Le Tour de Palouse

Earlier this summer, after some car problems and rising gas prices, Kelly and I had been talking about saving some money on gas and trying to cut back on how many trips I make back and forth between Moscow and Pullman. There is a great bike path between the two towns that makes it really easy for someone to ride back and forth between the two but my bike wasn't really the right kind for commuting. So we ended up getting a road/touring bike for me and now I ride that back and forth as much as I can...ok, maybe not as much as I can, but enough to cut back a little on how much we end up paying for gas. I've put over 180 miles on the bike so far which seems like a lot, but then when you consider that the Tour de France was 2178 miles long it no longer seems like it's that big of a deal.

AWESOME

Can't wait until tomorrow

One Year Later

One of Brian and my favorite little kids, as you all know, is little Evalie Rippy. Yesterday, July 14th, was Miss Rippy's first birthday. Brian took baby pictures for her announcements when she was born and yesterday I got to take pictures of the birthday girl one year later. I'm working on touching these up but here are few to view, especially for her Dad who's on the west side of the state.
Enjoy...

Picking grass...


...then eating it






Who could be cuter than me?




Cutest little girl ever!


So I hope you guys didn't overdose on the cuteness...it's tough not to whenever that girl is in the room!

As promised

As Kelly mentioned we took some photos of the Rippy family on Father's Day. I've been lazy and haven't posted anything up, even though I was already done editing the photos. Here are some of my favorites:


I've never tried to take a portrait of a family this big before. I just tried to get everyone looking at the camera and take as many pictures as fast as my camera can handle.


Besides Kelly and I, the Rippys had also invited their neighbors to come for dinner as well, and their children brought over their rabbits. No, the rabbits weren't on the menu but the kids had fun playing with them.


After we had eaten and the pictures were taken we all enjoyed some home-made ice cream, some obviously more than others.

As per request

Brian told me that I had to write about this so I will...
As you know I took pictures of Stacey's sister's wedding this summer. Well, Stacey went to print off one of the pictures at Walmart and they flagged it as a professional picture. She had to get my permission in order to use it. This happened to us before but it was Traci's (my sister's) pictures that time. So Brian was really excited. I was too, except that that wasn't even my favorite picture from that day!

Speaking of pictures, we went to Spokane yesterday to take family pictures for Jeff's family yesterday. It was lots of fun and I'm hoping that we got some good pictures...Brian took them to work so I won't get to see them until tonight! We will put them up as soon as we've flipped through them.

Until then!

Super Librarian strikes again

Is it sad that I can now type numbers with a 10-key number pad better than I can type (faster, less mistakes, and without peeking)? Not when you consider I've been typing about 5600 numbers every time I've worked at the library this past week. That's roughly 400 barcodes of 14 digits each per day. Some days like yesterday I did 620 barcodes, or 8680 numbers. I guess with all the practice its no wonder I'm getting pretty good at it. Chalk this one up as another one of my super librarian powers!

Birthday

Its a birthday tradition of mine to go on a bike ride and think about good things that happened in the last year of my life. It started either right before we moved to England or right after. Either way though I try to do it every year...especially because my loving mother likes to remind be of it every year. So this year I thought I'd invite Brian along, you know we are married so I guess I could invite him into my life. But first he had to take pictures to document the tradition. So here's a look.



It was a really good bike ride and I realized that I have a lot to be happy about.

On that happy note, my sister gave me an excellent birthday gift...



It was such a great surprise and I absolutely love it! This isn't the best picture but I was doing it myself in a mirror (which explains the backwardsness). And for those of you who don't get the shirt, it's from Juno and if you don't know what Juno is then you MUST go out and rent it if not buy it! Anyway, I'm sure there will be many more pictures in this shirt in the future. Just thought I'd show you some pictures. I'm off to read some really boring and complex research papers so that I can stop feeling guilty.