Hope's first piano recital

Hope performed in her first piano recital today. Her piano teacher had close to fifty of her students perform in just under two hours. I admit to a small bias, but I, and expect everyone else in attendance, enjoyed Hope's performance the most! Hope played "The Merry Bobolink" by C. W. Krogmann, adapted by Olive Bentley.

Spring Break 2010

While Ben was busy mastering economic theory at the University of Oregon, Hope, Becky and John escaped to Monterey for a couple of days during Hope's spring break. After a quick visit to the San Juan Bautista Mission, Hope and Becky went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium while John headed out on a bike ride along the coast. With a blue sky and crashing, high surf, it was hard to imagine a more beautiful location. We met a few hours later for our afternoon snack - ice cream at Ghirardelli's. We all went for a short bike ride, and took a few minutes to throw around a football at a local park, followed by a wonderfully relaxing visit to the hot tub at our hotel. The next day, John and Hope returned to the Aquarium, where Hope showed great patience while John gave his camera a good workout. A picnic lunch on the beach and a brief visit to Point Lobos rounded out the day!

Business in Korea

I was able to spend a week in January working in Seoul, South Korea. Both the work and the sightseeing were great, and I'd love to go back. I ate lots of interesting foods (who knew there were so many forms of kimchee?), and even got to play some good competitive ping-pong for a couple of hours.

Family Tree Photo Project

Hope found this Family Tree project in "The Friend" magazine that she wanted to do. We found and printed the template from the online version of the magazine, and Hope happily wrote in the names of her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. I took it a step further and did the project in Photoshop, with everyone's photo, then printed and laminated the result. It was a great project!

Aspen Grove in Utah and Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite

I'm finally getting around to posting these photos from our wonderful week in Aspen Grove, and from my 3 days of backpacking and hiking around Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite.

Ben to University of Oregon

Yesterday we dropped Ben off at the University of Oregon (in Eugene). I can't believe my son is now a college man!
He got off to an memorable start. There were two campus-wide power outages his first evening. Then, at 11 pm when he was ready to go to bed, he found that his dorm room key wouldn't work. A maintenance man showed up about 1 am with some lock lubricant that solved the problem. This morning Ben got up at 8 am to hit the gym - only to find out that they don't open until 10 am (but will be 8am once school starts next week). So he tried the track - but they were closed, too. Good luck, Ben!

Lassen Volcanic National Park

I'm a little slow publishing some of my summer adventures. This was my trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park. I hiked up Brokeoff Mountain and Lassen Peak, and enjoyed a 3-day, 2-night backpack trip to a series of lakes. Lassen is no Yellowstone or Yosemite, but is a nice place nonetheless, with some beautiful views of more mountain ridges than I've ever seen.

I've now visited all of the national parks in California (if you consider the Channel Islands visitor center as actually a part of that park)!