Disneyland

It has been many years since I was last at Disneyland. I think it was when Katie was a baby. At that time, the parking lot was right in front of Disneyland. That parking lot is now the California Adventure Park. Terri and her kids rode with Mom and me in our car to Disneyland and met up with Russ, who drove from Utah.

We started at Disneyland Main Street.

We rode lots of rides without a long wait because Terri was in a wheelchair. It was pretty nice to have short lines for each ride. We had a nice rest riding the Monorail.

At California Adventure Park, we were disappointed that we did not get short wheelchair lines. Since it was built recently, it was designed with wheelchairs in mind. That means that you can wait in the full line without getting out of a wheelchair. As a result we had a lot more “waiting in line” time.

While we were waiting in line for the Toy Story ride, Mom was texting Julie.

Then we got our 3-D glasses.

Here Stori is working on a turkey leg. I believe they turkey may have weighed more than Stori.

After going on California Screamin’, we went on a ride that was the scariest one there. It was Goofy’s Sky School. It had sharp turns that were not banked and I did not feel very safe. Signs like this one do not give one a feeling of comfort.

Mom and Stori rode on the Parachute ride.

We had to wait in line for the Grizzly River Run for quite a while.

The ride broke at the end of our ride, so we had to sit in our raft for about 20 minutes or more to get off. While we were sitting in the raft, they shut down the ride and sent everyone in line away with some having waited over an hour. They gave us some Fast Passes for any ride we want as compensation for our wait.

We then went on Tower of Terror. I took a photo of the photo that comes up on the monitor. Most of us look like you expect to look when you suddenly drop several stories…except Mom. She looks calm like nothing happened. She must have guts of iron.

Elder Crapo – The New Zone Leader

Joseph’s new mission president, President Mecham, posted photos of the missionaries as they held zone conferences and zone leader training.

A couple of weeks ago, President Mecham was in Pohnpei for the Pohnpei zone conference. The following three photos included Elder Crapo, who was a district leader at the time.

This last week, Joseph was transferred and assigned to be zone leader of the Guam zone. They then had zone leader training and meetings. This is the zone leaders in the mission with their companions.

This is Elder Crapo and his companion, Elder Bano, who is from the Marshall Islands.

The Marshall Islands used to be part of the Micronesia Guam Mission, but the mission split a couple of years ago and they now have a separate mission. Jon Jensen was in the Micronesia Guam Missioin and spent most of his mission in the Marshall Islands.

Both Elder Crapo and Elder Bano are wearing purple striped ties.

San Jose Tech Museum

John and Becky invited me to go to the Tech Museum with them today. This is John in the jet propulsion seat. He had to maneuver his seat to shoot a light beam at targets as they appear. I think it must take some practice to become good at it.

This John, or at least a projection of john in a space suit. He looks happy to be in space.
Becky is designing an Integrated Circuit. I believe the cute haircut and style give an advantage in the IC design.
John and Becky both were participating in electronic finger painting on the screen and making some very creative designs.
Becky looks pretty good as a goalie ready to play with the sharks.
This is John and Becky with their thermal images.
We had a fun time and saw some cool high tech stuff.

New Camera - Taking Rocky for a Walk

Mom gave me a new camera for my birthday. It is a Canon T3i with 18-135mm lens. I love it. Thank you Mom!!!

I have been reading the manual to try and figure out how to use it. I took Rocky for a walk this evening after the sun went down. The following photos were of some pretty flowers that I passed by on the walk. As can be expected Rocky did not want to stop and "smell the roses". i am still learning how to use the camera features. Most of these were using the telephoto to focus on the flower while the background is out of focus. i think my favorites are the first and last ones shown here.

The next two had the flash on which changes the colors somewhat.


I'll keep reading the 320 page manual and move on to other kinds of photos.

Happy Birthday Mark!!!

Today is Mark’s birthday (July 23). We took Mark and John and Becky to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As has become tradition, we ate lunch at the Fish Hopper before going to the aquarium. See my posts from January 22 and March 28 for more about Monterey and the Fish Hopper restaurant.

From the window by our table at the restaurant, we could see several sea lions lying on the rocks. Only one was moving around much.

I took a few photos in the aquarium but most of them did not turn out all that great. One of the exhibits that I really like is the different kinds of jellyfish. I like the moon jellies because that is the kind of jellyfish that we swam through a school of while scuba diving in St. Thomas a few years ago. The mature ones are about a foot in diameter. These are some of the moon jellies on exhibit.

One of the exhibits showed explained different kinds of sea creatures. We found ourselves on one of the description cards.

The following is a close-up of the text.

After the aquarium, per tradition, we went to Ghirardelli for desert. I really like their hot fudge sundaes.

It was a fun day celebrating Mark’s Birthday.

4th of July – Skyline to the Sea Trail

On the 4^th of July we decided to go for a hike in Big Basin State Park. Mom was going to be going on a 13 mile backpacking trip from Big Basin to the ocean on the Skyline to the Sea trail on July 8-9 with the level 4 girls before girl’s camp. We thought it would be fun to become familiar with at least the first part of the trail so we invited John and Becky to go with us.

We found some great redwood logs and stopped for a “family on the log” photo.

We found a geocache.

After the hike, we went with john and Becky and some of their friends to watch fireworks. We stopped at Blue Rock BBQ to get some of the best smoked pulled pork in San Jose and sat on blankets and ate BBQ while waiting for the fireworks to start.

On Friday morning, July 8^th, Mom and the level 4 girls started their backpacking trip. 11 miles and several sore muscles later they made it to their campsite. I was one of the people that had agreed to pick up them and their equipment up on Saturday at the beach at the end of the trail. I went early so I could hike up the trail and meet them coming down. This how I found the group coming down the trail.

They did make it to the beach.

Mom made it all the way to the beach.

Peaches and Cream Bread Pudding

We had a lot of leftover eggs from the ward Memorial Day breakfast so I was thinking about yummy foods that needed eggs. I have always loved bread pudding and it uses eggs. I noticed that the grocery stores have started getting fresh peaches so I searched online for recipes for bread pudding with fresh peaches. I looked at many recipes and mentally evaluated the expected final taste based on the ingredients. I found a recipe that looked like what I wanted. This foodnetwork recipe sounded really good to me except that seemed like it would make too much for the 9x13 pan I was using, so I scaled it down. Some of the recipes called for milk with the eggs and bread, while others used sweetened condensed milk, but this one called for half milk, half cream and more peach than other recipes. I decided that was the taste I was going for – more fresh peach and real cream.

Based on quantities of ingredients used in other recipes for a 9x13 pan, I scaled the ingredients as follows:

4 cups of bread cubes (diced bread slices)

1 1/3 lbs of fresh peaches pealed and cut into chunks

1 1/3 cup cream

1 1/3 cup milk

6 T butter

2/3 cup sugar

4 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

For those new to cooking with fresh peaches, dip the peaches in boiling water for about 10-15 seconds and then cool. The skins are easily removed and the peaches can be cut into slices and then cut into chunks in the ½ to ¾ inch size range.

The peach processing instructions in the original recipe seemed too time consuming so I modified the procedure as follows:

Beat eggs in large mixing bowl

Add sugar, vanilla, cream and milk and combine with mixer.

Melt the butter and pour about a third of it in the bottom of the 9x13 baking dish. Coat the bottom of the dish going partway up the sides. I did this by tipping the dish and letting the melted butter run over the desired surface. Add bread chunks and peach chunks to the buttered baking dish. Pour in the egg/sugar/milk/cream mixture and make sure everything is evenly distributed. Drizzle the remaining melted butter over the top of the final mixture in the baking dish.

Bake uncovered at 350F for 45 min to an hour. Once the center is puffed up, it is done cooking, but going a little longer will help cook off some of the peach juice and make the pudding firmer. Once the pudding cools off it will become firm anyway. The recipe calls for a 20 minute cooling period, but you can eat sooner if you want it still hot.

The recipe called for an Amaretto sauce, but we already had some Carmel sauce left over from some pumpkin bred pudding Mom made before. Since that Carmel sauce was incredibly good, I just heated up the leftover Carmel sauce and poured it over the bread pudding. It was really good and the Carmel flavoring complimented the peach flavor very nicely.

This is what it looked like in my bowl with the Carmel sauce on it.

This is what the baked dish looked like after we had filled bowls.

I will definitely make this a few more times while fresh peaches are in season. A peach pie or two might also be in order.