After Christmas

The day after Christmas, Neil, Ashley and their kids arrived. We took 173 photos on our camera while they were there, but I narrowed it down to 30 of the photos to show here.
There were of course presents to open.

The little princess was delighted to have new clothes. The little prince was more excited about the really cool egg separator he found in the kitchen. With his inherent creativity, he figured out several ways to launch a ball across the room with the egg separator.

Another fun activity was riding in the car in the basement. It is hard to beat argyle socks and a fly swatter for cruising in style.
We had a good snowstorm for a white Christmas. Joseph decided to add a smiley face to our door. The kids wanted to go out and play in the snow. The sledding was pretty good.Rocky wanted to play too.

At the end of the day Neil helped the kids make a snowman. He was then moved to the deck floor. He tipped over but stayed frozen for quite a while. The next snowstorm burried him, but when the snow melted, the snowman was still there, but a little diminished. He finally melted completely on Sunday, January 17.We went to the Magic House. While there, we climbed on Jack’s magic beanstalk…
Shopped at the grocery store…
Went fishing for magnetic fish...
Made ice cream cones…
Played with water…
Played with sand…
Crawled through tunnels…
And used dirt moving equipment.
After all of that work, we were hungry.
On another day, we hung around the City Museum.
And crawled through lots of tunnels.
On the last day, we went bowling.
The ramp was very helpful for small bowlers.
There was rejoicing at some well placed balls and some disappointment when the ball went the wrong way.
Overall, we had a good time.There was still enough snow to make a snowman as a car ornament when we came out to the parking lot. The snowman did not survive falling off the car less than a block from the bowling alley.

Christmas

I’m still a few weeks behind on blog updates, but I am trying to catch up. The days before Christmas and Christmas day were pretty quiet. With traveling to Arizona for Thanksgiving and California for the wedding, we decided to make the Christmas tree easy and we put up the artificial tree. I put up the tree before the wedding, but we did not get the lights and ornaments on until Sarah and Joseph got home a week before Christmas. Here are Sarah and Mom in front of the tree.
This is my new ornament that has Gayla Peevey singing “I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” from her 1953 recording.
Sarah flew to Pennsylvania on December 24th, so we had the traditional omelets that morning before Sarah left. I did not have any photos of Omelets, but they looked like our traditional omelets.

On Christmas morning it was just Joseph and Mom and me.
Our stockings were not used to all of the space around them. They are used to being crowded together.
Joseph got creative on the name tags. It was pretty obvious who the presents were for.
We had lots of wonderful presents and we appreciate all of the gifts we received.

After presents we had Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. These were the last of the strawberries from the garden. This is me making waffles.
They were really good. Here is Mom with her waffle.
Yes, she still likes whipped cream.
The next blog entry will have photos of the after Christmas festivities while Neil, Ashley and the kids were here.

Thanksgiving

There have been several postings by other family members on the great time we had in Arizona for Thanksgiving. Even though it was a while ago, and a lot of others have posted some great photos, I realized that I had some photos that would still be fun to share.

The first ones are from the back yard playground and the neighborhood playground.
These next photos were at the Pima Air Museum
The photos were taken the day after Thanksgiving playing paintball. We really had a good time and no one got an eye put out. The closest was Sarah, who got shot on the top of her head with a yellow paintball. She did not want to leave that in her hair for the drive to back to Utah.

The 22 hour drive back to Missouri was pleasantly uneventful.

Trip to France

This blog entry on my November trip to France is very long overdue. Even though most of the time was spent at work, I did get a little time to do some sight seeing in Angouleme. There were some pretty cool old buildings that were between 200 and 600 years old. Most of the old buildings were churches. These were a few photos I took. The first one was taken early in the morning s it was getting light.

This was a hotel a long time ago.
Angouleme is more than 800 years old, so many of the old streets were built long before there were cars and are quite narrow. Even though this street was very narrow, it still had parallel parking with enough space for cars to barely get by.
My last night in France was in Paris. I ate dinner in the hotel by the airport. I ordered “apple pie” for desert. But the apple pie was not what traditional American apple pie. This is what it looked like. It tasted pretty good.
The next day my flight back to the states did not leave until noon, so I decided to get up early and take the train into the city and see the Eiffel Tower. This was taken shortly after it got light in the morning, as seen from the east of the tower looking west (sun to my back).
While at the Eiffel Tower, I found a geocache in a small hole in the wall on the far side of the Seine River just west of the tower. Close by was a old barge like boat that had house plants on the boat suggesting that someone lived on the boat. This is a photo of the boat with the Seine River and the Eiffel Tower in the background looking east into the sunrise through the clouds.
I made it back to the airport in time to catch my plane and fly to Salt Lake and see my family.

What Am I?

Saturday was a nice sunny day. I was out on our deck enjoying the warm sunshine and apparently I was not alone. Also enjoying the sun on our deck was a cool looking bug. This is what he looked like.

Mom looked for him in the National Audubon Society Field Guide. It is a “wheel bug” or Arilus cristatus. I copied the following from the Field Guide:
Description: 1 1/8 – 1 3/8" Gray-brown to black. Prothorax raised into a curved series of coglike teeth along midline, inspiring the common name. Nymph is blood-red with black markings.
Habitat: Meadows and crop fields.
Range: East of the Rocky Mountains, from southern Canada south to the Gulf states.
Food: Caterpillars, even large ones including hornworms, Japanese Beetle larvae, and other insects.
Life Cycle: Eggs are laid in clusters on foliage. One generation a year.
This handsome predator can give a painful stab when it defends itself from a carless handler.”

I did not read the part about the painful stab until after I had captured and brought him in for Mom to see. Fortunately, I used a paper towel to handle him and did not get stabbed. When I saw the part about eating caterpillars and other insects, I wished we had lots more of these guys in the garden.

Last Squash Of The Year – "Dilly Squash"?

We have been picking squash for 4 months from the same plants. Four hills produced hundreds of pounds of squash. Most of it was given to others. We just could not eat 20 to 40 pounds a week. We had a freeze coming a few days ago, so I picked everything, including the little ones. These ranged from 9 inches down to about 2 inches long. The 2 inch long squash were about ¼ inch in diameter.
I have made “Dilly Beans before much like dill pickles but made with green beans. I wondered if it would work to treat small skinny squash like green beans and make “Dilly Squash”. I decided to try it. I chose the skinniest squash I had until there was enough to fill a pint jar and then followed the dilly bean recipe for one pint. The recipe includes water, vinegar, salt, garlic, dried red pepper flakes and dill. The largest squash was about 5/8 of and inch in diameter. This is what the jar looks like.
I’ll load it in the car to try out at Thanksgiving. It might be good and then again it might be horrible. We can all find out together.