We played with Kahlan in the snow on Saturday in our backyard. She had a blast throwing the snow and sledding on our little hill. We even made two snowmen!
We completed our California adventure today after a long drive across a cold desert. We had a great time visiting family at McAlister-fest in Fresno. We enjoyed a quick visit to Richmond and relished some delicious Cheeseboard pizza! It was fun to finally meet Milo and join in the birthday fun! Our drive was a success so we anticipate future drives out.
It was too perfect a day to pass up another bike ride. Sarah, Kahlan and I set out on the Legacy trail again. It was sunny and cool out. Kahlan sported her pink shades.
After four years, Sarah and I decided it was time to conquer Mt. Timpanogos again. It was a tough hike but I think we did pretty good. The weather was perfect and we had most of the trail to ourselves with the exception of some mountain goats.
We headed out to Vernal Utah this weekend with Sarah's family. It's about a 3.5 hour drive to the south east of us through some pretty country. We enjoyed a visit to the Dinosaur National Monument to see a fossil quarry. We went on a hike and enjoyed a couple picnics. The kids had fun swimming at the hotel. On Saturday we went to the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum . We saw one of these on our trip and Kahlan quickly identified it as a lion. :)
Kahlan has become our little helper. She likes to help fold cloths, vacuum, garden and do dishes. We picked some peas from the garden this week and she helped de-pod the peas. She's going to be asking for an allowance pretty soon I'm sure. :)
We had a couple of mud swallows move into our carport this summer. 5 little heads popped up last month and gave us angry looks for a couple of weeks. The parents threatened us for a while whenever we came outside but decided we weren't enemies once we rescued one of the babies when it fell out of the nest.
It was a relatively cool Saturday for July here so we went for another bike ride on the legacy trail. There were surprisingly few people on the trail and we had a good ride pulling Kahlan along. Here are some recent pics...
We finally made it to Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. We'd been delayed by a very rainy spring. It was a hot time of year to go but we still enjoyed visiting this park for the first time. Capitol Reef is located in between Arches and Zion National Parks. It took us about 4 hours to drive there through some pretty country. We called it a 'mini Zions park' because it was a lot less crowded. There were probably 10 times less people there than at Zions or Arches. So we liked that and enjoyed hiking on practically empty trails. One unique thing about the park is that they grow fruit trees in the middle of it. You can pick the fruit for free to eat and they have a shop that sells fresh fruit pies. So we enjoyed a few pies!
We had a fun trip visiting the family in California. We enjoyed staying at the Russian River for a few days, visiting Turlock and Ripon, and taking Kahlan to the Oakland zoo. On the way back from Ripon Kahlan practiced her ABC's in the car.
We've been doing more Blender lately and have completed some more projects. Our project goal was to model an existing object with exactness and precision. Here are the results. Sarah modeled some of Kahlan's mega-blocks in the form of a dog. It came out really cool looking! I made a replica of our record player. I had to simplify it a bit. I created a short animation too just for fun :)
We've moved our family blog to Blogger ! I've spent the last few days migrating it over from our self-hosted WordPress site. Why? Security WordPress sites have lots of vulnerabilities if you are not super careful. Our site had been hacked! Ease of maintenance We don't need to have a dedicated up-to-date server running all the time. Speed Our internet service isn't designed to host content so our site was really slow. Google has amazing bandwidth. Free Blogger is completely free and has no ads. You get up to 15 gigs of space which is quite generous and will likely grow in the coming years. Please bookmark our new site and enjoy!
Sarah's family put on an Easter egg hunt for the kids yesterday. Kahlan had fun outside finding eggs with her cousins. She also found many rocks and dandelions. :)
We went on our first bike ride of the year today. We took Kahlan out to the Legacy trail which is just a few miles from our house. It was a gorgeous day. Kahlan saw horses, goats and a cow. We rode through several swampy areas with thousands of croaking frogs. Kahlan was mostly interested in collecting rocks.
Sarah and I have been having more fun with Blender. For our latest projects we did some architectural modeling. We made short videos to show off our work with music! Sarah created a sweet castle tower with a spiral staircase. Check it out! I modeled the naive of a cathedral. I took advantage of a lot of symmetry. I think it's a good start.