The AlpineInker : Twins

Another Girl?

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:51:00 GMT

It’s been a busy summer – so busy, in fact, that the blog has been starved for attention of late. I have some cool posts in the works but it will be a little while longer before I can get them finished.

The exciting news on the home front is that my wife Angela and I are expecting a new addition to the family in December! The ultrasound suggests it is a girl, but it’s a little too early to say for sure. That would give us three little girls under two years old.

My twins, Sarah and Alissa, are now 18 months old and experiencing an early vocabulary explosion. Words that excite them of late include airplane – after their first plane trip to see their great-grandma and other family- as well as “bull-bo” (bulldozer) after our neighbors had their driveway torn out and replaced.

Some other new words they have picked up recently include truck, hike, mount (mountain), kitty, Cleo (our cat), rabbit, swing, outside, fork, cracker, umbrella, elephant, ear, tongue, and pants. I would guess their vocabulary is probably in the vicinity of 200 words and animal sounds now. Maybe a little more.

They can even tell us when they poop now, although they don’t always like to admit it!

My brother and his girlfriend are visiting this week from Boston, so the latest additions are “Uncle” and “Lori.” Pretty soon he will have them saying “Red Sox” as well, I suspect!

Twelve Days of InkSeine, Day #10: Scrapbook Fun

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:19:00 GMT

Well, there was just no way I could present this series without sneaking in a picture of my beautiful twin girls. I recommended that you should always wear extremely dark cute-polarized sunglasses whenever visiting the site way back in the inaugural post of The AlpineInker, and this was not an idle warning!

This picture is rather out of date, because the girls are almost a year old now. The cat is no longer quite as perplexed about the new additions to my family, but he wisely remains wary of becoming the twins' latest plaything. Since this photo was taken, the cat had an unfortunate encounter with what was probably a coyote, but miraculously he survived and is still with us, although he is getting rather old. At this point not only has he used up all nine of his lives, but he is also down to three legs!

It is quite a hoot to use ink to lend a personal touch to pictures of friends and family. Of course you don't need InkSeine to do this, but I find it a makes a great place to have scrapbook fun.

Application of this technology to mark up photos of your pointy-haired boss is left as an exercise to the reader.

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40 Days and 40 Nights… Of Snow

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:05:00 GMT

I visited Snoqualmie Pass this weekend, just 1 hour east of Seattle. Life in the mountains here at just 3000 feet of elevation is dramatically different than the maritime climate of Seattle.

The Alpental ski area, about 1 mile north of the Pass, has received 234 inches of snow (i.e., 19 ½ feet, or 6 ½ meters) in the last 40 days, according to the records of a local resident who keeps a running tally of the snowfall.

So what does all that snow look like? To give a sense of scale, here's my car dwarfed by the colossal snow banks. The other is the barely visible roof of my cabin, festooned with unstable snow mushrooms... The entire building shakes when one of them lets loose from the roof.

Noah's ark would do me little good in these conditions. Our solution was to concoct a sled to carry the twins around. So I spent my weekend as a glorified mushing dog, competing in the "Identical Iditarod." We were not beating anyone to our destination, but we certainly had the cutest brood on the trail.

Now that's traveling in style.