Raving Amicks

Yeah, I finally got to go to band camp!  :)   It was a week-long Jazz Workshop at the Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Worden)  Spent an exhausting week in workshops, listening to faculty perform and ourselves perform.  Food was bad, accommodations were sparse (tiny dorm-like rooms with shared bathrooms).  Here’s some pictures.  Went up with Bob, who also attended (he’s the guy in one of the pictures).  There’s a picture of the corner of the dorm/barracks I stayed in with the ocean in the background.  The trombone faculty member was Wycliffe Gordon – an amazing player (www.wycliffegordon.com).   He’s the large black guy in one of the pictures. There’s also a picture of me during our public performance.   Great fun!   Learned a lot.

He looks dead, but he’s just worn out. Your Mom has been walking the dogs hard like 6 miles every morning.

From Munich, we flew in to the airport in Kiev, Ukraine, where Vlad’s uncle kindly picked us up. The next day, we wandered out to see Kiev’s Golden Gate, which was a lot of fun to climb inside. Nearby was the kitty statue pictured here with me.

To get to the Golden Gate and just about everywhere else that we visited in Kiev, we went by subway. Subways in Ukraine tend to be highly stylized, with mosaics and marble and granite used to beautiful effect. This seems to be fairly common in eastern Europe, and it was one of my favorite aspects of the trip. A few subways were also very deep, presumably for protection against nuclear warfare, with high-speed escalators just to get people in and out in a reasonable amount of time.

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Went with 5 friends on a float/camping trip on the Deschutes River in Eastern Oregon Tues. thru Friday afternoon.  The weather was horrible – it rained all day on Wed. and  camping in the rain is the shits.  Caught some fish (the rainbow in the picture is like 14″), had some great laughs and conversations with my buddies.  One of the pictures show my buddy Ken in the rain in my boat with a tarp draped over him.

Tyler and I just got back from our three-week trip to Germany and Ukraine with our friend Vlad. During our trip we visited Lübeck, Berlin, Munich, Kiev, a small village in Western Ukraine, and Copenhagen. It’s really hard to write a single blog post about a three-week trip where we took 1,968 photos, so Tyler and I are going to split the duties (he’ll write a post about Ukraine sometime this weekend).

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The Mom unit and I toured the Powerdale Dam on the Hood River and the fish trap/station that’s located by the dam. The dam has been decomissioned and is in the process of being torn down. The fish trap and station is also being eliminated, so this was our last chance to see the fish trap in operation. They sort and tag ALL steelhead and salmon coming up Hood River and then let the wild fish and a few hatchery fish go above the dam. Here’s some pictures of the dam and the work being done with the fish. Most of the fish pictures show a wild winter steelhead. One shot also shows two (larger) chinook.