Thanksgiving was a great day for a horse ride!

Hodge Thanksgiving was at Dennis' Aunt Holly and Uncle Doug's place near Gettysburg, PA. Kylie e-mailed ahead (with Mel's help) to see if she could schedule her first horseride with cousin Danielle's help. Here she is, like a pro already.Shaye took a turn next.
Both did great! What a nice horse they rode!

Christmas is a great day for a plane ride!

Grandpa Hubele took advantage of the clear Oregon day to give rides in "Old Glory" around the Independence - Salem area. All the kids did great. One young Hubele even took the controls for a little while in flight and did a great job keeping us upright (good genes)!

Mikayla Co-Pilots

Dennis and Brenden take up the rear

Grandpa Jim and Noah check out the instruments

Mary and Micah get ready for flight

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

...but the fire is so delightful.



As a result, we have lots of November and December birthdays in our family!



We got to celebrate some milestones this year. Dennis celebrated #30 in December.
Grace celebrated #4 in December.
And Shaye turned ONE YEAR OLD in November!


We loved celebrating everyone's big days with them, and not just for the cake! All were celebrated in style with family and friends.

Now we did it...

We put our blog address in the Christmas letter, which Mom Hubele received today. She immediately went to our blog. She found no updates in 60 days. Whoops. I meant to do this Wednesday night, then Thursday night. So here I am, rocking and rolling, Friday night. Blogging.

We've been somewhat busy, but honestly, we've been spending a lot of quality time on the couch with the dog (Yes, he's allowed on the couch now. Clearly I am a woman without power in this male-dominated household.) and the cat enjoying the Christmas tree.

Is this THE ONE?

The tree... the tree. I've already decided on the man.

So here it is, at home in our living room, decked out with our favorite ornaments. I've never found a topper in a store that I like, so I'm thinking that will be a craft project next week. Visions of Barbie Sugarplums dance in my head.

Mass hysteria

More to come, but this is to remind us to remember to hopefully remind ourselves to add photos of our latest home destruction, we mean construction project. If there aren't photos on here by Friday feel free to harass us.

Mary's writing... Dennis is busy... at work!!!

Hooray! Dennis found a job! I can't tell you what it is, though. No, not because it's with the CIA. Just because I'm never very good at translating anything he does into English, or heck, comprehending it in the first place. We'll have to ask him, maybe after he figures it out himself. It's a 6 month contract position downtown.

We've spent the summer working on the yard some, experimenting with what grows where, figuring out what already grows certain places, and pruning, pruning, pruning. The back yard looks better, but the front yard looks worse, curtesy of our larger four legged family member. We've also taken a few road trips and hikes, Dennis and Stout especially.

These are crazy lilies that came up in the front yard as these UGLY shoots, and they FINALLY bloomed (flowers for maybe a week after 6 months of ugly stalks). They sent a wonderful scent across the yard.

Can't say he and Felix are fast friends, but they tolerate each other most of the time. Stout and this chicken, however, have quite the love affair.

Until next time...

More delays

So I was going to sit down and write a nice update with some good photos but the batteries are dead in our camera so I can't take pictures of how nice the backyard is starting to look. I'll be back with you once we get to the store for some new AA's

Our house is a very very very fine house

After much adieu (?) here are some photos of our house, and of us working on our house. This is how Dennis has been spending dry days. In the backyard, digging up layer after layer of river stone, pavers, bricks, etc. so that one day he can fulfill his lifelong dream of having a dog to call his very own. The plan is to have some grass back here eventually.

It is so much FUN moving rocks! Anyone want to come help?

This is our living room. We didn't pick the color, it came with the house. But, it grows on you. Trust me. And we hate painting. That might have something to do with it.

This is our bedroom. That skylight has us looking forward to Springing Ahead tonight for a little more darkness in the morning. We are going to have to find a shade before summertime. Daylight starts in the middle of the night this far north in the summer.

This is our reading room... or something. It's a little room with a low, sloped ceiling and a half-closet. A good home for the red chair...

Well I guess I will post these to facebook, too.

Thanks for everyone's thoughts and prayers for Dennis in his job search. He is in good company, as the depressing news reports are sure to tell us every day. He is networking like crazy and meeting tons of people, making a lot of contacts, and being sociable. We're so thankful I was able to keep my job with moving to Oregon. One out of two isn't bad, these days.

Mom and Dad Hubele came up for dinner a while back. This is our pre-dessert photo. I made Kahlua Cake. That might now be my favorite food.

A couple weekends ago, Rob and Claudia came to visit from Seattle. We had a great time. Thanks for coming, guys! These are the only photos I took... Claudia was VERY focused. She and Rob kicked our tails. We obviously need to spend more time in bars.

There ya have it. Sorry it's been so long. Feel free to come visit anytime. Then we'll do fun stuff, take pictures, and update our blog. :-)

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home...

With all of our great adventures over the past few months (almost a year), it's so nice to finally have a house that is actually starting to look and feel like our home. After performing some of the minor home repairs such as leaky drains, clogged gutters, and old thermostats, it was time to tackle our first full room renovation. Most of your know our home is nearly 100 years old, and there was about that many years worth of wallpaper on it. Luckily we only needed to go through the top two layers, but there were a few places that needed a little additional work. Fortunately we had a professional working on things.

So everything turned out looking pretty good.

We found a few of our pictures from our trans-continental Christmas trip, as well as a few shots from the great Turkey Feast 2008.

Mary acting like she knows exactly how to handle a one month old.

The Hubele Kids. Some are just a little older than the others.
And we don't want to forget about our California peeps.

Mary has been quite the busy bee with work, still trying to manage up and out or at least from the other side of the country. I finished doing about as much as a could for my Philadelphia office so I'm currently in the pursuit of new employment. Alls well that ends well though, it's giving me plenty of time to keep making checks off that "honey do" list. I'm glad to be done with the cross-country commute at least.

Mary and I got the basement somewhat organized over the weekend, I mean it is a basement after all. Similar to our house in Ardmore, we've made the main floor look respectable, just don't venture up or down the stairs. We had our first none related house guests over the weekend as well. Heidi and Jason were down from Seattle with Trevor and little Toby. I think Felix's affection for 2 year olds has reached a melting point.

That's all for now. And remember, our doors are always open.

Starting off 2009

Well it's been so long since I wrote anything here I figured I'd better say SOMETHING before people think we fell off the face of the earth. So I found a picture Deanna took at Gracie's birthday party the weekend after Christmas. These are Hello Kitty stickers the two of us are decked out in. They combine two of Gracie's favorite things... Cats and PINK!!! Gracie was very generous and Uncle Dennis and Aunt Mary just could NOT have enough stickers on their outfits to make them fashionable.

Then I found this one Deanna took, too, of the bunch who was able to come to the Independence B&B for Thanksgiving. I must say it was really nice not to be the ones who'd traveled the farthest (furthest???) to get there.

This one shows the middle 4 Hubele nieces and nephews... Brenden, Noah, Mikayla, and Micah. They are SO creative! They wrote, directed, and produced a full length stage production of "The Turkey who Escaped" or something like that. Nikki posted the same sort of photo on their blog but I thought it was so cute I had to copy it. Not to give it away, but the turkey escapes the pilgrims in their boat.

This is Gracie and her best friend for the day, Uncle Dennis. The mischievious grins are no doubt the result of some thrilling and dangerous acrobatic feat that had Gracie flying to the rafters or something. All's well that ends well.

We had a lot of fun over Christmas, too. I'll have to find some pictures from that week and comment on them in our next post. We spent the week in Philadelphia and Downingtown with Dennis' family, which was a lot of fun. More to come on that. We got to meet our new little niece, Shaye. Of course I got a cold for Christmas. That wasn't fun to fly back to Portland with, but we survived.

None of our pipes froze that week, and it turns out it was a fantastic week to not be in Portland. There was a ton of snow and had I not left when I did, I likely would have spent Christmas by myself in our new house trying to unpack all the boxes, since their airport was closed for a few days before Christmas. We've made serious progress unpacking over the last several weeks, but there is so much to do! But we love our house and our neighborhood and are starting the year off knowing that we are truly blessed to have all kinds of wonderful family and friends, a warm (now that we got a space heater in our bedroom) bed to rest our heads each night, and a significant other that is kind, funny, smart, and tall. We have so much in common! :-)