I am pretty proud of how we raised our kids when it comes to snow skiing (the one athletic endeavor for which I can say that). They learned at the Canyons, Brighton, Brian Head, Piancavallo, Civetta, Bad Kleinkircheim, Nassfeld, and Monte Cervinio (aka the Matterhorn). But we missed the chance to spring ski on Monte Etna, the volcano that created the island of Sicily. So we were looking forward to skiing on a volcano for the first time after moving to Oregon in 2017. In January 2018, Isaac and I got that chance at Timberline on Mt Hood.
There are the man and the mountain. The snow was terrible, unfortunately, but we still had a blast flying down the groomers. This is at the top of the highest winter lift. The lift behind Isaac is only open in the summer when everything but the glacier has melted. You can take a snow cat to the top in winter but there was always a huge line the two days we were there.
We were there with Isaac's Scout troop and we stayed in a very affordable but very uncomfortable Scout refuge right off the highway on the way to Timberline. I came prepared with ear plugs after my experience at EMEDS in 2014, but the quality of sleep was still poor. Most of Isaac's troop couldn't ski or board well, so it was great for him to show off his skills and feel like the athletic one for once!
This is the Timberline Lodge. If you are a "Shining" fan like I am, then you will understand why I was geeking out all weekend. Kubrick built a set that looks like the Timberline in England where he shot the film, which was the biggest movie set created at the time, but the exterior shots from distance were of Timberline. We went inside, which looks nothing like the Overlook, but it was still fun to imagine Danny sneaking out of one of the windows with the snow piled up underneath. "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny!"
And of course I had to get a shot of Isaac with the lodge and Mt Hood. Just looking at this picture makes me want to watch the movie again. For some weird reason I always have some faint hope that THIS time Jack won't go crazy and try to axe his family to death.
We hit it hard for two days and by the end of the second day Isaac was keeping up with me fairly well on the screaming groomers. I tried to work on his carving technique with hime and he made great progress.
The snow finally came in March, and Isaac was out of school on a Thursday, which meant that we could ski for $20 each at our local resort, Hoodoo. The drive is two hours, which is a massive bummer, but at least doable in a day. I had heard mixed reviews, but I was definitely impressed.
Here is Isaac at the top of the mountain with Mt Washington in the background. The volcanoes in the Oregon Cascades are, from north to south: Mt Hood, Mt Jefferson, Three Fingered Jack, Mt Washington, The Three Sisters, and Mt Bachelor. Hood is right between Jack and Washington, with great views of both on clear days. Washington reminded me of Monte Cervinio, the Italian side of the Matterhorn.
The snow that day was pretty good, maybe 10 inches of powder on top of old, crunchy stuff. We went back with the whole family later in March when the snow was amazing and bought season passes for '18-'19. I took Isaac on double blacks through the trees that day and he did a great job keeping up and improving his powder form. I'm planning on buying used gear for the kids next season and going every weekend or day off that we can. It's not the Alps or the Dolomites, but it's cheap and not crowded, so we'll take it!
For Thanksgiving 2017 we met up with the extended Merback family at the home of Aunt Laurie and Uncle Bob in Lafayette, CA. I hadn't been to their home for a long time, probably since Isaac was an infant. They had remodeled their kitchen and Bob had survived a brush with death from lymphoma in that time. They had visited us with Blair and Sue in May 2016, just before Bob's scare, and I was so glad that my kids had spent time with them and had a relationship with two very special people from my life.
We left right after I got out of work on Wednesday and drove until after 2:00 am. Thanksgiving morning the men took the kids to the park to be of some use to those preparing the feast. We met up with Dave, Jenny, the triplets, Morgan, Elizabeth, and their five kids for some serious touch football.
Great action shot with Mt Diablo in the background, taken by K. R. Merbsbacher, as Bob calls him.
Front row, left to right: Dave, Grant, Ava, Ty, Will, Fiver, Stella, Isaac Harris, Morgan
Back row: Berkeley, Brandon, Rob, Travis, Jake, Cole, Joey, Luke, Isaac, Cooper, Tanner, Bob
We came home hungry and to a delicious meal prepared by our better halves. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, partly because of the amazing memories we made in Tuscany, partly because it is not religious, and partly because it is all about eating amazing food that I don't have to prepare! I try to do the dishes.
The big kids at their table. Ty is ready to be a frat boy with his Martinelli's.
This isn't the same table, but it is the same location as their old everyday dining table. A lot of great memories of sitting around that table, playing cards, eating Bob's famous waffles, mixing cereal types, discussing the finer points of Terminator 2 on Laserdisc, etc.
And some video:
The little kids at their table. Not pictured is Jade, who is adorable and a holy terror at the same time, much like her mom was.
And the biggest kids' table, also with Martinelli's, in the formal dining room. The meal was amazing but we spent the next few days trying to make our way through the mountain of stuffing and yams that were left over.
The redesigned kitchen at Leeward Glen.
On Friday we drove into San Francisco for the city experience. We first drove to Twin Peaks for a view and photo op.
The grandkids with the sun in their faces. On the right is Mt Diablo again.
Mimi and Poppop with the grandkids. Georgie is trying to hide from the sun behind Jade.
We then drove to the Sutro Bath ruins on the north coast and hung out on the rocks for awhile. Jake and Ashley realized that they had left their electronic key back at Twin Peaks and borrowed a car to head back. As they pulled up they saw a man holding their key and looking around. So fortunate that they found it!
We then set off from the Baths on the Coastal Trail that led to a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge. I love this candid shot of Cooper holding one of the twinner's hands. Can't tell them apart from behind, although based on the pigtails in the previous shot I think that this is Cate.
Couple selfie with the Golden Gate.
I love this family picture! Could have been our Christmas card picture but Ashley had proactively sent out Thanksgiving cards early with our new address.
We then headed to Fisherman's Wharf for clam chowder in a bread bowl, which wasn't as good as I remember and which left us with tons of leftover sourdough bread. We walked out onto the pier to see the old battleship and submarine and saw this cut-out of Rosie the Riveter.
On Saturday we drove to the cemetery where Sam Garff is buried. Laurie became pregnant in 1993 when Shaun, her youngest, was nine. That June Jake, Rob, and I drove to their house, by ourselves, after Jake's graduation and she told us the news while we were at Rocky's baseball game. We were sworn to secrecy until the family cruise that summer. Laurie told everyone on the cruise and we were all excited for the twentieth grandchild. On Jan 19, Bob called our house and told us about how the heartbeat was lost before birth and Sam was stillborn. I don't think his name would have been Sam if he had lived, but since he had passed they named him after Bob's beloved dog. Sam would have been 23 at this time had he lived.
We went to play mini-golf and arcade games afterward and then went to Szechuan Chinese food at the classic Laurie and Bob restaurant that night.
On Sunday we should have been driving home, but Mimi had been able to buy tickets for everyone to visit Alcatraz, so we decided to let the kids play hooky on Monday. Here is Georgie on the ferry with Coit Tower in the background.
Juliet soaked from the rain with Alcatraz in the background. I hadn't been there since my senior trip to see Phantom of the Opera in SF in 1995 with Ms. Taylor and Ms. Grabovoi, my favorite English teachers, and Lianne Ong, the girl who broke my heart in high school. The audio tour was excellent but I still fantasize about having Phil Hartman give me the insider's tour (R.I.P., John "Vicky" Johnson).
Crazy faces with Coit Tower. We walked from the pier to China Town to have specialty pastries and buy adult-themed fortune cookies. We then drove over to the Golden Gate bridge and walked about halfway across it on a very windy night. Crisis hotline placards and phones are everywhere and the first few hundred feet have chain link fence in front of the guard rail.
That night Laurie read us her talk from church that recapped the entire experience she had with Bob in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles, then her experience with the benign ovarian tumor that she had removed once Bob was fully recovered. It was a very touching experience, and although I don't share their beliefs and the how and why of Bob's recovery, I am still very grateful for a little more time with him.
The next morning Bob took the boys to get donuts in his Porsche for Fiver's birthday. It was then finally time to make the nine-hour drive back to Oregon. Thankfully there is an In-and-Out Burger in Grant's Pass about 3 hours south of us, as if we needed more food after that weekend. It was great to get the whole Merback clan together again and it made us very excited for the next July in Cancun!
On August 21, 2017, Corvallis was in the pathway of the solar eclipse totality. I was due to separate from the Air Force on September 30 and the squadron policy was a maximum of 30 days of terminal leave. I was not going to miss the eclipse, so I bargained hard and was able to accomplish my final-out on August 18. I was done by 0930 and on the road. I drove 12 hours to Lincoln, Nebraska, the first day and 13 hours to Park City, Utah, the second day where I stayed with Aly Monson's family. I woke up super early the morning of Aug 20 and could not go back to sleep, so I slipped out of the Monson's house early and started my final leg of the drive.
Ashley had arranged for me to swing by a home in Liberty, Utah, just on the east side of the mountains from Ogden. They had a litter of 2 month-old Border Collie-Australian Shepherd mix puppies that they were selling for $200. There were two females left and the cuter one immediately started biting my fingers. The other one was very calm and not biting at all, making my choice very easy. I had stopped in Rock Springs, Wyoming, to buy dog supplies and I put her in the crate on top of absorbent pads. She immediately puked up her breakfast and managed to completely miss the pads. After cleaning everything up we resumed our trek. She puked between every stop and refused to urinate or defecate during our gas station breaks. She seemed very shocked and skittish. I finally pulled in to our home for good late that evening, just one day before the eclipse. My parents were there with my nephew Luke, and Ashley's college friend Jessica was visiting with her family.
Happy to be together again.
I asked the kids if they could have me pull anything in the world out of the car, what would it be? Juliet and Georgie immediately replied, "A dog!" Isaac said he was thinking the same thing. Ashley recorded the moment with her phone:
Suddenly all of the puking and clean-up didn't seem so bad. Of course, she almost immediately urinated on the living room rug twice, but thankfully she became house-trained very quickly.
The kids stayed up late spending time with her, and who could blame them?
When I sent a message to my siblings about the dog and the surprise, my brother Rob sent me this picture back and said that he became emotional just thinking about the fact that our dog was part border collie. This is a picture of Pepper, our border collie mix who was owned by the Baldersons but belonged to both families. I don't think we ever trained her to do anything, but she would come immediately when you called (and eat anything you offered her) and she would run interminable loops around us when we were playing sports in the yard or swimming in the pool. She hated being in the water and my dad would get more upset about Pepper being the pool than by our riding our bikes down the small hill into the pool. She went absolutely crazy when the meter man would come in the yard, but was very friendly with all of my mom's swimming lesson students and families.
The next morning we took her out to meet the chickens, who were still chicks themselves, having been born just a week or two after the puppy.
Of course, once Juliet was up she was all about the puppy again. Here she is with Jessica's three kids.
We had breakfast on the east-facing porch from which we could see the start of the eclipse. Jessica is on the left and Luke in the center.
I had created solar filter lens covers for my binoculars, which allowed us to have close-up views of the moon starting to cover the sun.
This is the shadow of a small colander that we had out for breakfast. As you can see, the sunlight coming through the circular holes is crescent-shaped because of the moon shadow.
Luke with Mimi.
Juliet using the glasses I constructed with solar filter paper.
Jessica's youngest, Ashley, and I all had Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon t-shirts, the final track on which is called "Eclipse". We staged this picture while I was helping Ashley to find the sun with the binoculars.
Our neighbors were out on our pond's dam since they could not see the sun from their houses, so we all relocated to join them
Merbacks watching the eclipse.
The kids with the puppy and our neighbors in the background.
Georgie with her new best friend.
Dark Side selfie
College friends selfie
Jessica and her husband Gabe
Luke and Isaac. Tanner had come to visit us in Italy while he was on his 6th grade sabbatical, so Luke got to come see us in Oregon during his. And even though Oregon may not seem like much compared to Italy, Luke got to see the eclipse totality. I was not prepared for how amazing it was. Pictures don't do it justice. It is the most out-of-this-world experience I have ever had. I can only imagine what it was like for pre-scientific cultures to have an eclipse appear out of nowhere. You definitely would have thought that the world was ending. You can hear it in my voice in this video:
So incredible.
The kids enjoying some time together before saying good-bye.
And the final good-bye!
Before they left, Jessica and Gabe had to take the requisite "American Gothic" photo with our pitchfork. After they left my dad and I got to work connecting the electrical system for the hot tub while the kids spent some quality time with the puppy.
Juliet snuggling up with the puppy.
Luke doesn't want to give her up.
Luke retaliating for Isaac's puppy theft.
Merback family mix selfie: multiple generations, families, sexes, and species.
Ashley and I went on a short walk with the puppy later in the day. I think it was the next day when I really forced the issue of what we were going to call her. I looked up all kinds of Italian dog names but nothing seemed to fit. Finally, we decided to name her after one of our family's favorite European trips to the island of Naxos, Greece. But since Naxos is a bit formal we decided to shorten it to Naxi.
