Blue Angels and garage reconstruction

The Blue Angels are in Seattle this weekend, putting on a show for three days. They were here yesterday (Friday), today and tomorrow. Rebecca, Rick and myself rode down to watch them from the bridge deck for I-90. I took lots of pictures, but didn't have my camera with the super zoom, so they are a little fuzzy. It was a great day for a bike ride and an airshow as you can see from the pictures.

The show is part of "SeaFair", the summer long celebration in Seattle that peaks late July, early August with the hydroplane races and the Blue Angels. I have never actually gone to see the hydros, but I hear it is fun. I do try to ride down and see the Blue Angels every year. I love all the noise as they fly over. After the show, we rode over to John and Liz's to join their annual BBQ.







I also have pictures showing the work I am doing on my garage. The first photos is the outside, looking in with all the tools of destruction/construction laying around. The cement mixer is my neighbors. The other photos show the inside corner where I was tearing away the top layer to see what is actually supporting the roof. It turns out the answer is "not much". The last pictures show the form boards I have put up to guide the new cement we will be pouring next weekend (hopefully).







The faint blue line in the last photo shows how much the cement slab has settled at an angle over time (about 8 inches in the corner). Luckily the garage has settled much worse than my house. The plan is to pour a new slab on top of the old slab, anchoring to the old and the new together by driving sticks of re-bar through holes drilled in the old concrete (see the holes with the concrete dust laying around them in the photo). Once the new slab is set up, I will building a new, stronger back wall that supports the roof much better, then remove the old wall. I had to break out a section of the old floor so that the new concrete will be at least a couple inches thick the whole way, so where it used to slope up and meet the old floor, I knocked out a few inches.

Gold Creek hike

Rebecca, Ruby, Lance and I went hiking near Snoqualmie Pass this Saturday. We went to Gold Creek trail, off of exit 54 on I-90. It was a perfect day for a hike, really sunny and not terribly hot. The trail follows along Gold Creek the whole way. At 4 miles, it crosses over the creek and that is where we stopped for lunch and turned around.

Here is the very beginning of the trail, you can see Alaska mountain in the background with snow still on it.



The trail is in a valley, and there were some nice waterfalls on the cliffs above. Here are the two most impressive ones, in the order in which we came upon them.




We stopped when the trail crossed the creek and had lunch. And took several pictures. Here is Rebecca sitting on a rock in the middle of the river looking very zen like.



Here is Rebecca and Ruby in a few shots....




Here is Ruby in stick fetching action, she really loves all hikes that are along rivers.



Here is Lance waiting for me to accidentally drop my sandwich.



Here is Lance and Ruby training to steal my sandwich.



This view is looking up the creek from our lunch spot



And this last picture taken at the lunch spot is an artsy one looking down through the water at the rocks.



The wild flowers were coming out along the whole trail.