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...

Puzzle continued

Well she did finish the next 300 piece puzzle a day or two after the Noah's Ark puzzle. She is getting faster and faster with them. She finds them relaxing and can do them sometimes for at least an hour before moving on to another activity. She was proud that she completed this all by herself.

Gotta Love Puzzles

Brittany loves to put together puzzles. She gets so that if the patterns are the same in a couple different puzzles she will start mix and matching the pieces so two puzzles become one very strange looking one. She can also just look at a piece and pick it up and place in the correct spot without really thinking about it. She will put them togeter row by row. She had a few 100 piece puzzles but we thought we would give her more of a challenge. So this year for Christmas we got her a couple 300 piece puzzles. Jon and Brittany worked on them the day after Christmas and were successful.

Now Brittany will put them on the kitchen floor and work on them by herself. During one of our quiet times while Kylee and I were watching a video, Brittany sat in the kitchen and put together her Noah's Ark puzzle. She was so proud of herself for putting it together by herself. The picture may not look all that hard but there are 300 pieces in it. Now she is working on the Whale puzzle...stay tuned.