Meteor strike!

When I came left for work on February 19, the sky was very clear. Imagine my surprise when I saw what looked like the biggest, closest, and longest lightning strike I had ever seen. It was actually a meteor strike, and was seen from as far away as Vancouver WA and Boise ID. We were pretty close to the center of the action I guess.
It was a memorable enough event that I was actually relieved when I came to work and saw another Christian. That ruled out the possibility that I had missed the rapture. When it hit I checked the clock in my truck, 5:30 a.m. because I figured I was coming into a plant that had just scrammed from the biggest electrical grid hit in history.

Spokane bound!

Today was the school speech meet for the 1st graders at Liberty Christian School. A large group of parents and grandparents had gathered in the school library to witness the event.

The G-man was the 13th kid to give his speech, which gave him time to get comfortable. He said that his knees were shaking while he was giving the speech for the judges. By my guess there were probably 40 people in the room watching the speeches.

His speech was excellent, quoting Matthew 5:43-48 and giving a short explanation of what the verse means to him. After his speech he sat down to listen to the rest of the 1st graders giving their speeches.

Micah is doing his first math homework in this picture. We used some skittles to help illustrate simple addition. After finishing the math problems he colored in the squares based on the different answers.

It looks like this summer will be the "summer of math and reading" in the Long household. Both
Gavin and Micah will be doing lots of studying in

the summer to stay sharp. This is all part of Russ' master plan to minimize his future tax burden and grocery expenses at the same time.

I took this picture of Brady and Ethan this afternoon out of picture guilt since they weren't in the blog yet. Of note is Brady being the #1 "picker upper" in sunday school this week, and Ethan saying "Matthew" when he saw his friend in the nursery.

More sections of building siding are falling off at work and landing all over the place. Watch out for flying projectiles big enough to flatten a car! The good news is...this is Eastern Washington so the wind will stop sometime after WSU has a top 50 recruiting class in football. Ha!

District Spelling Bee

Today was the district spelling bee for grades 1-8. It was held at Liberty, so of course we had a much shorter drive than the families from Yakima. The school from Bothell did not come because Snoqualmie Pass is once again closed. This time all of the passes across the cascades are closed, so this sounds like as good a time as ever to secede and throw off the shackles of oppression the "Birkenstock wearing lefties" have had us under lo these many years. :)

The spelling bee was pretty cool. They had two practice rounds, where I was allowed to take the picture of Gavin you see here. When the actual

competition began, he received the word "about". It was very cute to see the look of relief on his face when he answered it correctly. He made his mom and dad very proud today.

The district spelling bee was only open to the top 3 spellers from each school. He was able to go with his two best friends, Matthew Ng and Matthew McClure. Matthew Ng came in 2nd place for 2nd grade, and Matthew McClure was the winner for the 1st grade competition. Gavin was a bit frustrated when he exited the competition at the word "weave". Nevertheless, he has now advanced further in spelling bee competitions than either his mom or dad, and we are extremely proud.

This coming monday is the speech meet. He came in first place for his class and now is trying to advance to the next round in Spokane. Dad is cutting out of work for a while on monday morning so he can be at the school and watch.

High winds!

It was so windy last night that I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep at all. It's very wierd, but a windy night will keep me awake like nothing else. I think it's a flashback to growing up in tornado alley.
The house is fine, however.....

Hundreds of square feet of metal siding came flying off the side of the reactor building at work around 6:30 this morning. Thankfully, no one was in the line of fire. The gusts were around 60 mph, which means at my house in the wind tunnel of a canyon we live in, they were around 80 mph.

Big spelling bee tomorrow!

Winter storm 2008

This has been a good winter for snow. Right now Snoqualmie pass has 160% of it's normal snowpack, which in the northwest means we have plenty of electricity to sell to California this year.
Two sundays ago we had 9" of snow, which was great. We went sledding at our friends house and the boys had a blast. The mighty Chinook winds melted it all away during the week, and we got 2" more on Super bowl sunday. That is gone now too. We have tons of pictures of the snow, and they are expecting more in the Cascades this weekend.
I'm guessing that this spring will be awesome in the Cascades...trip and pictures to come.

The first picture was taken of our Seahawks fan early in the morning on the day of the 9" snow. The second picture is a day later at the mall. Of course, school was cancelled, for a total three days so far this year. They are crazy if they think we're hangin around for school come vacation time this summer.

First blog post

Ok, we're on...

We've seen a few of our other friends get these, and this looks like another good way to keep in touch with our family and friends scattered across the world. We promise to try and keep it up to date with the happenings around here.