Raving Amicks

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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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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Hey y’all. Mindy posted some pictures of our new wine glasses a while ago and it’s high time I ‘splained ‘em.

These wine glasses are the sequel to our fantastic beer glasses and they use the same serious-business, full-body tempering (apparently using heat and not chemicals). The tempering requires an increase in glass thickness, but results in strong and stable, long-lasting glassware. They’re extra short for stackability, which also adds a bit of stability. I like ‘em, and Mindy’s even warmed up to them.

I conned Mom and Dad into getting a set of 12, cuz I had to order ‘em by boxes of 48 for $200. I found the best deal at ReStockIt.com with free shipping and some sort of discount (they have sales a lot). I’m going to give the 6 of them I have left over to Dieter. Hopefully these will hold up to the harsh realities of Dieter’s roommates. I’ll be bringing them down the next time we come to visit, hopefully in the next week or two.

With Tyler’s help during President’s Day Weekend (he had a three-day weekend back then), I reupholstered our dining chairs that he had picked up for $10 years ago. They originally had dirty and cracked white vinyl on the seats, plus they were really hard and uncomfortable. Now they have high-density foam seats covered with beautiful white leather, and our butts sigh with delight each time we sit on them (or maybe it’s just the leather sinking into the foam that sighs). One of the chair seats isn’t quite as taut as the other (surprisingly, the second one we did), but they’re still infinitely better than before. Now I just need to strip and re-stain them during a summer dry spell and we’ll be dining in style.

Osa also approves of the new seats:

The snakes were enjoying the spring rays today.

On the same note my friend Adam McRae and I came up with a name for dad’s snake the other day. We’re calling him Neville which seems to pair with “Benji” the other snake pretty well. It only took about a decade to name two pets but I think the wait was worth it don’t you?

I convinced mom and dad to get out of their comfort zones and take a cross country ski class with me on Mount Hood. I’m still shocked that they actually agreed to do it, but in the end we all had a lot of fun. The class was only 2 hours long but we managed to take away quite a bit of knowledge. We even journeyed out by ourselves after finishing our beginner’s class exploring a few different trails.