Crab Feast

Thursday morning I had the privilege to attend an Anna Voskamp 1000 gifts bible study at The Chapel By The Sea on the Coat Gaurd base with a family I met through the birth of their son.  It was quite a process getting my car onto the base so next time I think I will just park at the parking lot by the gate and meet my friend there.  She was hoping we could get a pass for the other days of the study all at one time and it was worth a try.  This first week was about thankfulness and how it is necessary to experiencing God’s joy.  I am looking forward to reading the book.  Chad bought if for me on the kindle yay!  I got home around noon, it was lightly raining and had been all day.  We needed a rainy day to force us to take it easy.  I was so thankful for the excuse to just lay around the house reading to the kids, and checking out the contents of the Alutiiq History educational box.  Shortly after I came home I checked my email to discover that after nearly a year of waiting I had recieved an offer for grad school  (it is my fault, I applied for the fall class of 2016 because I didn’t think we could handle traveling with full time grad school).  I’m still in a little bit of shock over the acceptance. My course work will start shortly after we return home in September.  Sandra called and said, “you know the fresh crab we ordered?  They said they will have it at the docks today at 6:30pm.”  Neither one of us were wanting to do a big old crab dinner today… I work the whole weekend though and with fresh crab either we needed to eat it today or freeze it. It would mean another late night.  We decided that we would have it at our place as it is much closer to the dock (45 minutes closer) and so we could start earlier.  Chad bought the other things necessary for the crab boil that we didn’t have at our house and watched a few YouTube videos on how to cook and pepair the crab.  Sandra called 30 min. Early to say that the boat was in and we could pick up our crabs so we jumped into the car and met them down at the dock. It was fun to buy them right off of the boat. They were way larger than we expected and we were thankful that they included a thick plastic bag  to take them home in as we had no buckets.  
​​They were such a beautiful color of purple and feisty as all get out.  They had poked a whole bunch of holes in the bag before I could get them to the car so they could spill their nasty stinkyness in our car.  I’m just glad they didn’t get out.  ​
​​​The bag contains the shrimp and clams (not fresh local, but frozen from Safeway due to the recent health hazard warning for local).  The crab was bright red after cooking, no longer deep purple.
It was so delicious.  We had a whole crab each plus the other fixings, salad and garlic bread…we were all stuffed with much left over.  There wasn’t many pictures of the actual meal since we were all busy in preparation as well as shelling crab for the little ones.  It was such a blast. We all forgot that we had even felt too tired to get together.  We were able to pick up the crab a half hour early and didn’t keep anyone up too late.  Infact, Chad and I stayed up watching some “Friends” after the kids went to bed.  Thank you Lord for your reminder to be thankful, good friends, crab, grad school acceptance, and getting to bed early enough to get a full night sleep! 😍 We love you!!!