82 posts from 2006

I spent most of this week in the office working with GIS and preparing a summary of land ownership, road lengths, and road density within the Twin Ranch timber sale boundary. On Wednesday I'll show my boss what I produced and hopefully he'll like it.  On Monday I had to go do some maintenence on my two stream gauges, so I took off bright and early.  It had been raining all weekend and I underestimated how big the streams would be.  I had two tasks: first I had to dig up a stream intake pipe and flush all the sediment out of it. 

I also had to rig a boom for a water sampler intake nozzle.  When I got to the streams, the water level was up to my waist (normally, it isn't much higher than my ankles).  I had waders on though, so I jumped in.  Unfortunately, the stream (now a river) was so muddy and so swift that I couldn't see what I was digging for and everything I dug out was instantly filled back in from upstream sediment.  After a couple hours and getting completely soaked, I gave up and drove back to town in my underwear.  I let several days pass before going out again.  The river had gone down, but not by much.  I was able to finish the two jobs even though it was much colder (about 32 degrees) this time around.  I was frozen and wet by the time I was done and made another trip back to town in nothing but my underwear.

In other news: this weekend is going to be great! It was going to be three days, but my boss,

President Bush, decided that the entire Executive Branch should have a "day of mourning" for the late President Ford.  So now I have four days off!  Last night we went to Hollywood Video and rented six movies (we're trying to catch up from a summer of not watching anything).Last night we watched "Superman Returns" (good, but kind of long) and "Thank You For Smoking" which was hilarious.  Today we slept in and then decided to go on a walk.  I wasn't sure about where to take everyone for just a walk. It's not rainy or snowy out, but it's not warm either (about 45 degrees).  In the end I decided to take everyone to Upper Table Rock. It's a huge butte left over from an ancient lava flow.  The BLM has a really nice trail to the top of it. We hiked about halfway to the top before Emma started getting fussy; plus we were at a nice viewpoint.  We took a ton of pictures and a video here and got some really good ones.

What a great weekend!  But before I tell you that, I've gotta tell you

about what happened to me Friday morning.  It had rained the night before and then froze early in the morning.  When I drove to work there was black ice everywhere.  I didn't want to go out in the field, but I kind of had to.So I found the heaviest BLM rig I could, defrosted it, and was just waiting around for the sun to come up and thaw the roads a bit.  It was so slippery that the entire parking lot was more or less a sheet of ice.  I couldn't delay any longer and so I took off - driving very slowly down the road. I started off on backroads and was doing just fine until I got the main highway (state highway 62).  I needed to drive on it for about ten miles.  I had only driven about a mile and was heading down a hill.  In the other lane (oncoming traffic), vehicles were starting a passing lane and about five vehicles and a loaded log truck were all scrambling to pass eachother. The log truck was driving way too fast and had swerved in, out, and around three vehicles when one of the vehicles it was passing hit a patch of ice and went out of control.  Now behind the log truck, the vehicle swerved across one lane of traffic and hit the guard rail (with a formidible cliff below).  Fortunately, the vehicle bounced off the guard rail, but unfortunately came swinging around and started crossing into my lane of traffic.  The vehicle careened into the ditch on my side of the highway, having narrowly missed the back end of my rig.  I not only saw, but heard the whole thing; the metal-on-metal  grinding as the guard rail was hit and the thud as it smashed into the ditch.  I gradually slowed down since I didn't want to spin out of control and pulled off on a gravel pull-out.  The BLM rigs all have radios in them and I called into Dispatch who in turn immediately called 911.  Then I ran up to the accident.  Two other vehicles had pulled over.  After I made sure the lady was alright and told the other folks to stay with her, I ran up the road and slowed traffic down.  It was so slippery on the main highway and having seen that accident I wasn't in the mood to go on any further after slowing traffic down for two hours.  So I just went back to the office and told my boss the story.  he was more than understanding, so I just did office work for the rest of the day.

We went shopping on Saturday (after sleeping in until noon!) and picked up all of our Christmas Dinner fixings and watched movies all night which was a blast. 

Costco got a shipment of DVDs in for real cheap, so we bought several.  We also finished watching the tenth (and final) season of "Friends" which was a lot of fun and definitely recommendable!

For Christmas Eve, we turned on some Christmas music, cleared away some space in the living room, and opened all of our presents! 

Emma got the first gift and did a pretty good job opening it.  She loves anything that "crinkles" - magazines especially - so wrapping paper was a real joy for her.  She only lasted for a few presents before she got cranky and went to sleep, however.  We all got a lot of great gifts and we spent all of today dressing Emma (and ourselves) in several different outfits.  Get this: we couldn't make or receive a single phone call on Christmas Eve.  We think that it was probably just call volume and the fact that everyone gets free calls on weekends.  The phone lines were just fine this (Monday) morning.

Speaking of today, we slept in again and then started in on cooking dinner.  I started the sweet potatoes and made a jello dessert.  Then I started getting things ready for mashed potatoes and the ham.  Dohnele put the finishing touches on everything and supervised me very closely.  When we were done we had sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, ham, stuffing, cranberries, olives, rolls, corn, and of course, sparkling cider!  We're very fat and happy right now. 

Later we're going to have a pumpkin cheesecake that we picked up at Costco.  Mmmmm.

Thanks to everyone for the wonderful gifts and enjoy the rest of the Holiday Season!

Here are our videos for the week.  They're a bit dark thanks to our lovely fluorescent lighting and the one on the far right is 90 degrees off center.

And here are some "new outfit" pictures.

Emma had her first doctor’s appointment in Medford yesterday afternoon. Jonas and I took her to Southern Oregon Pediatrics where she saw Dr. Ljungkvist (pronounced young-vist) for her four month check-up and shots. First the nurse came in and weighed her in at a whopping 17 pounds! Second, she got measured; she is 25 inches long and has a 16 inch head circumference.  Our (very nice) doctor declared Emma in great shape and in the 50th percentile for both height and head circumference and in the 75th percentile for weight.  We already knew that, though, because Emma is always fat and happy!  Then came the shots; the nurse was very quick and the four shots only took a few seconds.  Emma cried for about 30 seconds more and then was right back to laughing and giggling.  She loved the baby-sized examination table, because it was backed with a mirror and she couldn’t get enough of looking at herself.  So we went home and celebrated her successful appointment by getting a membership to Blockbuster.  After renting two videos, however, we decided that it is the biggest rip-off in the world!  Two new releases came to $8.29 and we only get them for two days!  Needless to say we won’t be going back there anymore.  We did watch “An Inconvenient Truth” which was a little bit boring, but a very well done movie all in all.  Go see it!

 

Here’s a fun recipe that we made the other day:

Cranberry Relish

• 1 bag of cranberries
• 1 whole orange
• 1 cored apple
• 3/4 cup sugar

Finely chop or blend the ingredients (peels and all) together.  Do not over-blend!  Eat with chips, crackers, or something salty and cracker-like.

Jonas’ boss made this tasty dish at the Christmas Party a week or so ago, we got the recipe, and have been eating it ever since.

I spent most of this week in the office working on getting monitoring equipment ready to be placed in the field.  In other words I killed an awful lot of spiders because all of this equipment has been sitting in a warehouse for half a year.  Gross.  Unfortunately, most of the equipment needs to be repaired and since nobody really cares about this equipment, the parts are hard to come by.  I finally tracked down a water sampling equipment company in Lincoln, Nebraska that had silocone tubing (the part I needed) for $250 per 50 feet!  We'll see if my boss wants to spend that kind of money on Monday.  I also spent a lot of time working with GIS.  Starting next week I'll be helping my boss prepare a cummulative effects analysis of a timber sale that is being planned near Butte Falls, called "Twin Ranch."

We also did all of our Christmas shopping this week which was fun.  We also ordered the Christmas present that we'll be "giving ourselves."  We purchased a big "Lovesac" which should be lots of fun (check it out here).

I'm sure you've all heard about that big storm that hit Washington and Oregon...  Well, it kind of hit us too.  Not bad, but it was really windy and the power went out for a little bit.  As of this morning, I heard there were still 600,000+ people without power across the Northwest!  I'm glad we're not in that batch of people, because it's only about 30 degrees right now!

And finally we got appointments for Dohnele and Emma as our helath insurance paperwork got finalized earlier this week.  Emma will get her four-month immunizations on Tuesday from Southern Oregon Pediatrics and Dohnele has a checkup in February at Providence Hospital.  We got to pick out the doctors so we feel good about that.

No new pictures today, because I left the digital camera at work.  Hopefully I'll remember to bring it home tomorrow.

We did all that typing a few days ago and forgot to put up the pictures of the tree itself!  Happy Holidays - here it is!

This past week Jonas spent most of his time in the office organizing files; nobody has had his job in six months and things are a mess.

On Friday, Jonas finished up the last couple hours of work needed for the pay period, picked up a Christmas tree permit and drove up to – a 30 mile drive from here. The drive turned out to be really pretty, as it was fresh, sunny, and warm. Emma especially had a good time hiking around with us, she is such an outdoors girl! We ended up finding a tree after a couple hours of tamping through an old clearcut.  There were lots of pine, fir, and cedar to choose from and we ended up getting a cedar.  We also cut a lot of cedar and pine boughs to make our apartment smell nice.

This weekend we concluded that our apartment needed to be livened up as our walls were barren and white.  We thought about buying pictures or art or something, but decided that was too expensive and not personal.  We’ve always wanted to enlarge some of Jonas’ digital pictures since he takes so many of them, so we looked through the computer and narrowed it down to about 80 pictures we liked.  From there we further narrowed it down to 60, then 50, then 29.  We picked two of them and sent them in to Costco to see what an 11x14 enlargement would look like.  

An hour later they were done for $2.99 apiece and they looked fabulous!  So we sent in the remaining 27 and had them all done too.  We then spent the rest of the day buying all of the cheap frames we could find ($5 at Walmart took the cake).  For the past two days we’ve spent all of our free time hanging pictures.  Our “middle bedroom” is now our computer room / art gallery!

Since we’re reasonably confident that we can’t decorate too much more, we’ve finally taken some videos of our apartment and, of course, lots of pictures of Emma.  In other news, Erica passed her test in , so she’s ready to enlist!  AND, Ma Parker is thinking about coming down and visiting in mid-January.  

We can’t say anything unusual about Emma, aside from the fact that she’s still adorable and gets cuter every day.  She loves her little “exersaucer.”  She’ll sit in there, spin around, and play with all her toys.  

She’s very attentive and easily made happy. 

All you have to do to make her smile and giggle is smile at her first.  She’s also very ticklish and laughs hysterically when tickled!  Emma also loves her rice cereal which she gets periodically.  At first she’s not sure what this metal spoon is headed toward her mouth, but once she tastes it, she reaches up to hold on to the spoon and doesn’t let go.  When the spoon is pulled out of her mouth, she grabs it and pulls it back in.  The other night when we fed her she cried four 15 minutes when the cup was empty.

Today Jonas signed us up for dental insurance.  Another deduction out of his paycheck, but now we can go get our teeth cleaned when we have some free time (yeah right!)  We’re also covered by his health insurance (of which the approval came a few days ago).  Now Emma can go get her four-month shots which she was due for a couple weeks ago.  We also mailed Christmas presents for JOSEPH, APRIL, BEN, & JULEAH!!!

Here are our videos for the week:

Hi all! We've decided to move to a different blog site. This one is getting to be a pain. So check it out or copy and paste this link into the address bar above: http://threeparkers.vox.com/

This blog will always be here, so you can check this site for Emma's age and to look at all of our past postings.

The other place where we had a blog was just getting too cumbersome, so we switched to here. 

Hopefully things will be easier on our end.  You can still look at our old blog (http://jonasdohnele.blogspot.com) if you want to see all of our posts up until today.  One of the nice things about this new blog site is that we can upload videos for your viewing pleasure; we've got some good ones for you to start off with today.  Click on the pictures and a description will pop up as well as a bigger version of the picture. 
So what's been happening with us this past week?  We got all of the stuff out of the uhaul and moved into the apartment and now we just need to find places for it all.  My week of work started out with eight inches of fresh snow on the ground.  Here's a fun story: my boss wanted me to go out to this weather station and collect rainfall data it had been gathering since May.  The directions he gave me were written by my "predecessor" and were horrible.  Nonetheless I drove about 40 miles, parked, and hiked uphill through thick brush and deep snow.  There was also plenty of snow on the tree limbs that continually fell off and down my shirt.  Very cold and very wet.  Anyway, I got to where the weather station was supposed to be located, but I didn't see anything!  I kicked around for about an hour with no luck and finally headed home empty handed.  When I talked to my boss about it, he offered to call my predecessor and ask him about it.  Sure enough: he had dismantled the station months ago and not bothered to tell anyone about it!  So it was just a long day of unproductivity and cold wetness.  Oh well, I still got paid for it!  Since then I've gotten a better feel for the area I'll be working in.  I'll be plenty busy, even though the data I'm collecting seems somewhat meaningless at the present.

Dohnele spent the week unpacking our belongings and finding places for everything.  Today should be our last day of that.  We have pictures to hang, TV speakers to hang, the computer room to organize, Emma to play with, and movies to watch and relax to at the end of the day.

We bought Emma a new toy yesterday.  It's one of those saucer things that a baby can sit/stand in while playing with toys all around her. 

Emma doesn't really like it right now as someone other than Dohnele or myself is holding her.  She just kind of gets real quiet and eventually cries.  She'd much rather be a free-range baby which she loves.  She's also very talkative as you'll see from the videos.

We got our Christmas present from Ma and Pa Parker yesterday; a "bed-in-a-box" consisting of very soft flannel sheets with Dohnele's favorite flowers (sunflower) on it.  We'll be sure to get a lot of cuddling out it!  Erica is also off to Anchorage today to take a test for Coast Guard placement.  She did so well on her last test that she has to take it again so that people know it wasn't a fluke!

The past couple days have been super sunny and nice and even warm (55).  Almost all the snow is melted off the mountains which is great!  Oh yeah, I almost forgot...  We ordered pizza last night. 

There was a coupon in the mail, so we ordered four pizzas and two drinks for less than $40!

Now for the good stuff...  The videos!  Don't worry about downloading any of the videos, just click the "play" button and they should play!  Turn on your speakers, however, because there is sound with each video.

I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving weekend, because we sure did! I broke down and finally decided to roast a whole bird for the first time in my life. The one we ended up getting (for free!) was 18 pounds – if it’s free why not go for the gusto?!

Then, on the morning of the big day I prepped my bird, by giving it a bath and pulling out the excess bagged “goodies.” Then I patted it down, stuffed it with: carrots, celery, lemon wedges, fresh garlic, and rosemary twigs. I then stuffed rosemary twigs, fresh garlic cloves, and pepper, and salt under the skin. I then coated the bird with a mixture of finely chopped garlic, crushed rosemary leaves, lots of lemon juice, salt, pepper, and olive oil. It was then to the oven for five hours of slow roasting. A few movies later, it was done! I proceeded to make the rest of dinner, while the bird set. We had stuffing, sweet corn, cranberry sauce, and of course, pumpkin pie. Jonas and I had a peaceful, but quiet dinner as Emma slept. Let me tell you: the turkey was so good! It was moist and had a hint of garlic and rosemary. It was the best turkey I have ever had!

Friday morning at around six o’clock Jonas, Emma, and I all got up to go shopping to check out the biggest sales of the year. Later that day I dropped Jonas off at airport for his flight to Spokane. He spent the night with relatives, picked up a u-haul the next morning, stopped off in Moscow, ID to get our stuff, and then drove all the way home. It was 766 miles of driving for him and he got home at 11pm. So he is safely at home and I have know doubt we will spent the next couple days unpacking. Next weekend or maybe sooner I will have pictures of our finished place up her, but in the meantime enjoy these adorable pictures of Emma and my bird!

Here is a picture Jonas took of Bald Mountain showing the area of where he works