MUST...DESTROY...BOX!!  He's really friendly, I promise.

Sara is the best!  This one's mine, and I'm not sharing!

Tadaa!  We bought actual grown-up person furniture.

Memorial Day--when we celebrate our freedom, remember the fallen...and eat stuff.

A little disc golf with friends...

The mad scientist at work...

Marko's (early) B-day

He's (almost) seven!  We had to celebrate early 'cause he's off to the homeland in a couple days!

 

Who had the most fun here?

Sara's loot from BFF Shalen.  Happy late Easter?

While Sara and I were doing our spring cleaning, we encountered a ghost from Christmas past.  The Badnjak.  "Good morning and Happy Christmas Eve to you!"

There, you can't say you didn't learn something today.

Morning coffee on the porch together makes going to work kinda hard some days...

Beating the odds...

Pencil pushin'...

Annular Eclipse 2012, as viewed by your local super-dork.

I made a ghetto camera obscura with a drill and a piece of plywood.  It actually worked pretty well. See?

Here's a direct picture I took.  For those of you interested... I used a Canon 40D w/ 300mm lens, ISO 100, 1/8000, f34 + two out-of-phase polarizing filters.  If you look carefully, you can even see a sunspot.

An eclipse and an earthquake all in the same day.  What does it mean?

Fire. S'mores. Friends. Family. Lights. Beach. Graduating. All good things!

Smashball meets Over-the-line.  Can we patent this, or something?

Mark is a Graduate!

Mark, you are quite a bit taller than your professor.  Dunno if you had noticed or not.

Whew!  It feels good to be done, doesn't it?

Dad, being proud. --  Mom, trying not to cry?

Great job, Mark!  We're all proud of you!

Sara's Dad is in the hospital.

Still at it...

Who says writers don't get their hands dirty?

Diving in...

Are we in Vegas...again?  Honestly,  I have no idea why we end up here so many times.

Our room (New York New York) wasn't quite as cool as the last one we had in Vegas, but you can't win every time, right?  Anyway, since we were in Vegas, we decided to check a few things off the "To Do" list:

1.) Eat breakfast under a map.

2.) Oxidize some melanin next to a pool

3.) Wager successfully 

4.) Enjoy some fermented beverages under the watchful eyes of Nine Fine Irishmen

Tyra's Graduation!

There really isn't much traffic between San Diego and Las Vegas at 4am.  Just sayin'...

The UNLV Thomas & Mack Center is full of grads!

We found Tyra from waaaay up in the nose bleed section.  She looks happy to be here, and she should be!

A sea of graduates.

Congratulations Tyra!

Harold and Betty

"Do you guys mind if I, like, take one of the throw pillows?"

This morning was dark and dreary.  Dew was dripping off the house, and it was so foggy I could barely see across the street. And then this happened.  A few hundred feet up makes a BIG difference.

I'm guessing that at some point I will regret this.  But right now, this seems pretty awesome.

Seriously?  Again?

Guaranteed frustration free?  How do you test that, exactly?

San Jacinto and Miller Peaks

The first big hike of the season.  My dad and I made a great day out of it.  It took about 10 hours, but we bagged two peaks over 10,000 feet tall!  There was still a little snow here and there, but that didn't slow us down too much.  Post-holing builds character, right?  It did make some of the signs hard to read, though.

We left from Humber Park in Idyllwild, and marched through Wellman Divide.  It was remarkably people-free for a weekend!

Click for link to Panorama Viewer

We had great weather for hiking: cool, but sunny, with almost no wind.  A great day for a walkabout.

  That's my Dad.  He's 65 and still enjoys climbing trees, even at 10,300+' elevation.  Booya!

  Miller Peak (10,317') on the left and San Jacinto Peak (10,834') on the right.  Obviously, San Jacinto is a little more popular.  Moral of this story: no trail = no riff-raff.

This is actually the tallest, tippy-top of the mountain.  Kinda precarious, but you have to do it, right?

The gruesome details, as usual... click for bigger versions.