Ray and Tammy's Place

  Stevenson, Washington
Monday, January 26, 2009

So I finally made it to my friends place in Stevenson, Washington.  I planned to spend a week there and sponge off of them as much as possible!  ;  )  My best friend Ray Paskey and his wife Tamara used to live in Beaverton, Oregon (Portland Area) for several years before moving to the Columbia River Gorge area to start up a Telecom Systems installation and service company called NW Communication Systems.  Check out the web site, he did it himself (http://nwcomsystems.com).  I still think of them as living in the "Portland Area" even though they live 45 minutes away now in Washington, what a dork! 




Ray and Tammy have a beautiful daughter named Eryn who just turned five.  For some unknown reason, they designated me her official "Godfather", so she is pretty special to me.    We celebrated the occasion with a party at her preschool and back at the homestead.  Tammy's awesome mom May and sister Lisa came up from Salem, Oregon to join the party too.







I've been dieing to get on the slopes this winter and do some
snowboarding, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to ride Mt. Hood at the Meadows Resort.  I lucked out with perfect weather and great snow.  Since it was mid-week, there were no crowds at all.








One of the reasons it has taken me a bit to get the updates to the blog going is that my P.O.S. HP laptop died on me!  I just had it serviced before I left on the trip (replaced LCD and CD drive) and now the BIOS melted down!  Ray convinced (badgered) me to come over to the dark side and switch to IBM (Lenovo now).  I was able to pick up a nice used ThinkPad T60   locally without breaking the bank and it works great.  Till now, I've never liked the straight laced all business and jet black ThinkPads, but it's growing on me.  This thing is built like a tank.  Titanium case, anti-drop/shock hard drive, and one-button reformat and restore.  Probably the perfect machine for a long road trip, damn I hate it when Ray is right!




Well, from here I head on over to Idaho to visit my cousin Dina Barnes and her family.  Catch you on the next page...

p.s.  I uploaded a video of Eryn dancing in the thumbnails picture section, it's really big so let it load up first (takes a few minutes) before playing.

~JR