Glacier?

What is your first impression of the picture above (look at it in full size)...yeah, I thought it looked like a glacier. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This is what happens to your Spa when you go out of town for a week and the cover blows open during a major snow storm.





The ice was 5 to 7 inches thick depending on the area. After spending an hour and a half pouring boiling water over the ice, I finally broke it down enough that it would crack if jumped on it :) The picture below was taken a few minutes before I started jumping on the "glaciers". I removed them from the hot tub in 3 ft long chunks, which felt as if they weighed a couple hundred pounds...although, I could just be out of shape :( Once I removed all of the ice, the water level was down to 50%!!! Half of the spa was frozen??? The question I got a lot today was, "did you have the heater running?". The answer is yes, it appears that when the outside temperature is in the low teens even 103 degree water will freeze. I imagine that the snow falling into the spa also helped out. The thermometer in the water read 32 degrees...



I'm sure that Kacy will report on our wonderful Christmas vacation on the family blog.

Missile Bases For Sale

I was talking with my boss today and he showed me this site.

http://www.missilebases.com/

The owners of this site sale decomissioned missile silos. Back in the day these missile silos were created to contain ICBMs. The structures were designed to enable a group of people to live for years without any communication with the outside world. Additionally, the silos were designed to survive a direct nuclear strike...now that's impressive.

This is a concept of what can be done with one of the Atlas-F missile sites. A similar missile site is for sale for $229k.



Can't you just see the Charger sitting in this concrete protected garage :)



It appears that the silo for sale has about 90ft of water in it that would need to be evacuated before it could really be used. But hey, it is only $229k for 29 acres of high security fenced land. Anyone interested in going in on it with me?

~Brotherly Love~

My family and I had a chance to go to North Carolina over the Thanksgiving holiday. We had a wonderful visit with both family in Raleigh and in Morganton. While in Raleigh we were able to attend and take part in a traditional family fish fry. It was great to be around a large group of family and catch up on all that has transpired since our last visit 7 years ago.

As those of you that are close to me know, I am not good at keeping in touch. I am dissapointed in myself as I think about my family and extended family often, but fail to reach out. Not to mention that the Family, outside of the teachings of Christ, is the most critical and emphasized principle in the teachings of my church!

I didn't have a lot, well any, extended family around me when I was growing up in San Diego. Most of Mom's side of the family live in the East and my Dad's family members are in Finland. Dad was raised in a town called Ekenas (Swedish)/Tammisaari (Finnish). During my childhood I spend 2 to 3 weeks in NC in the summer and got out to Finland to see my Grandma and Cousins every few years.

So here is some background on me and my family. I was adopted as a baby within my family. My biological Mother, Sheila, was thoughtful enough to allow my parents to adopt me. Sheila was very young when she became pregnant with me and my Mom, Charlotte, could not have children due to biological reasons; therefore, the situation worked out well for both sides. Sheila is my Mom's neice, the daughter of my Mom's sister Ruth. I have two "full" biological brothers from Sheila and Lee Redwine, Dean and Shane. I found out about my brothers many years ago; however, we did not meet in person until the year 2000. Our first meeting was very emotional and still seems a bit like a dream to me.

Even though I have not been raised with my Brothers and most likely have not experienced the bond that I'm sure Dean and Shane share, I immediatlely found something special in each of my brothers when we met. I was raised by a wonderful, supportive and loving set of parents; however, I never got the opportunity to experience life with siblings. I don't regret how I was raised, but I do have a special place in my heart for my relatively newly developed relationship with my brothers.




I see a lot of myself in both Dean and Shane. Dean and I are closer in age and he and his wife Jennifer recently had their 3rd little girl. Their other two girls, Kaylee and Allison, are cute and loving. Kaylee and Savannah are nearly the same age and really hit it off while we visited. I bought the three of them My Little Pony's to play with while we were there, which seemed to have been a good choice :)

I was so happy for Savannh to get to experience the same bonding and fun that I experienced as a child visiting my cousins. I have so many great memories of playing with Joey, Jennifer and Jamie, my Aunt Linda's kids. We would spend a lot of time at my Aunt Jean and James house. I love the following pictures because I have so many great memories running through this yard as a kid.





While we visited Dean and Jennifer's house, it was great to see Shane and his girlfriend playing with the kids for several hours. They went from the swingset, to getting buried in leaves, to kicking a ball, to playing tag...it was fun to watch.

Even though it has been 7 years since my brothers and I first met, I still feel as though I am in a dream state. There is so much to say and so much to try and catch up on. We only had a week of vacation, half of which was spent in Raleigh and in travel. Needless to say, I wish that we lived closer to my brothers. It would be nice to have the chance to hang out and bbq on the weekends together.

Here are the Dad's with their sweet neices:

I Love having family and hope to do a better job of keeping in touch and expressing my Love for my extended family. There are of course a multitude of other family members that we spent time with and thoroughly enjoyed being with. I always risk hurting someone's feelings by not including them by name...but after all, this is my Blog :)

Yeah, so I'm here, now what??

I have finally thrown in the towell on the website and made the jump to a blog. I'm not certain that I have enough shared thoughts to make frequent updates, but we'll see how it goes.