Anya and Liya, bakers. We’re invited to a Chinese New Year’s party at the home of friends Shu-Chih and Steve, whose daughter, Natasha, was in the same Mandarin tots playgroup as Bree. Bree’s happy to spend time with Natasha, but the older girls are uninterested in spending a lot of time there. Jan lets them stay at home on their own. They decide to bake cookies — from scratch, for the first time ever, unsupervised.
They decide to use up a bag of butterscotch chips we have leftover from some other project. They google around for a chocolate chip cookie recipe and substitute butterscotch chips. Since they’re unfamiliar with dividing ingredient amounts, they look for a recipe that makes the smallest number of cookies; the smallest recipe makes 3 dozen cookies. The recipe calls for butter at room temperature, so they google for “how to get butter to room temperature”. They discover that we’re out of brown sugar, so Anya heads down the block to the Red Apple market for brown sugar. She discovers the store has more than one kind of brown sugar, so she looks at the packages and selects the one that advertises that it’s, “ideal in cookies”. They preheat the over, make the dough, form the cookies, and bake. When the allotted cook time has passed, they decide the cookies don’t look ready, so they leave them in some more. And some more. The cookies ultimately end up very, very crispy, but not burnt. But, for a first time, not bad.
Super Bowl snowboarding. Anya’s eager to try snowboarding for the second time, and Jan suggests we’ll have the mountain to ourselves on Super Bowl Sunday. Liya’s excited to join as well.
As hoped, the mountain is quite empty, and with a recent snowfall, the conditions are great. Liya (shown) spends the morning boarding with Jan, while Anya takes a morning lesson (her second). At lunchtime, Anya’s instructor is very enthusiastic about her progress. Apparently Anya (and the one other student in her group class) did so well that they tried out a small terrain park (stunt park). Anya leads Jan and Liya there so they can try it. Jan and Liya both make small jumps but fall. Anya falls too — but not before hitting a big jump at a good clip and catching some air. Fearlessness is a plus when trying a new sport.
Anya calls an emergency family meeting this evening to discussing a pressing matter: WHEN are we going to get a hamster?
All three girls have been thinking a hamster would be a pretty good idea. To try out their ability to keep something alive, Angela recently took the girls shopping to pick out plants. If they can each keep a plant alive for, say, six months, that would show they are responsible enough to keep a hamster.
During the family meeting, Anya argues forcefully that this six month plant trial is clearly far too long. “If we can keep the plants alive for two months, then we all know that we can keep them alive for six months.” We agree, and shorten the plant trial to two months.
Ocarina duet. Last fall, Jan bought a couple of ocarinas for Anya’s birthday party puzzlehunt. An ocarina is a small wind instrument, sort of like a recorder. Ocarinas are common in Europe, South America, and Asia. They show up in the movie “Totoro”, which is why they figured into Anya’s birthday party.
The ocarina turns out to be a fun little instrument to play, so Jan’s bought another, mellower-sounding one. Today, he’s practicing “Minuet in G Major” on it, when Anya picks up another ocarina and begins playing the harmony. She’s quick to pick up the fingerings, and the piece doesn’t sound half bad. Jan never thought a simple instrument purchased for a game would turn into a wonderful opportunity for a nice duet with Anya.
Bree’s anxiety about watching movies containing any sort of tension reach a new peak when we settle in for a family movie night. We carefully select “Happy Feet”, a so-so animated kids movie about singing, dancing penguins. This seems harmless enough, but before ten minutes have passed, Bree begins freaking out. Jan points out to her that she’s doing so during a happy scene: one in which the adorable baby penguin chicks are about to meet their mothers. No go. Anything with more tension than “Strawberry Shortcake and Friends” seems to be out.
We abandon the idea of finding any kind of common ground for family movies for the foreseeable future.
Jan is forming another tech company. He’s founding the company with a former Microsoft colleague and long-time friend named Bruce Ryan. By a miracle of good timing, Jan approached Bruce about joining just as Bruce was wrapping up another job. The two of them are looking forward to working together again.
The company will be focused on a new technology called web components that makes it much easier to build web sites and apps. For the time being, the company’s working name is Component Kitchen; a final name has yet to be worked out.
On long road trips, we sometimes play a car game called Rubberneckers. Each player gets a number of large cards that depict things one might conceivably see from a car. Some are common things (a Yield sign, a green car, a school), and some uncommon (an ambulance, a skyscraper, a farm animal) depending on where one is driving. Liya’s created her own deck of game cards with a greater variety of things to look for, from common (Starbucks) to extremely rare (Man Wearing a Purple Turban).
Ski week at Big White, BC. We once again join a group of families from the girls’ school to spend the mid-winter break skiing up in Canada. This year, we’ll be spending a full week, Saturday to Saturday. This year also marks the first time Sabriya will be out on the slopes with us for the whole trip. Our first year or two here she would spend the day in childcare, and then she did several years in the ski school. Now she’s old enough and experienced enough to ski with us on the slopes. She’s mostly done green (beginner) runs until now, but on our first full day, we take her down a blue (intermediate) run, and she does fine.
The five of us at the top of the Bullet Express chairlift. From left to right: Angela, Anya (already looking down the run), Sabriya, Liya, Jan.
The families of two of Anya’s best friends, Kaila and Jane, are with us at Big White. The three friends spend virtually the entire week skiing together. Here they make their way down a bumpy, somewhat challenging run called Whitetail. From lower-left to upper-right: Kaila, Jane, Liya, Anya.
Although the Seattle area ski resorts haven’t gotten much snow this year, BC’s Okanogan Valley has gotten quite a bit. It snows a bunch more while we’re up here. Liya and Jan take advantage of a great powder day to explore a rolling field of fresh snow in the Powder Bowl just below one of the mountain peaks.
At lunch at one of the ski area restaurants, Liya and Bree notice an outdoor ice skating rink and decide they want to ice skate. Four of us (the two of them, Jan, Angela) rent skates, and spend a fun hour or so skating over the bumpy outdoor ice.
Liya’s definitely a more accomplished and confident rider this year. She and Jan spend half the week on snowboards.
There’s such a thing as too much snow. To get home from Big White to Seattle, we have to drive through two mountain passes. In one of the the passes, the Coquihalla Pass, an enormous avalanche has buried the highway under 15 feet of snow. It’s still snowed in on the day we’re heading home, so we have to return by a longer route through Eastern Washington.
To pass the time on the long drive, we listen to a long audiobook (“The Wildwood Imperium”) off of Angela’s phone. We still have several hours of driving left to go when we make a rest stop at a gas station. Angela walks into the station’s restroom while checking her phone. She stumbles — and her phone goes flying into the toilet. She manages to get it out quickly, and it doesn’t seem damaged. But when we get back in the car to resume the drive, the adapter that connects the phone to the car’s audio system won’t work. So we’re left hanging, halfway through the book, for the rest of the drive.
Although we left early in the morning, it’s dinnertime by the time we’re coming through the Cascades into the Seattle area. We make up for it by stopping for dinner in Bellevue at Facing East, a tasty Taiwanese restaurant.
This evening, Bree’s leaping around the family room while listening to the soundtrack for the movie, “Frozen”. She particularly likes the song, “Let It Go” (the version by Idina Menzel). It’s somewhat ironic that she loves the soundtrack so much when she didn’t like the actual movie.
Anya attends her second school dance. After she’d attended the first one, she wasn’t sure if she would go to the next, but enough of her friends are going that she joins in.