Gratitude

It's Thanksgiving time, and we have a lot to be thankful for.  The Subaru ended its vacation at Pillar Creek Beach, just in time to take us to Thanksgiving dinner at the KI.  We're thankful for a blue sky Thanksgiving day.  We're thankful for all the people who helped us get it out.  We're thankful for good Samaritans.  We're thankful that no children were decapitated in the process.  We're thankful to have learned an important lesson about snow tires.  And Pillar Creek Road.

We're thankful that we can now start being thankful for the snowiest November in Kodiak in over 20 years.  We're thankful for snow sports.  Thankful for being able to sled in our yard.  

We're thankful for Lucha Libre snow masks.  Did I mention that it's been cold?

Of course, we're thankful for all our friends and our family.  We're thankful for modern technology like Skype and cell phones and Facebook and email that helps us keep in touch.  We're thankful for jet airplanes, too.  And trains. And ferries.

We're thankful to be healthy. We're thankful for warm fires on cold stormy days.  We're thankful to be living in Kodiak, Alaska.

We're thankful that there are two Montana football teams in the FCS playoffs, and thankful to have grown up in Missoula, Montana.  

We're thankful for our shiny brand new computer that doesn't take five minutes to click programs open.  It's not that we're unthankful for our old computer.  We're just more thankful about having replaced it.  

I'm personally thankful for all of the above, plus I'm thankful for 13 years of life partnership with my dear lupu.     (Lupu is short for life partner.)  We both have to confess to forgetting the Cat-Griz game last weekend.  (For us Montanans it's quite a big festivity.)  It snuck right up on us.  Our chance meeting in 1998 is what we celebrate as the starting point of our life adventure together, even though we simultaneously roamed the halls of Hellgate High from '88-'92.  It seems like just yesterday that I was trying to impress Genevieve with my remote starting red 4X4 van as we departed the SLC Port o' Call satellite party.  ("I swear, it usually works.") 

Having forgotten the big occasion, we decided to celebrate on Sunday.  Right after a short surfing mission.  In-town waves!  The surf mission was short.  Getting the car back up the hill was not.  After a couple hours of attempting to get back up the hill, I was approximately 100 feet further down the hill than when I started.  Of course, I was in my wetsuit this whole time.  And the blizzard was picking up.  A short wetsuit blizzard jog and a good samaratin phone call later, Genevieve arrived for a Monster Van full team Wilco rescue.  Tough Team Alert!  Tough Team Alert!  

Of course, the tow truck guy just laughed and said "No way!"  So, we were off to do it ourselves.  We bought some too small chains, the last pair in town, and headed out.  Two hours later, we'd moved it about 15 feet up the hill.  

We called it a night after learning an important lesson about leaving kiddos in a car with operable power windows.  Namely, don't.  Fortunately, we were close enough to prevent any decapitations.  But Paxson had locked the doors, so it was fairly scary.  We're glad it didn't turn out worse!  

Back to the car.  It wasn't hung up on anything, it's just that the road was solid ice.  The very slippery kind.  Eventually, with help from a lot of people over five days, we were able to get it out.  Some friends tried to help on Wednesday and wound up getting stuck for a couple of hours themselves!  We wound up using a 2 ton come-along to ratchet it up through the steep part.  And the final pull out was from a good Samaritan who was passing by on Thanksgiving morning.  Thank you, everyone!

 Pax and Stokes thought Genevieve would rather be a fisherman than a princess, so we had to give the fisherman some feminine touches to turn him into Genevieve.  Long flowing brown frosting hair and some cream cheese frosting augmentation.

I'm hoping I can make Genevieve's upcoming 38th birthday so awesome it will catapult me right out of the dog house.  The candle selection might hurt my chances.