Day: April 16, 2013

Girl Scout Troop Adventure: Indoor Rock Climbing Gym and the Wall of Doom!

~ K ~ 4 Comments

Last week during Spring Break, we took our Girl Scout Troop to the Stone Gardens Indoor Rock Climbing Gym in Bellevue, Washington.  The Girl Scout Troop loves to go to this place and play for two solid hours.  And I enjoy allowing them to challenge themselves in the safety of indoor climbing gym wearing the appropriate safety gear.

The only person to get hurt was yours truly.  In my misguided notion that I have superpowers, I fell attempting to leap from one climbing handhold to the other on the free climbing wall.  I realized that my arms don’t quite stretch as far as an orangutan as I fell backwards towards the floor.

Sure, the fall was only onto my back from a good ten feet up (maybe higher but we won’t tell my wife that) and I almost gave myself a concussion, but it was fun.  At least that is what I kept telling myself.  My friend Mark (the other dad to attend this event) got a really good laugh that I hurt myself.  He showed me pictures of me doing a really good job of climbing and a picture of the rock face where I had been before I fell.  He wasn’t quick enough to capture my rapid descent to the matt and the aftermath.

Luckily, I was able to hold back the tears and keep up my macho appearance in front of my daughter and her fellow Girl Scouts.

One worthy tip to note is if you have a Boy Scout or Girl Scout Troop is to inquire with different venues if they offer a non-profit rate.  We saved about $5 per climber since we were a non-profit group.

 

Thanks for reading!  Your comments are always welcome!

Let’s Work on Peace!

~ K ~ Leave a comment

A quick note to say that it greatly saddens my heart with the acts of violence we have all heard about lately.  While most of us seem to be sane, it is hard to understand the logic and the thought process of the people who commit these acts of violence.

Keep your heads up and let’s move forward.  Work on Peace my fellow humans.

It’s April & I’m way behind on posting Worthless Advice!

~ K ~ 2 Comments

I can’t believe it is already Monday April 15, 2013 (now it is April 16) and I haven’t done any blog entries since last month.  I got a bit swamped at work and just didn’t feel like writing.  A fairly lame excuse to say the least and I’ll admit to that.  We also were busy with family trips and mini-vacations so I’ll throw in some more lame excuses while I’m at it.

The end of March, we (the little people who live with me and my wife) spent a couple of nights in Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast.  We lucked out and got some great weather.  Sunny weather to be exact.  We had nicer weather those two days in March than we did last August on the Oregon Coast.  Anyway, the weather was good, the local community seems pretty nice (but everything seems nice when you are on vacation), and the food wasn’t bad either.

If memory serves me correctly, we stayed at the Surfrider Hotel.  Overall, our hotel wasn’t bad either considering we got a Groupon deal on it.  The pool was inside and old school style but the hotel was right on the beach.  We had a lovely balcony over the sand, free wifi, cable TV, etc.  Pretty sweet.

After two nights on the Oregon Coast, on the way back through McMinnville, we stopped at the Hotel Oregon and had a great lunch on the rooftop bar.  Again, the sun was out and we enjoyed their rooftop deck.  The Hotel Oregon is run by the McMenamins Brothers and we like the quirky style they have throughout their restaurants and hotels.  The food is reasonable priced and the atmosphere is great for those that like that pub feel.

We spend a third night in downtown Portland (Oregon) at the Sheraton.  I like the Sheraton chain and we weren’t disappointed.  My wife also got a good deal on that so instead of sleeping in the car, we stayed there.  (There goes another life lesson my children could have learned about being homeless and living out of your car).

Not to worry, the city of Portland (like Austin, Texas) likes to pride itself as being weird.  The downtown homeless bums did their best to put on a good show for my kids.  On a side note, we do have homeless people in our downtown suburb city but my kids aren’t exposed to them.  And we have them in downtown Seattle but we hardly visit downtown to experience them.  I know what you are thinking: my kids aren’t being exposed to crazy homeless people like they should.  I agree with you, I’m a terrible father.  I promise to work on that.

We also squeezed in a visit to my friend Chance and got to see his new family.  Again, we had great weather and the afternoon temperatures in Portland were 77 degrees in March!  Unheard of!

Overall the trip was a good one.  We certainly lucked out on the weather for this kind of trip in the month of March.  We are looking forward to going back to McMinnville to check out their Evergreen Air and Space Museum and Water Park.