Carl Hutzler’s Blog

We had a heavy, wet snow today in DC. Perfect for a guy with a button nose.

My son got some temporary hair color for the holidays. So he let me paint him as a Christmas tree the other day. He loved it!

  

The kids were out of school for fall break so the whole family went off to Seattle to visit my brother, Paul.

We got in around noon and rented our car which took a while as I was cheap and went with an off-site rental location which I always swear I won’t do again but do anyway :-) Once we got into town, we decided to grab some lunch in Ballard which is a neighborhood just north of downtown. We ate a a great mexican place. Then we went over to Archie McPhee’s and scouted the random stuff they have which is always fun to look through - odds and ends of toys and motors and magic 8 balls, and nun chuckers with real flying nuns. You get the idea.

While we were looking around, my brother emailed my mom back in Baltimore telling her he had no phone as he had just moved to a new place. So I would have no way to call him. But he did say he was a coffee house in Ballard (great, that narrows it down). My mom called me and gave me the address. I told her to look up the directions on the web and she did and provided some reasonable instructions. She emailed Paul back and conveyed that we would be there in 15 minutes. I think there is a need for an Email to Phone to Web to Phone to Email gateway. Someone should create something :-)

Anyway, we drove over to “Q Cafe” on 15th Street and after missing the exit and driving backwards up the on-ramp, we arrived. Paul was inside finishing up a café olé. We talked for a while and caught up. He had not seen the kids in a year or so.

First Sighting: Paul drives a Bio Diesel VW GTI.

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Down in Charlottesville today visiting my good friends Bill and Wendy and young Solomon. We had fun catching up last night and working on Bill’s website a bit. Went for an 8 mile run this morning and it felt good.  Not much else going on.

Took a cool picture of young Solomon. Enjoy.

Moped Adventure Pix

The Story

My son’s cub scout troop visited Burke Lake this past weekend. We had a lot of fun fishing, building fires, cooking, learning to tie knots, and other such “always prepared” types of things. We even made peach cobbler in a dutch over. It was very simple to make and so amazingly good I can’t even begin to describe it to you. Yummm, butter!

Yep, my brother and his friend made it! About two weeks ago they completed their moped oddessy and reached Skagway, AK. Amazing.

Now that he’s been to Alaska, we will have to go back together and really see the place. :-)

 Some pictures from his adventure are now in!

The family went back to the beach for a few days this past weekend. We go the weekend after Labor Day every year because its still warm, its a lot less crowded, and Funland is still open :-)

Anyway, we had a great time surfing the waves, eating chocolate covered pretzels, riding the rides and horse racing at Funland, and eating out at some very nice restaurants. Everything was just great except for my Scrabble game and the fact that my father won Settlers of Catan twice! Ughhh. Enjoy the pix.

My kids had a day off of school today for a teacher workday. What? A day off? How could that be since my kids just started school this week??!!, you ask?

Relax, its OK. This is not some kind of social worker emergency. My kids went back to school way back on July 30th as they are in one of these “all year” schools. So today was just a normal teacher workday break.

Anyway, my parents took the kids and I sailing on a boat co-owned/operated by my Dad and his two life long friends George Hess and Bill Kaufman. We sailed from the Magothy River just north of Anapolis, MD. We motored south and under the Bay Bridge and around some big freighters before actually putting out the jib and running a little. But there was not much of a breeze so we ended up motoring most of the way back too.

But we had a blast playing Scrabble and word games. The kids got to steer a bunch and a good time was had by all.

When we got back, we decided to find some crabs to round out a purely Maryland kind of day. $44 a dozen for some pretty good mediums. And they even came from the bay :-)