Christmas 2010

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE KORTH FAMILY

Christmas 2010 brought the family together on Christmas Eve with the exception of one family, and they were missed.  Family memories are kept in our hearts and through pictures.  Enjoy the Christmas pictures and the memories they bring!!!

Remodeled Basement Bathroom

We have been working hard to get our basement bathroom all remodeled. We needed to get it done before our Club came to our house on 12/10. We worked on it for about 4 weeks and finally finished up the afternoon of 12/10. None too soon huh?

After having Heather tell us again (and again and again) how to do a new blog we are hopefully finally having success. We will write it down and will maybe find the instructions when we need to do it again. It might be easier if we did this more than twice a year.

Here are some pictures of the finished project.

Here is a new picture we put on the wall over the tub.

We had the cabinets painted graphite which is a dark gray.  This picture is lighter than it really looks. Notice the new knobs that match the fixtures.  The fixtures are called pewter and the knobs are brushed nickel.  You can see the new tile here that we put on the floor.  This picture shows the color better than the other pictures.  It took about 4 hours of hard labor chiseling up the old tile off of the concrete floor.

Here is our new counter top with the new faucets.  Notice that the countertop now matches the window sill that started all of this!

The counter top again with the new picture.  We made two frames and had beveled glass put in.  Of course, we had to tear down the large mirror first,

Here's the cracked glass tile we put around the tub.  The two sides of the wall are dark brown and the other side is light brown.  We also replaced the plumbing fixtures.  By the way, this tile was a real learning experience to put in.  Painting is another of the remodel that was a pain for your dad.

Here's our new double towel rack with towels.

The old tub with the new tile and new fixtures.  It is no longer a shower.  That opens up the room a bunch.

Here is more of the bathroom with the square sinks.

Mushrooms and Snow

Our first snowfall for 2010.  How can this be?  It's only October!

It must be getting closer to Christmas since the snow started to fall.  It looks beautiful here but it only lasted a day.

Here are some more mushrooms from our alaska trip this year.  This first one has mushrooms growing on the side of the tree almost clear to the top.

A very interesting and colorful mushroom.  Others follow this one.

Mom and Dad's Alaska Vacation

As we were driving north from Anchorage to see the Portage Glacier mom saw this in the sky. At first we were trying to figure out what it was. It is a sun dog. That is supposed to mean there will be a storm within 3 days. It rained the next day. (it didn't want to wait for 3 days).



This is our catch when Reed and I went out on a charter. We went about 53 miles out into the ocean to catch our fish. We got 4 halibut and 10 salmon. The following day (Thursday)we caught 14 salmon on our own. It was the most windy and rainy day of the trip. We estimated the swells to be about 6 feet with white caps. It was rather hard keeping your balance while trying to bring in the fish. The halibut were between 25 - 40 lbs each. The salmon were probably between 8 - 14 lbs. The biggest salmon we caught were three 17 lbs. We brought back about 300 lbs of filets between the two couples. That means we have about 150 lbs of fish now in our freezer.

One of our 51 salmon that we caught while in Ketchikan. Many others got away.

A picture of Portage Glacier. This glacier is miles long and around 200 - 300 feet thick. That's a lot of ice cubes.

Here we are on a tour boat to see the Portage Glacier.

One of the many glaciers up in the Anchorage part of the state.
It was amazing that here is a glacier so cold and frozen and yet it comes down to where (as you can see) the trees are green. As we flew into Anchorage we saw the most beautiful mountain ranges with many glaciers. We were lucky the weather was perfect. However, it remained cloudy the rest of the trip and we only saw clouds when we left Alaska.

What we have here is a Boluga (sp?) whale near Anchorage. We couldn't see any whales as we were driving along, when mom saw what she thought was a plastic bag in the water. We went back and low and behold we saw a half dozen whales popping up and down very close to the road. They never stuck their heads out so what you see is what we saw. A few hours later the tide was out and so were the whales.

When Reed and I (Bruce) were fishing on the very last day we saw two killer whales about a couple hundred yards away. They weren't there long enough to get a picture. Their dorsal fins stick up three or four feet out of the water.

Yup, you guessed it! Mom is fighting a fish. Mom caught the first fish of the trip and three our of our first six fish. She is the best fisherman ever.

We found mushrooms like this in the undergrowth. I thought colorful mushrooms were only to be seen in cartoons. There were other mushrooms that grew up the trunk of the trees. These mushrooms looked like the could be foot holds to get you to the top of the tree.

Jon and Shanna's new blog site

Ok so I have finally posted on my new blog site that Heather created me. So now you will need to view my posts from there.

Now we need to have mom start posting on this one all the projects she and dad are doing or the trips, etc. they are having.

Birthday flowers!!!

Thanks for the b-day flowers, they were very pretty!!!

From mom and dad:

From the Bishop family (it says I can even plant these roses outside):

Craft Day

For Christmas the girls got a bunch of pom poms, pipe cleaners, and wiggly eyes. They are always wanting to create their own thing so we thought this would allow them to be a little creative. They really enjoyed gluing things on however they wanted to.

Proudly showing their creations...