This is a closer view.
Now for the question: Does anyone want some? I thought so. Mom is currently driving to Utah with lots of wonderfully tasty lemons. There is also a bag of oranges from John and Becky's back yard. They are perfectly ripened right now and taste really good.Sam, Jack and Stori have been visiting with us for over a week now and we have had lots of fun. We did not take any photos until Friday evening when we lots of family over to celebrate Jack and Stori’s 10th birthday. For the birthday dinner, the kids helped put together the menu. We had steak, grilled squash slabs, corn on the cob, salad and blue Jell-O. These are some of the photos at the birthday party.
Stori likes playing with Rocky and Rocky likes her and anyone else that will play with him.
Jack spends a lot of time with his new Legos.
Yesterday (Saturday) I took Sam and Jack to Almaden Lake Park. In addition to the typical playground for little children, they have one for ages 6-12 with some cool climbing structures that the older kids enjoyed. .
Sam and Jack were able to get the swings going pretty high. 
Sam really enjoyed jumping out of the swing. Jack enjoyed it, but not as much as Sam
After we left the park, we went up into the mountains close by for a hike. The trail head is 8.5 miles from our house by road and 6 miles in a straight line. At the beginning of the trail, there is a sign warning about mountain lions and bobcats. The sign said that where there are dear and other animals to eat, there will be mountain lions. The first thing we say was 5 wild turkeys and then we say a deer. After seeing the photos and reading about mountain lions, Sam was whacking two rocks together. I asked him if it was to scare off the mountain lions. He said yes. I asked him if he saw "The Parent Trap" he said yes. I told him that it does not work. I told Sam and Jack that the best way to protect against mountain lions is to stay together in a group and do not go off on your own. They stayed within about 4 feet of me the rest of the hike, even when I was jogging. We saw a bobcat while driving home, but no mountain lion.
The next morning (today) is Easter. Here are the kids with Easter baskets and dressed for church.
After Church we fixed ham, cheesy potatoes, asparagus, carrots for dinner. For desert we had boysenberry pie and ice cream. The kids declined the pie and only had ice cream. Mark, Mom and I really enjoyed the pie and vanilla ice cream.
After dinner, we had an Easter egg hunt in the back yard. I believe the kids had a good time. They asked if they could do another Easter egg hunt a couple of hours later.
They have been gone from their Mom and Dad for 9 days now and they are ready to go home on Tuesday morning.
In the first batch of photos Joseph sent, there was a video of him chopping open a coconut with a machete. Now several months later, he has improved his machete skills considerably. It was interesting to note in a recent letter that a missionary was injured while chopping open a coconut. Mom and I took Sheri and Dallin to Monterrey on Saturday. It has been raining here for about two weeks and was still raining a little when we arrived in Monterey, but it cleared up later.
Since we were hungry, the first thing we did was go to the Fish Hopper restaurant. This is the same place Mom and I ate when we went in January. The waiter took a photo of the four of us at our table with the ocean view. Dallin was enjoying the bread while we waited for our food.
Mom and I both ordered the Macadamia crusted Halibut. It was amazingly good like last time. Sheri got the seafood platter with crab with a skewer of scallops and shrimp with rice. She looked like she was enjoying her food.
After we ate, we went to the Aquarium. Dallin and the rest of us enjoyed the exhibits such as the sea anemones.
Sheri and Dallin got to be in the aquarium. There was a tunnel that they crawled through to get to the other side.
Dallin really liked the star fish that were available to touch. There were bat rays that people could touch, but they were not getting close to the people while we were there.
Dallin discovered that he really likes chocolate chip cookies. He liked them so much that he even swallowed.
We stopped at Ghirardelli for Hot Fudge sundaes. I did not get a photo before we started eating, but they looked and tasted amazingly good. Here is Sheri finishing off the last of them.
After we got home and Dallin had his bath, he decided that he did not like the gate that kept him from going down the stairs, so he tried to go under. He got stuck, so we rescued him. He was more annoyed than upset about getting stuck.
We had a great day. It has been fun having Sheri and Dallin visit.
On Saturday, February 12, Mom and I invited john and Becky to go for a hike in Uvas Canyon County Park. Uvas means grapes, but I did not see any grapes. There are lots of hiking trails to choose in the park. Since one of our hiking goals is to prepare to hike to the top of Half Dome, I picked one that had some good uphill hiking and also some nice scenery. Of course, there were geocaches along the way. Becky posted some great photos and recorded the Ten Commandments of Geocaching in California Crapos.
We hiked up the trail along the stream. Here is hiker Mom looking good. This was her first hike with her new Camelbak and trekking poles.
We came to this fun tree. Mom was the first to climb up on the tree. 
We also found a few geocaches along the way. This is an ammo box cache that we found.
When we got back to the car, John and I decided to go look for one more geocache that was close to the car. It is called the Waterfall Cache for good reason. The cache was close to this waterfall.
The total hike was about 4 miles. We will be doing several other hikes with increasing difficulty to prepare for the big hike. And to answer Mom’s comment/question on Half Dome: Of course, there are geocaches to find while hiking up Half Dome. We found some of them in 2008, but most of them are virtual caches where you just log information without actually finding a container.
We had various group photos.
The following photos were cropped from other photos in order to see how cute Charlotte is. Neil just came along for the ride.
