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.

Memorial Day Weekend

Memorial Day weekend started Saturday morning with our stake 5K run. John, Becky, Mom and I all ran.

t was on a very nice trail by one of the church buildings.

Mom and I each received bronze medals for finishing 3^rd in our “age categories”.

Since we burned up so much energy running 3.1 miles, we needed waffles. We stopped and bought some beautiful strawberries from a guy that sells them at the side of the road every week. We then went home and made Belgian waffles and John and Becky came over.

On Memorial Day, we started with a ward breakfast that the high priests were in charge of. I drafted John to help out. After breakfast, Mom and Becky drove to Utah.

After Mom and Becky left, John and I decided to go back over to where we ran the 5k on Saturday because there were lots of geocaches along the trail. We put our bikes in the truck and drove back to where we did the 5k run. We then rode to Almaden Lake Park and back looking for geocaches. We only found 3 out of 12 but we had a nice bike ride

After we got home we made lemon basil shrimp. John went out to get a lemon and brought in a huge lemon that was as big or bigger than the one we had last week.

Along with the shrimp in cream sauce over bow tie pasta, we had beats and also had beats and root beer floats for our beverage. It was a great end to a great weekend.

Gyoza Re-Run

Once Mom was back in town, we decided to have Mark, John and Becky over for Gyoza. I am getting better at making gyoza. They still taste good and they are even starting to look good.

These two plates were not all of them. We had more than we needed, so some of them are now frozen raw in gallon zip log baggies, ready for another dinner.