Rollercoasters, ball games and friends & family

The past couple of weekends have been productive and fun.  Two weekends ago myself, Bill, Rose and Stuart all passed our ham radio licensing exam administered by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and licensed through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  We are using ham radio in the 4Runner when we travel with friends to make sure we all end up at the correct destination; plus, it's fun to be able to chat along the way.  The range on ham radios can be hundreds if not thousands of miles when connected to a repeater.  They use the VHF FM band, so clarity is amazingly good. 

A few other activities:

• We did a Thursday night River Cat's game sponsored by Hanna's company.

• Hanna did the Davis Moonlight run with her co-workers and did really well.

• Spent a day at Six Flag's Discovery Kingdom riding rollercoasters.

• Had my sister, Joe and Derek up for a weekend of visiting.  Hit the RV show at Arco Arena on their last day before they left town.

• Were invited to dinner at Mike and Marin's family's house for an excellent feast of salad, ribs, chicken, steak, pasta and quinoa.  

I also started a "new" job last week.  It is still with the same company (basically a new boss and new collegues) and the job is very closely related to what I was doing previously, but I am now assigned to work on the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), which is a fancy name for the twin tunnels project that diverts water from the Sacramento River near Freeport for delivery to farms in the Central Valley and to thirsty citizens of Los Angeles.  The BDCP is no less than 23,000 pages long, so I have my work cut-out for me.

New and improved(?) blog

For four years now I have wondered why the options on blogspot.com were so limited.  I couldn't change formats, templates or even colors.  I finally looked into the issue and realized that because my Mom and sister Jen had originally started the blog for me, they had the administrator priviledges.  For a small fee my sister rolled the blog over to my control and wha-la, I now have new-found powers.  Note the new format; like it?

So what's new?  I did a rafting trip down the Stanislaus River for work.  We are looking at increasing flows on the tributaries to the San Joaquin River, the Stanislaus being one of them, and we wanted to see the effect of releasing high flows into the river.  Because there are a lot of restoration activities occurring like increased side channel and floodplain habitat for spawning salmon, we wanted to ensure that increased flows would not render these restoration activities useless.  We will go out again at low flows to determine what can be done to increase salmon survival at low flows.

Our friends Rose and Stuart joined us on a little backcountry adventure the other weekend.  They recently parked their Jeep CJ7 and bought a 4Runner, which Stuart has diligently been building up for trail-use, and we decided to explore a portion of country we had not seen.  We did the 74 mile dirt road called Henness Pass Road, which leaves from Camptonville (north of Nevada City) and ends in Verdi, Nevada. 

Views from Pliocene Ridge

We spent the night at Sagehen Creek campground near Truckee.  There are only about eight sites and each back up to a beautiful meadow.

Sagehen Creek Campground

The next day we pressed-on toward Nevada, passing through some beautiful meadows just north of Truckee.

We found some areas that we liked a lot and will explore further this summer.

I mentioned in my last post that I was working on refinishing some new wheels for the 4Runner.  I looked at aftermarket wheels and didn't see anything I had to have.  When I see other people's aftermarket wheel choices I usually think to myself "I wouldn't have picked those," and often factory wheels are better quality anyway.  I ended up buying some 17" Toyota Sequoia wheels, which should look very at-home on the 4Runner.  Of course I couldn't just leave them alone, I chose to repaint them a dark graphite gray like you see on some of the high-end new cars.  I also went up one tire size to a 275/70R17, here is the final product:

The dark wheels aren't for everyone, but I like it. 

And finally, last weekend we went to Spicer Meadows Reservoir to join my mom for a weekend of camping.  She and Eddie have had their trailer up there for two weeks now, escaping the heat.  We got to spend lots of quality time and were able to celebrate her birthday that Sunday.  Hanna and I snuck in a nice mountain bike ride around Lake Alpine as well.

I have a goal of updating my blog a little more frequently, but we will see how that goes.  Until then, is the new format an upgrade or downgrade?

Wedding photo preview

We received a preview of our wedding photos with the bulk of them coming to us in late July.  Until then, the full preview album is located here:

** Ken & Hanna's Wedding Photo Preview **

Some of my favorites:

It was one of the most amazing days of my life and yet I have few words to say about it.  Getting to marry Hanna with the company of my closest friends and family was just simply incredible.  There were times in the planning process where we wondered why we didn't do a destination wedding, but in the end, there is not a single thing about our day we would change, it was perfect.

June 2012 update

I haven't forgotten about the blog...I am anxiously awaiting our wedding photos to share, which should be along shortly.  In the meantime life is returning to normal again after the wedding and honeymoon.  It has been fun catching up with our friends and hearing their stories from the wedding, evening bike rides at the lake have resumed, the gym is getting squeezed in once per week and I am trying to make more time for short runs along Dry Creek near the house. A little down-town at home is really appreciated too.

I planted a few new plants in the yard, inspired by the wonderful weather we have had, moved a couple of sprinklers and started refinishing some Toyota Sequoia wheels in a graphite gray color for the 4Runner, it's time for new tires too.

Stay tuned for wedding photos!

Punta Cana

Honeymoon teaser pictures. :)


View from our balcony:

Just Married!!

After eight months of planning the wedding came and went exceptionally quick.  While it was a tremendous amount of work, Hanna and I were beyond happy with how the ceremony and reception turned out.  The venue (Matt and Renee's beautiful colonial style home and garden backyard) were perfect, the weather was sunny and in the low to mid 80s, the food was exactly as we had remembered from the taste tests, and the floral arrangements and music selections all seemed to work nicely.  The best part was looking around and seeing our friends and family happy and having a good time.    

It will be a while before we get our official photos back from the photographer, but the photos below look professional and were taken by our friend Beth Lawson.  I will be sure to share more photos as they become available.  




We are extremely appreciative of all of the support Hanna and I received from our family and friends, we are truely blessed to have all of you in our lives. We are enjoying our honeymoon but can't wait to get together with all of you to hear about your experience at our wedding and who you enjoyed meeting or visiting with, what made you laugh and who had the craziest moves on the dance floor.  I think I know the answer to the latter.

March 2013 - Alcatraz & Red Rock Cyn.

We are coming up on the 30-day countdown to our wedding!  As you might imagine, things have been crazy busy for both of us. I compare wedding planning to the feeling you get when you're in college--that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that says "you should NOT be enjoying yourself, you should be studying!"  We secured the most important vendors in the January-February timeframe, having done taste-tests for catering and selecting one we really liked, interviewing DJs and finding an officiant that was willing to do an outside wedding for a couple that rarely sets foot in church.  But the little details are the killers--picking music, finding a reasonably priced location for rehearsal dinner, finding hotels for out of town guests, trying on tuxes, designing/making table center pieces, getting a ring bearer pillow, a flower girl's basket, a basket to place greeting cards, doing a registery, booking a honeymoon...you get the idea.

In-between the wedding planning we try and sneak a few fun things in.  We got in at least a day of skiing at Squaw Valley (I think we also got another day in at Homewood, but not sure), we hiked the Steven's Trail with friends, we spent a day in San Francisco and took the Alcatraz Island Tour and probably some other things I can't remember.

Here are a few photos I liked from Alcatraz:

I expected to see a concrete prison and little else, but the landscaping on the island was pretty spectacular. 

Last weekend we had my bachelor party (of sorts) and went to Red Rock Canyon State Park down south in the Mojave Desert.  We all took Friday off work and spent three days camping, taking the 4WD trails and exploring the mines the area has to offer.  One of the mines, Burro Schmidt Mine was 1/2 mile long and punched through the mountain to the other side, and the Old Dutch Cleanser Mine (picture below) was big enough to drive a truck through and had series of interconnected tunnels that were open to exploring.

Overnight sandstorms left a film of sand on everything inside the tent, but otherwise, the weather was perfect and we plan to return another time to do more exploring.  No bachelor party would be complete without some kind of forced embarrassment, so my friends took care of that at lunch at Hooters, where I had to stand on a chair while the girls sang a song about how I was a sucker for getting married.  It was all in good fun.

Red Red Canyon:

 

Our campsite

The v-notch on the 4wd trail

One of the many HUGE mines you can walk--one was 1/2 mile long.