Long-Awaited Update

I've been hearing from various people for a while that they were still watching our blog, waiting for new posts. It's been over a month and a half since we've posted, so I guess it's due.

Samara started a post about our vacation to Kentucky, but it didn't get finished, so I'll start by describing that trip.

We moved to Alaska at the end of August in 2008. We finally made it out of Alaska for a visit to Kentucky in August 2009. This was the first time we were able to visit the lower 48 in over a year. This was big, at least to us it was.

We left on August 26th. We were on the 9:30pm flight out of Dillingham. When we went to check in, they told us that the flight was going to make a stop in King Salmon. In case you don't remember King Salmon, I had a bad experience the last couple times I was forced to go to King Salmon. We then went home for a while and started walking to the airport at about 8:50. As we were getting closer to the airport, 2 airport attendants yelled towards us asking if we were on this flight. We told them we were and they asked us to hurry so the plane could leave earlier. So we boarded the plane at 9pm and we were off to Anchorage.

It wasn't easy getting back to Kentucky. We had to fly from Dillingham to King Salmon, to Anchorage to Seattle, to Chicago, to Louisville then drive to Winchester, pick up a car and drive back to Lexington. It was a long trip. I will spare you the details of flying the red eye with 2 screaming children and the long lay overs.

When we landed, we were greeted in Louisville by our good friend Amanda. She was sweet enough to pick us up, take us to dinner and loan us a car for the duration of our stay. As we cruised us to Winchester to pick up Amanda's spare car, I saw my little brother, Michael, at the stop light. I yelled towards him and we got a short visit with him before we left for Lexington where we proceeded to pass out at our house.

One of the first things we did when we got up the next morning was to eat at Chik-Fil-A! Mmm... fast food chicken.

Samara even bought a Chik-Fil-A tshirt.

Hooray for chicken!


Friday, we did a little shopping and were suppose to meet up with our friends Scott and Kirsten to celebrate their son's first birthday. We couldn't find the park for the party and ended up having dinner with Ann and other Anne. Later in the week, we did meet up with Scott, Kirsten, Violet and Wip.


On Saturday, Aaron's parents and sister came up for a visit. Aaron and his dad worked on Ann's car while the girls went shopping. It was a good visit with them and Natalie got to visit with the kitties. She was more excited to see the kitties than she was with us. I can't say I blame her. Pippin is such a sweet cat and Eve is just as naughty as ever.

Here's Ann's car, in partially disassembled form.

Aaron and his did get Ann's car put back together and running, which was good. I think they enjoyed spending time together on that project.

We visited with a lot of our friends over the rest of the week that we were in Kentucky. I snapped this picture of Aaron eating ice cream with some of the boys.

Of course, I got a few shots of some of those boys in their drag outfits, as well. We spent a lot of time hanging out at Pulse Nightlife in Lexington. Two of our friends are the owners, and they've built a really nice bar/nightclub.

Another thing did during the time we were in Kentucky was hook up with our tattoo artist and get some new art. Aaron got a flying skull on his arm, which we didn't snap a good picture of yet. Samara got a tattoo that people either understand or don't: bacon in a frying pan on her leg.

The real reason for the entire trip to Kentucky was that Aaron needed to get sworn in to the Kentucky bar. So we went down the Kentucky capitol in Frankfort and did the whole official deal.

That's it. Now Aaron can practice law in Kentucky.

We paused for a few pictures in the stately capitol building. Isn't Samara cute?


Check the credentials on our famous Kentuckians.


And what's a trip to Kentucky without a tour of horse country?


Samara had a visit with her mom and sister (who was about to pop!).


On the second weekend we were home, Aleks and Jenny drove up from South Carolina to visit with us. Our first outing was a nice trip to the Pioneer Festival in Winchester.

Al was very excited about the Pioneer Festival.

Jenny, maybe not so much.

But we did do other fun things while they were there. Mostly alcohol-related. First, there was the winery.

Then, we checked out the distillery.

The free samples were better at the distillery.

I'm sure there was a lot more we did while we were in Kentucky. We saw a lot of our friends, but not everyone, unfortunately. (Sorry Matthew and Hideko!) The flights back to Alaska were better than the flights down. We got to go straight from Chicago to Anchorage, instead of stopping in Seattle. We also had an overnight layover in Anchorage. We crashed at our friends Nathan and Trevona's place. We even got to go out to eat with their daughter Sailor.

She tried all the different foods at the Yak'n'Yeti, which is pretty amazing for a kid that young.

We got back a while ago, obviously. What have we been up to since then? Well, mostly business as usual. Aaron is still working at the courthouse and doing Deputy Magistrate duties on weekends. Samara is still working at SAFE and trying to teach kids not to commit domestic violence. Aaron cut some wood for the steam, bought a big game tag for bear and replaced the water pump on our Canyonero. He's living the Alaska lifestyle. Samara's big news is that she got to go to Anchorage and then New Orleans on a two-week training conference extravaganza.

This is the part of the post where we promise to make better efforts to update our blog. Well, we'll try. But no guarantees.