Deep fried Oreos? "Crispy Creme Bacon Cheeseburger"??! When Jim saw this sign, he knew he was "back in the USA". 
Multiple colors of cauliflower? We were used to plain, white cauliflower at about 1/20th the cost. Of course, we were buying it from a cart in the middle of a dusty street.
Alonda got ambitious and made pretzels! Surprisingly easy when she has a bread machine to make the dough.
We watched our neighbor's Fourth of July fireworks display from our dining room window. It was cold and rainy outside, but we were nice and cozy and comfortable.
We entered two events in the West Sound Senior Games. This was a much bigger deal than we thought. There were actually people who came from Canada and Louisiana to compete. Apparently, you have to win local to compete at state and then at national levels! We won Bronze in Badminton Mixed Doubles. Jim got a Bronze in the 25Km Bicycle Time Trial.
We went to the Kitsap County Fair. We have never been since it happens at a time when we would have had to be in Pakistan. This is a real, straight-ahead, small-town feel county fair. Kitsap County has a population of about 280,000 people. We have been living in a city of 22,000,000 people. Alonda got to meet an alpaca. They are really cute and soft.
Alonda was gardening on the patio. She grew basil, sage, parsley, chives, tomatoes, spinach, tarragon and rosemary. She had to bring the tomatoes into the house to ripen. During the day, the west facing patio is too hot during the day and too cold at night for them to ripen.
We live in a Navy town. The Bremerton shipyard does light and medium level maintenance on all kinds of ships. The USS Stenitz is being upgraded and the USS Nimitz will come in soon for maintenance and upgrade. They also have a few ships and subs in mothballs and some are sent here to be stripped of weapons and equipment before scrapping. The picture shows the former aircraft carrier, USS Constellation. We and several hundred other Bremertonians watched it being towed out of the harbor on its way to be scrapped in Texas. They will tow it all the way around the southern tip of South America and then all the way up into the Gulf of Mexico. It will take about 8 or 9 months. The ship is simply huge. The photo doesn't even show how big it really was. 
This is part of the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle this summer. It is a new, outdoor sculpture park we had not seen. This was an audio sculpture.
We went to a language teachers' conference in southern Washington in October. This is the bridge crossing the Columbia River from Vancouver, WA to Portland, OR. Alonda caught the lighting just right!
Jim hosted 18 exchange students and their two teachers from Tuttlingen, Germany in October. They were here for 2 1/2 weeks and we will go to visit them this summer. One of the field trips we took them on was in Seattle and they had to get up and catch the foot ferry over from Port Orchard (where Jim teaches German at South Kitsap High School) to Bremerton. This is the foot ferry arriving from Port Orchard. We were waiting on the Bremerton-Seattle ferry for the students when we took this picture of their arrival. This is the foot ferry Jim rides to work. 
In Seattle, we took the students from Germany on the Ducks. The Ducks are WW II vintage DUKW 5-ton front-wheel drive tandem axle amphibious vehicles. There were a lot of them made and some of them are still around. Most of them are in Alaska where they use them to resupply fishing trawlers. The Germans were fascinated! They have nothing like this in Europe.
We took them on a weekend field trip to visit the grave site of Chief Sealth. He is the Native American chief who helped the early settlers in this area.
The last field trip was to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. Here are some of the students relaxing on the BIG chairs. They loved the Ripley's Believe It or Not! exhibit and the other hands-on stuff.
This is one of the trees outside our dining room window. We have not seen fall colors in a decade!
