has these all over the highway systems and i love it! some say "do your best" or "be grateful" or "be happy" but i always like this one. simply put, "smile."

sunflowers of north dakota

the sunflowers here are awesome! i was quite surprised this spring to hear that the sunflower is one of the big local agricultural products and i was excited for summer to come so that i could see all the wonderful flowers. and they are wonderful!! there is also a large amount of canola and flax grown so, combined with the sunflowers, the fields are the most wonderful of colors! the flax fields are oceans of blue, the canola fields are oceans of yellow and the sunflowers are golden suns. it's gorgeous! there are also a lot of other grains here which i really can't tell a difference between but i've got the flowering plants down!
i've been going out and taking pictures of the sunflowers and i just wanted to share some of them with you. i've absolutely loved seeing them! when i'd be out among the flowers i would imagine that i was alice in wonderland and would hope that the flowers would start talking and singing to me. just so you don't start worrying, no, the flowers never did talk to me but they definitely mumbled among themselves when the wind would start blowing. :) they certainly have a personality because of their ginormous size.





the weeds next to the fields are quite pretty, too. they're definitely photo-worthy...

Alaska trip continued...

To continue my alaska vacation...
i made it my goal, after the family reunion, that i would go hiking everyday, or go on some outdoor adventure. i stuck to that pretty good except for sunday and 4th of july. i just wanted a rest from being busy everyday so it was just nice to stick around my parents house for a day. so here is another baldy hike. this is krystal, keith and me. and the pic of dad is in the next frame. so this is my "summit" pose that i borrowed from some family friends. every time i reach the top of a mountain i have to have some sort of dominating pose (ha!) to show that i'm at the top and the world is at my feet. corny, i know, but lots of people do it, so there! :) and way to go keith! not bad for a six year old, especially since he beat me to the top! (i'm a slow, steady hiker...)
here's my dad doing what he thought was the karate kid stance. i disagree and think it looks more like a spider man pose. either way he looks rather limber in this photo, ready to swoop down and pounce on unsuspecting villains!!
one of the hikes i did was up to the hatcher's pass area. i parked on the side of the road on the way up and me and raisin took off up the side of the valley and found this beautiful bowl. the tundra flowers were GORGEOUS up there with little streams running here and there. it was great! we stayed up there awhile but i could see a storm moving in from further in the mountains, so when it started to sprinkle on us we headed down.
and just as a side note, a tribute to raisin. she is the greatest hiking companion ever! i don't like hiking by myself, just in case something happens, so i've always taken raisin with me and she's wonderful! she's a great bear alarm and she's not the type that will chase the bear, just warn me of it. she also is very conscious of who she's hiking with and constantly plays "mother hen" making sure no one is left behind. she's nearing the end of her life now and is stiff and has trouble walking smoothly but she never wants to be left behind. as soon as she sees me put my backpack in the car, she is there jumping in my car. she's also now deaf and so it's hard to call her to let her know where i am. so if she looks around for me and can't find me, she starts panicking a bit. so then there i am jumping up and down, waving my arms so that she can see me. i do love her and appreciate her being such a good companion to me.
and here's a photo of me on the drive down from hatcher's pass, after my hike. this is the matenuska river and it's beautiful! and a perfect place to stop and take pictures. and just fyi, the daisy picture at the top of my blog was taken right next to this river. beautiful flowers!
while i was home i probably went and ate sushi two or three times at my family's favorite restaurant. mmmm! there's no sushi here in minot so i had to eat as much as i could while up in alaska since i knew there'd be a sushi draught coming on. ha! anyhow, here is one of my all time favorite rolls - the dynamite roll (the one in the center of the picture that looks like a volcano). it's fabulous! whenever i go that roll always gets ordered even though i'm trying to branch out and find something as fantastic as that but i always come back. oh dynamite roll, how i luv thee! :)
carolyn's family came up and spent the day at mom and dad's house so i got to spend some good times with here kids. here's cayden, pretending to sleep in some baby fireweeds. he's trying to pretend but had a hard time trying not to smile... :)
and here's the youngest, cathryn. she's a very smiley baby who is always into everything! she's very adventurous and has a very strong personality. and notice that nice gouge in her head? that happened when i was watching her and she smacked her head on the corner of the counter. it really makes me feel horrible because she carries that nice reminder on her head.
and here's whole bunch of wildflowers that my mom picked and put on the porch. daisies, columbine, geraniums, blue bells. i love the wild flowers from home!
i know this doesn't show much but the kids are sitting in the flower garden that i started back in 2004. i made a nice little stone walkway and a flat area at the top for chairs that was soon overtaken by weeds. when my youngest sister got married, we pulled out all the weeds, really flattened the area, put some of that black fabric stuff that stops the weeds, covered it with gravel and put some nice boulders around to add to the charm. here's cassidy and cayden sitting in my garden. i'm so glad that my mom and dad have kept it up. it looks great every time i see it!
and one last wildflower picture. i don't know what these are called - i'll have to look them up later and add the name once i figure it out. but they're gorgeous! they're really tiny flowers that grow in clumps and just look so angelic. mmmm!

deKay family vacation, part 2

i mentioned that the kids entertained themselves the whole time and found lots of things to do. they decided that they all wanted to make bows. they would go find the perfect sticks and have my dad tie string on them and then find great arrows. here's hannah with a great arrow that she found. i don't know that it'd be that functional but it really does look great!
for all that really know me, i am a true deKay, which will be defined in a second. this is my campsite. i had to find the perfect site and then i hung my tarp over my tent, just in case it decided to rain the entire time, which it didn't. it only sprinkled a bit the first day but i left the tarp up because it sure heated the air under it up quite a bit. anyhow, i have to have everything perfect and just so and all the knots tied correctly and all. it's amazing how nit-picky i am. anyhow, every time i'd walk up to my tent i'd get a little thrill of pleasure by how perfect it looked. i know, it really sounds obsessive and ridiculous but for some strange reason i love making things work efficiently and neat. And that is the definition of a DeKay.
here's a pic of jennifer and thomas looking out at the ocean. i just love thomas' face in this one. he is such a master of facial expressions and you can tell exactly what he's feeling. water is such a draw for almost everyone and it's exciting and relaxing. especially if you can throw rocks or sand in the water - then it's even better!
the last full day we were there curtis and robert took the kids out in the kayaks. cathryn was not very thrilled at all about being out there and being confined so she screamed and tried to stand up. needless to say, she didn't stay out very long as curtis was afraid that she'd tip the kayak over. the rest of the kids were great! here they are, swarming around the double kayak, waiting for their turn to go out.
one final picture and then you'll be done with my family vacation (although not my alaska vacation)! here's the whole group that came, minus krystal who's taking the picture, bringing the total to 24. my mom's brother and his three sons came, and then krystal and then various siblings and their kids. for the deKay family, we were almost complete with the exception of three: shawn (because of work), tyson (because of training) and jonathon (he's still on a two year mission for our church - but will be home in november! wahoo!!). next time we do something like this i hope that we can all be there. i loved spending so much time with everyone that went - it was a blast!
and just a side note - do you like the shirts? i know you can't really see the print on them but i did it! i learned on YouTube how to screen print shirts, bought some photo emulsion off of a screen printing shop, built some nylon screens and did it. it was great to learn how the whole process was done. next time i do it the shirts will look even more fabulous because then i'll know what i'm doing. :)

deKay family vacation, part 1

ok, ok. so i haven't posted in a LONG time. it's only been a little over a month, but a lot has happened since then, hence the "LONG" instead of "long". so in the middle of june i took off to alaska for a family reunion. i was only supposed to go up there for two and a half weeks but i ended up extending that by a week. unfortunately shawn was unable to go with me because of work, so i went up by myself. when i got there the flowers were amazing! i absolutely love wildflowers! perhaps i'll have to dedicate a whole post to the best flowers that i took pictures of since i think i spend most of my time photographing them.
here's some of my neices and nephews in a lupine patch in my parents backyard: cayden, rachel, cassidy and keith.
one of the first days i got there we took a nice family hike up baldy, the mountain that my parents house is on the side of. we hike straight up from their property up to the top. not all of us got to the top, as hiking with little kids slows things down a bit. here's a pic of cayden and rachel part way up the mountain with the town of eagle river spread out below. and here's one of those gorgeous flowers! this is a chocolate lily, which are everywhere in the woods around my parents house.
my sister sarah and her husband, chris got to come up with their one month old son, dalin (or is it dallin?). i got to take some baby pics so i'll get those done and posted. and yes, sarah, i'll send them to you. :) he's a very cute baby and was great during the whole trip. people were surprised that they took a baby on the trip (across katchemak bay, out of homer, alaska) but he did fantastic!
i drove down to homer with my sister carolyn and her husband, curtis, and two of their three kids. we stayed the night at a campground in anchor point and while carolyn was putting cayden down to bed me and curtis and cathryn went down to the beach. i was down there at first with cathryn, taking pics and there were some huge bald eagles that swooped down towards cathryn. i think they thought that they might be able to carry her off. i didn't let her get that far from me after that. she had so much fun finding all of the perfect rocks to throw into the water. i really think that's every kids favorite pastime. something about seeing that splash is so thrilling!
and here's a lovely self portrait of myself. i just really liked the effect of the clouds and the sand and the reflective water. *sigh* it was hard to leave.
so the whole troupe met down in homer for our five days of fun and we had water taxis take us across the bay and drop us on the beach that was to become our home away from home. there was a yurt (kind of like a cabin) there that we rented from the forest service and the rest of us set up our tents in that same area. it was pretty isolated there. when the tide came in it completely blocked our beach, so we were stranded there until low tide. it was great!
the sand, dirt, sticks, sea weed, plants, trees, water and rocks provided so much entertainment for all the kids. there was never a moment when they weren't busy. they would find flowers and plant gardens on the beach, they would make castles with mote systems for the incoming tide to fill up... i got the kids to make a mermaid with me. we made sure she was modestly dressed (a full shirt instead of just shells) and we used only the things that we could find on the beach for her composition. after we were done winnie decided that our mermaid needed a mer-dog, so we made one, complete with a sea weed leash. here's winnie, cassidy, me and hannah.
we brought two kayaks with us on our trip - curtis' and my parents. curtis had taken a five or six day kayaking course in katchemak bay earlier in the summer so he was our guru teacher. he took all of us out and instructed us in safety and all the little techniques that he'd learned. it was great! it was wonderful to have someone who had actually taken a formal course instead of just having us use the trial and error method to find out all the ins and outs of things that you never really think about until you do it the right way and find out that it works so much better that way. here's curtis virtual kayaking. i guess the class failed to teach him to use an actual kayak! haha!
and if you know me i have a need to take a random meditation picture everywhere i go. it's just one of my constant poses that define me. so here i am on the beach, sitting on very uncomfortable rock covered in mussels. i didn't really meditate there but if i had it would have been good practice on ignoring the pains of the body, especially those sharp points i was sitting on.dad and keith started building this great tower. they very strategically balanced all the rocks and then dad very carefully lowered keith on it to see if it'd hold him and to see if he could balance enough to not knock it over. he did great! then i decided that i wanted a turn. let's just say that the great rock tower is no longer standing...i just had to put this one in. mad cow disease finally got dear 'ol dad.curtis taking me and krystal bundy (my brother-in-law's sister) out for a kayaking jaunt.
we decided that we were going to go on a 16 mile hike to a glacier. we had to time it just right so that we could hit the tides right, since our beach gets isolated at high tide. chris, krystal, curtis and cathryn came part way in and then turned back to get to the beach before the tide cut them off. they were being the responsible ones and went back to make dinner, help watch kids. the rest of us went the whole way. me and my dad split off from the rest of the group towards the beginning of the hike and so got to sit and enjoy the glacier for a while before everyone else caught up. then my dad decided that he wanted to go down to the glacier, so everyone went down except for me. yeah, yeah, rub it in. i was freezing and the last thing i wanted to do was go and stand on the ice. i probably should've but i didn't. the group did bring back freshly melted glacier water flowing in streams on top of the ice and it really did taste great. i guess i'm just a wimp. ha! so here's dad:
and here's the crew down on the ice below me:
and here's the group on the hike back: my uncle mons, cousins bryce, kyle and tyler, dad, robert (brother) and me.
here's a pic of the kids and krystal climbing on the rocks and peering into a tide pool that had sea anemones in it!
and finding lots of little snails in the water...
dad with winnie, rachel, cassidy, keith and cayden.
earlier this year shawn wanted to get matching celtics shirts. i have to admit that i haven't really worn my shirt since i'm not really all that into sports but i did make sure to bring it with me and to take a picture of me wearing it. i did it for you, shawn! in this pic i'm holding cathryn.
i had decided before i came that i was going to go swimming in the ocean. there was never a day that it was really, really sunny so i had to just go with a cloudy, breezy day. i convinced krystal and several of the kids to go with me and we had a blast! i don't know if you can really call it swimming, though. krystal and i dunked all the way in and i was on my way out when i realized she was still in. the kids were squealing because of the cold and she was patiently standing in the water convincing them to come in. i think they all ended up coming in and krystal would float them on their backs until they decided it was just too cold. i felt like a huge wimp because i just wanted out of there! i did bring soap and did a quick saltwater hair wash but she was just the image of patience and it seemed like the cold wasn't bothering her at all. great job, krystal! the kids all came out of it smiling and laughing and shivering and blue but we had a blast doing it. the picture below is the "before" picture. i don't know that we could've stood around long enough to get an "after" pic.