And Just Like That...They Were Gone

We’ve officially moved our blog to www.calebandtara.wordpress.com!  So, change your bookmarks and email subscriptions and stay in touch with us over there!

Please Do Us a Little Favor...

And in return you may be doing yourself a favor....

If you’ve ever in the history of our blog tried to comment on a post and had any issue, could you please hop on over to : www.calebandtara.wordpress.com and try to leave a comment on the post there?

All you should have to do is click on “leave a comment”--or “# comment(s)” if someone’s already commented--on the bottom of the post and type your comment in the box under “leave a reply".  There are lines to fill in your name, email address, website, various accounts, etc., but you should be able to leave all of that blank and just hit “post comment” if you don’t want to provide information.

Just trying to do a little troubleshooting and see if Blogger is the problem behind the number of people who’ve said they’ve tried to post a comment and couldn’t.  My previous theory was that it had to do with security measures on each user’s browsers or networks, which could explain why some can comment and some can not, but one, I can’t really test that, and two, if that’s the case, people probably aren’t willing to compromise their cyber security to comment on our blog.

So to recap:  please click on the link to our wordpress blog above and try to leave a comment.  Go to the bottom of the post, click “# comment(s)”, type something into the box, and hit “post comment”.

If this works, I may import our blog into our wordpress account and write there.

Thanks!

Take Your Wife to Work Day!

Pretending to fly

Monday marked our squadron’s first Spouse Taxi Day, something most flying squadrons do annually, since you can’t stop in and see your husband in his office any day.  These events provide an opportunity for them to share their work environment and the cool stuff they do.

Posing in the static display

I knew that we were going to wear flight suits(even smallest borrowed ones are dangerously large--I was shuffling all over the place) and explore the plane a bit and taxi.  Sort of like taking a guided trail walk on a horse instead of galloping across a field.  Not that exciting. At least, you hope it doesn’t become more exciting than it’s supposed to be.

Imagine my surprise when I learned we’d be making radio calls!  The pressure was on!  The most easily ridiculed pilots are those who constantly mess up their radio calls!

Sorry for blurriness!  Listening to a crew member explain some onboard equipment.

After we climbed around the static display, they separated us from our husbands like baby birds being kicked out of the nest and forced to get in the plane with engines running to show the waiting IP(instructor pilot) our stuff.  I was first in my group to clamber into the pilot seat and half-heartedly listen to the IP explain how to adjust the seat and what the pedals and switches and buttons did, thinking he was saying this stuff for fun.  So, again, imagine my surprise when he prompted me to put my feet on the rudder pedals and steer us around the taxiways, making difficult maneuvers like left and right turns, applying brakes, and making radio calls, all while trying to keep the plane on a little yellow line!  With some coaching and some influence from the IP’s twin instructor controls, we made it to the runway, did a “high speed taxi” down the runway--sort of like a takeoff fake-out, looped around, and let the other spouses try.

My action shot!  Concentrating hard at the controls. 

Treasure

My birthday--Caleb had to come straight from work and ended up being two hours late to the party--ha!  Fortunately there were a number of other people there.

Birthday fruit pizza--sooo delicious!

Cardboard Logs and Turkey Dogs

Well this past weekend was a first for us: our first camping trip together!  Also the first time we’ve been climbing in over two years!  Hard to believe.

One of the more interesting aspects for me was the making of cardboard logs.  Have you heard of this?  I’d never heard of it.  But we started with these boxes from furniture and some wedding gifts:

And watched The Two Towers and cut them into long strips and then rolled and tied with string until we had this:

Actually, these are the results of rolling about half the boxes, but you get the point.  Basically it was a good way to compact and discard of our excess cardboard while simultaneously providing fuel for our campfire.  Naturally they do not burn as well as regular logs and we had to supplement our supply with sticks and small logs from the forest, but they do pretty well, all things considered.

Here is our home away from home:

This was a free campsite called Luther Campground near Luther Spires, the rock formations we were climbing, just ten miles south of Lake Tahoe.

I decided to buy and try turkey dogs because they were actually cheaper than regular hot dogs, so we cooked those over our campfire and I was just mindlessly eating mine and I asked Caleb what he thought of the turkey dogs and he said he thought they tasted a little weird and then I kind of noticed that they do taste a little weird.  Know what tastes better than regular or turkey dogs?  Toasted marshmallows.  Yum.

Here is Caleb rinsing off dishes in the creek:

Here are a couple shots of us climbing:

First one is me, second one is Caleb. 

We decided to cap off our little trip by driving the highway up the west shore of Lake Tahoe, new territory for both of us, and it was really beautiful.  

I set up a beautiful shot on a beach on the south side of the lake and asked a man to take our picture and then his kid ran into the frame:

So here’s the best I could do with iphoto’s primitive “blemish” tool:

Heh heh.  

And, a parting shot: overlooking Emerald Bay on the south end of the lake.  

SO Many Pictures!

Alright, we got the rest of our pictures from our photographers today!  Yay!  Overall I am so happy with how they turned out.  I was way off on my estimate of how many I thought we were going to get; there are over a thousand.  So, many hours of trying to decide which ones to post, print, put into photobooks, Christmas card picture, etc. are ahead.  It took me several hours just to watch the slide show and look at every single image in the gallery.  And apparently a disc is on its way that has a few more shots not in the gallery.  Gah!

Here is a link to the slideshow of the photographers’ favorites.

Here is a link to our viewing gallery, through which you can order prints if you want to order prints from our photographers ($$$).   Bear in mind that this gallery contains pretty much every picture that they took that day, so not all are flattering or suitable for framing.  :-)

And here’s a shot that made me stop and laugh as I was wading through the masses:

Caleb started it.  I have pictures to prove it.

“First” Dance

Some of you asked about listening to the song we had for our first dance again since it was tough to watch the dancing and listen to the lyrics and voiceovers and everything.  If you weren’t there, our DJ recorded us saying stuff about each other a couple days before and put it in the intro and outro(is that the proper term?) of the song we chose for our dance.  

I was going to just upload the mp3 file of the song with our voices, but couldn’t figure out a way to do that, so instead I made this very simple  four minute video with the song and five lo-res pictures from our photographer’s blog.  I think it took me about an hour.  I now have a deeper appreciation for those people that make cool videos.  Not to mention movies.  

The song is “God Gave Me You”, recorded by Blake Shelton.