Lee Family Lights

Didn’t really do anything big this year for Halloween, maybe next year, but it is fun and worth a look. I might do a few tweaks to the sequence, but other than that they are they way they will be through Halloween. They are out and running from about 7pm-9pm nightly.

Halloween is a go!  I have started preparing for our small show for Halloween this year.  It’s actually a little bigger than last year, 11 lighted pumpkins instead of just 6, but nothing like what some people do for this holiday!  It’s gonna be fun to get back working with the controllers and setting up the network and all.  I am really looking forward to it.  As soon as I get that deployed, hopefully by Monday night, then I will start working on getting ready for Christmas as tonight I learned that we WILL have a Christmas light show here at this house this year… REALLY excited about that!  Not sure where we will be next Christmas, but let’s just take it 1 step at a time 🙂 WOOHOOO!

Happy New Year to y’all. I have offically declared 2009 as “The Year of the Dog!” I am gonna make sure that this year I spend time doing things I have never done before. With that said, I started off right away…

Today was the day of the 25th Annual Polar Bear Plunge here in Lacey. It took place at Long Lake, which is about 2 miles from my house. If you don’t know what a Polar Bear Plunge is, basically you get as many wacko’s as you can together and they jump into freakin’ cold water! This is something I had been saying for years that I wanted to do, but never did. Every year, on January 2nd, I read about it in the newspaper and say I am gonna have to do that one of these days. The next thing you know, it’s January 2nd again and I am saying the same thing. Not this year!

How this all came about is that my boss was telling me how our company was going to be a sponsor and asked me if I would work our tent at the event. He also started prodding me about jumping and I did mention that it was something I had always wanted to do, just so I could say I did. However, I told him it would have to be a game time decision cause I just didn’t know if my nerves would let me do it. See, I am not a water person and the thought of jumping into water (especially a lake), when I didn’t really have to, just made no sense to me. That’s like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane… for fun!?

Today I was prepared and when the jump approached, I was ready to go. We started out on to the dock about 15 minutes prior to the jump and those 15 minutes went by SOOOO slowly! With the wind blowing periodically, it got cold! The water was a balmy 38 degrees! All I could think of was the scene from National Lampoon’s Vacation where Clark Griswold is about to jump into the swimming pool at their hotel, “This is crazy! This is crazy! This is crazy!”

With the final countdown under way, 3…2…1… JUMP! People went flying into the water all around me. My problems were as such, beyond the fact I just dont jump into water like that for fun when it’s hot and we go swimming, I wasn’t sure how deep the water was and wanted to be somewhere that I wouldn’t hit bottom too fast and I didnt want to hit anyone. As you can see in the video, I stalled a bit. People jumped, then started swimming back to the dock, I have no clue why, but they were in my way. Once I saw a place I could jump without hitting anyone… BOMBS AWAY!

The water was FREAKIN’ COLD! Those first few seconds in the water made me wonder what the heck I was thinkin’ when I decided to do it! Those thoughts quickly left and were replaced with an adrenaline rush that was AWESOME! A sense of accomplishment come over me as I was wiping my eyes as I realized I had done it! Man what a feeling!! I will tell you this, this will now be my New Years tradition, no matter if it’s here in Lacey or wherever I might be. It gives you a sense of being alive that you just don’t understand until you do it. I can’t believe I waited this long to do it!

We wanted to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! Thank you for making LeeFamilyLights.com a success in our first year.

As per usual for us, we spent Christmas Eve at home with friends and family as we hosted our own party. Then Christmas morning we drove north to Marysville to spend time with my wifes side of the family at her parents house. This year was quite different as we woke up to a White Christmas for only the 10th time in Western Washington since 1891. Our drive was quite interesting. As we left Lacey the roads were solid ice. The state patrol actually had part of I-5 closed just north of Nisqually Valley awaiting a gravel/salt truck. It wasn’t long after we got there that we were moving again, behind the truck and police car, in kind of our own person escort. A few miles up the road they both pulled off and we continued on with roads that were just wet, no ice at all. By the time we got to Seattle there was a mix of rain and snow falling and by the time we reached North Seattle, it was pure snow. The video below was taken as we got close to Everett and the snow started falling really hard. I have never personally driven on I-5 when it was falling so hard that the roads were covering over fast! We did make it to Marysville eventually and had a great time with Yvonne’s family there before we came home on the 26th and back to our routine.

Please enjoy this video and there will be more to come 🙂

This is a video I took standing on our back deck. There is dang near a foot on the table and more in the drifts!

Today was one of those days where you just know the weather man is gonna be wrong… all of them.  You see, living in Western Washington whenever they predict snow, especially in large amounts, we might see a flake or 2. So, while they were calling for 6-12 inches for us, I really thought we would just get a flake or 2… WRONG!  The snow started falling around Noon as my wife and I were getting ready to go shopping.  I never go shopping, especially to the mall, on the last Saturday before Christmas… but today was different.  It’s not the shopping I wanted to talk about, it’s the snow!  So after we finished up what we needed to do, had a bite to eat, we headed towards some friends in Tumwater.  This was about 4ish and it was still snowing and starting to come down harder at times.  After a quick stop at Safeway, we got to Richard & Valerie’s just after 5pm.  Between then and when we tried to leave just after 10pm, the snow never stopped.  It looks so amazing and as we left our friends house we were really loving it… until we couldn’t get the van to budge!  Heck, even then we were laughing about it.  I finally had to go get Richard and his shovel to help us dig out.  Between us both shoveling, Yvonne trying to drive and us pushing, we finally got it out on to the street enough where we were no longer in danger of going up on the sidewalk (though, honestly, with as much snow as was there, there was no way to tell what was street and what was sidewalk, it was all the same level).  At this point when we realized that there would be no way that we could simply have Yvonne turn the van around and pick me up, Richard suggested driving in reverse all the way up his street to the main cross road that was already plowed… and so thats what he did!  As Yvonne and I were walking down the street, with it still dumping snow (allbeit a very fine almost just shaved ice) I told her, “I am SOOOO gonna blog about this!”

The drive home on I-5 wasn’t really that bad, honestly.  There were no lanes though, you couldn’t see the lines, it was just 4 lanes of solid white, compact snow and ice.  As we tried taking our exit, the idiot in front of me decides he is gonna slow down and take the same exit, which caused me to slow down so much that there was no way that I would be able to get over the snow heaps from where it was plowed… so we went to the next exit and made our way back, which looked to be better roads anyway.

As we got into our neighborhood the roads got worse but being the “Rock Star” my wife called me, I got us home. I even tried pulling up our driveway, but that wasn’t happening!!  So we parked at the base of the drive and walked up and sure enough as I did, I fell… again!  For the 2nd time in 3 days.  This time when I realized I was alright, I made a snow angel and just had fun with it.

Below are some of the pictures that we took tonight of our lights and all the snow as well as a link to more pictures on our Picasa site.  I can’t recall a time in recent memory where we have had this much snow at one time, especially not expecting more… so we have been enjoying it while we can.

The Great Snow Storm of 2008!

It appears that we were able to fix the problem with the controller on the roof (Thanks Jon for the info I needed to do that!) So after testing it today, it appears that its working good, for now anyhow 🙂 Check it out on web cam # 1.

Here are a few more pix I took just a little bit ago:

Under a few inches of snow… Santa and Frosty come alive 🙂