Brett and Debbie

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-22T19:49:40Z

Our lives have gotten even busier (if you can imagine that) while keeping up with Simone & continuing to work. Both Deb and I have changed our work schedules to 3 days a week so someone can always be taking care of Simone, and it's working well. We even get a whole night's sleep once in awhile, which the designated going-to-work parent gets the night before.

Simone is growing fast, and is over 9lbs now! She started smiling at ~5wks and is now distinguishing between day (often awake, eating & sleeping in short cycles) and night (3-4 hour sleep cycles, little awake time). She's got a mild cold right now, but it seems to be getting better. Actually, we all have a mild cold which we hope gets better before the holiday travel.

Here's a short video clip..

And some pictures

We're looking forward to our east-coast tour and some holidays with family! Merry Christmas everyone!

]]>

Baby Furniture

2011-11-21T21:14:15Z

After a weekend of shopping, we've now got some nice furniture on the way for Simone's room and a new Bob stroller. This will be handy to store all the gifts that have been showing up at the door and in boxes!

We are so grateful for family & friends who are helping support us in this life transition! And a special thank you to Brett's Mom, who is here helping us adjust to the new schedule..

I'll post some more photos soon, I hope!

Big news!

2011-11-10T22:22:08Z

Debbie and I are incredibly pleased to announce that we adopted a baby girl yesterday. She was born at 6lbs 4oz, and brought her home Sunday, Nov 6th after a couple of whirlwind days preparing for her arrival. She is in perfect health!

The past 6 days have been an absolute whirlwind, from first getting a call about a possible adoption to driving home with a newborn 2 days later. We're all healthy and happy, and now trying to figure out work, and sleep schedules that work for everyone.

Here are some pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/bretthall/OurBabyGirlSFirstDayHome?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCISb9rC-hNKX7wE&feat=directlink

Cider!

2011-10-21T16:32:45Z

The pace of life has picked up lately! Last weekend we held our now annual cider pressing weekend where we juiced 800lbs of apples with the help of many friends. Even some family was able to come by, we've recently discovered one of Debbie's cousins lives in Portland!. With all the extra hands, we finished juicing the whole crate of Golden Delicious apples in one day by 7pm! After starting out with a trip to the orchard near Mt. Hood we ended with ~50 gallons of juice and tired smiles on our faces. My hands are still stained from the juice, but 10 gallons is fermenting in the basement and the remaining 5 from our share were split between canned cider (who knew?) and reduced cider for use in salad dressings. If someone sends me pictures I'll post them, but we were so busy I forgot to take any.

Debbie's also starting a new job on Halloween, and Brett's work continues it's accelerated trend. We're continuing some more house projects, painting the upstairs, replacing one of the electric heaters upstairs, and changing the water filter for the kitchen sink (which involves installing a new filter housing due to the stuck-ness of the existing one).

Charlie had a friend visit for a couple weeks, a white Jack Russell Terrier named Gigi stayed with us. Although Charlie and Gigi have completely different personalities, they are both gentle, don't like to walk in the rain, and seem to enjoy eachother's company.

Refinishing the deck

2011-10-03T05:28:05Z

Our latest project was to sand and refinish the front deck. The sanding was hard work, and we just barely beat the rain (which has just returned to Portland with the familiar damp drizzle meaning it's Fall). But, it looks great and the water is beading up as I type!

I'll post a picture someday soon.

Pacific Grove Triathlon

2011-09-16T18:10:21Z

Brett and I just returned from the Triathlon at Pacific Grove Sunday evening. We had a great time with the entire Oregon/SW Washington team - everyone did an amazing job and finished the race strong. In addition to cheering us all on, Brett took great photos and videos, the best of which are now posted on our Picasa site.

The weather was perfect for the triathlon - overcast and low 60s - and the water temperature in the Monterey Bay was a slightly shocking 58 degrees. The kelp was out in full force and made for an especially interesting swim! The views of the ocean during the bike were priceless - my legs were tired after 4 laps on the bike, but I never tired of the view. The run this year was about a thousand times more enjoyable than when I did the same race two years ago thanks to great coaching and lots of practice at the track. I wound up finishing in just under 3 hrs and was ranked 4th of 36 women in my age group. Whoo hoo!

At least as inspiring as the triathlon experience was the team's contribution to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Our team raised almost $40,000 for LLS -- $300,000 if you include all 95 Team in Training participants at Pacific Grove this year! A special thanks to all of you who supported the mission and helped me achieve my fundraising goals.

Thanks to all of you for your encouragement throughout the season and especially this past weekend. I loved the facebook messages, emails and positive energy you were all sending!!!

Kite flying & bike rides at the beach

2011-07-11T18:30:41Z

We had a nice long weekend trip to the beach, stopping to ride the waterslides at Evergreen waterpark for our anniversary on our way to stay in Manzanita. We stayed in a house with Amy, Lindsey & kids and Ammi, Adam & their daughter, what a lot of fun! There was much music playing, karaoke singing, kite flying, sandcastle building, bicycle riding, and making fun meals together!

The bike ride around the three capes loop was particularly beautiful, even though it had some significant headwind and sizable hills.

Beer season..

2011-06-24T17:11:06Z

The weather's improving, and it's beer season! For the first time, I'm brewing one of my favorite styles: Belgian Saison. Popular opinion among those who have tasted it indicates success, and I'm quite happy with it as well. More batches are on the way..

I brewed another batch last weekend for a certain July 4th party, so I'm hoping it ferments fast to be ready. I'm exploring how best to use our new refractometer which is a much handier way to take gravity readings, however since it needs correction based on alcohol already in the beer I'm using a spreadsheet.

For any other homebrewers out there, I'm using a formula that Sean Terrill has pioneered with greater accuracy than the standard formulas, you can read about it here if you're a beer geek. I've made my own version of this spreadsheet that is a little simpler: refract_blank.xlsx

I hope you are enjoying the summer!

Photos from PPP

2011-05-24T04:44:25Z

Here are some of the snapshots of the better photos we took from Pole Pedal Paddle. You can see the rest of the photos and videos here.

]]>

Pole, Pedal, Paddle 2011

2011-05-23T17:04:03Z

We spent the weekend in Bend in a house with some friends while attending for the Pole Pedal Paddle relay race Debbie and her team were in. They were called the "Fab Five" and were in the Coed 40-44 age group, you can see results here but they tied for 9th place!

It was mostly warm, and sunny, although being a supporter involves extra driving. I enjoyed trying Bend Brewing beers (and food..!) while watching Tonya brew above us as we ate. Growlers provided sustenance for the weekend.

We enjoyed the soaking pool at the Old St. Francis School, great meals on a small grill, and many, many sled dogs joining Charlie and the rest of the team. Pictures to come..

Spring!

2011-05-20T07:03:16Z

We posted some of the photos from our trip to NC to see Zane and Matthew and Andrew, and some photos of the house in spring over on picasaweb for your browsing pleasure.

Happy Spring!

A great trip to North Carolina

2011-05-17T17:15:31Z

We had a great trip to NC to visit family, and had some great summer weather for a change. (Oregon is still transitioning from the rain..) We were so excited to get to meet our new nephew, Zane and spend some quality time making meals and being with the family. We got some good cuddle time, and Brett got to prove his diaper changing skills. What great parents Jeff & Becca are, and what a cute kiddo!

We enjoyed visiting Raleigh with Erica & Chuck and family too. We had fun meeting old friends for drinks, having backyard cookout, and playing with the kids. We went to a cool Lego exhibit, giving Matthew so many ideas his brain was full. Brett got to spend a lot of time with Matthew (and even Andrew) playing lego..!

Now it's back to the Portland routine, if you can call it a routine, of cheesemaking, biking, working, and harvesting lots of great stuff from the garden! We're happy that we got an early start on gardening this year, as the salad (lettuce, radish, arugula, kale, chard) are already coming on strong, we even got our first bite of our own asparagus this year!

goodreads..

2011-04-30T18:55:58Z

I added a little "widget" in the right hand side of the webiste that shows some of the more recent books that I've read, through the goodreads site. I've been listening to audiobooks in the car on my way to and from work.. you can really get through some books in > 1hr of reading a day!

Finally.. a new look for brettanddebbie.com!

2011-04-19T06:42:57Z

Brett finally got around to updating the blog style to be less like the year 2000, we're at least up to 2009 now.. Whoa! Technology whiplash! This should also resolve the gross comment spam we were getting, so commenting is enabled again. I hope to keep it enabled with the latest spam-prevention technology.

If you have an old RSS feed link to the site, you may need to update to the new link (over to the right and down).

We hope you'll like the new format. Let us know what you think.

Latest updates

2011-04-18T19:23:10Z

It's been so long since I've updated, whoops! We've been keeping our pictures on picasa up to date, but not announcing them here.

We had a great trip to Olympic National Park and thought you might enjoy some photos. We went to Lake Quinault, staying in the lodge and visited the Kalaloch area of Olympic National Park. It was sunny the entire time we were there - not a small feat for a Northwest rain forest in February! We had an excellent time hiking and exploring. Here are some pictures

We've been busy outside (in the rain mostly) doing some significant landscaping done, our neighbors must think we're crazy:

Building retaining walls in the front yard on the slope and taking out juniper
Building two garden boxes in the parking strip for vegetables
Planting lots of blueberries bushes in the new retaining wall area in the front and even some tea plants!
Distributing 7 yards of compost around the yard (that's a lot..!!)
Moving the huckleberries to the shady side, planting honey berry plants instead.
Pruning, planting vegetables in the boxes..

Here's an in-progress shot from the cell phone before we were done:

Lately, Debbie has been doing a lot of cheese classes with very good success. We've got more home-made dairy products in the fridge than is believable: One day I counted 17 different types! She's also doing some (flexible) contract work so our schedules have shifted back to busy-life again.

Brett just got some prescription sunglasses for the first time in his life and hopes to use them on upcoming bike rides. He got in his first "significant" ride of the season yesterday at Sauvie Island for a 25miler. He's currently got a very tasty Saison homebrew on tap, and is still enjoying the cider from last year.