In looking at our camera, I found some old videos that never got posted. The kids love watching themselves in these videos, but the videos are definitely ‘B’ grade, both for quality and content. Reality Church Christmas Program 2007. Family Card Games: After Max watched this video, he explained that I had laughed ‘too loud’ and that ‘was teasing’ and he didn’t like it. So, next time I use strategy against him while playing cards, I will laugh quieter.

We’re in quite a winter storm this week. Yesterday we had 2 hours of solid lightning and booming thunder. Today, there was a 20 minute set of fiercely heavy rain, followed by 5 solid minutes of HAIL. Not a bit here and there, but basically a crazy hail dumping. Max thought it was great fun. 🙂

This was just so darn pretty I had to put it up for posterity. 🙂

On New Year’s Day, 2008, we took some time to do some ‘treasure’ hunting. The D’Elia family turned us on to the fun of GeoCaching. [Geocaching is an activity where someone (the hider) hides something (usually in tupperware) and publishes the latitude and longitude to a website. The seekers then get the coordinates off the website and use a GPS device to find the cache. Most caches consist of a small number of trinkets and a log to sign.] Since we are trying to keep up with the D’Elias, we had to get in on the act and we received a GPS device from my parents for Christmas. I downloaded 5-6 geocaches from the website (there are ~25 within 5 miles of our home [N 34 23.889 W 119 31.257] in Carpinteria) and we went exploring. The first one we looked for sounded very easy to find, and so I had hope that we would start off on a high note. I let Max hold the device and keep us going in the right direction, he liked following the little black arrow. The device has about a 13′ accuracy so we began looking around for likely hiding spots. I had to duck down to reach the container and Lucy came up behind me. When I pulled up the container, I popped her in the nose with my elbow and gave her a bloody nose that streamed down her face. She immediately wiped her nose with her sleeve and red streaks appeared on her cheeks. Toby picked her up and got blood all over the front of her shirt. Luckily we had a Kleenex and within a few minutes the blood stopped. Lucy did not like having the tissue plug in her nostril. I took Lucy back to the car and Toby signed the log of our first geocache and re-hid it for the next person to find. Once Lucy had calmed down, we decided to try for another one on the other side of town. This cache was not so specific, so we spent about 5-10 minutes hunting in the grass within our 13′ radius. We finally found it and everyone had a good time! We will definitely become serious geocache-ers in the future. It is a great family activity.

Found It

Beautiful Geocachers

Update : I looked at the entry for ‘Quiet Marsh’ and it is very specific, I just missed the details.