Water skiing

Some friends of ours have a boat and took our family out water skiing. For those not into water skiing but who are country music fans, this trip might be of interest because we passed by Alan Jackson's home a few times as well as his luxury yacht the Lady J. (This is the house in the background of the first picture.)
Everybody had a good time in the boat, even if ME and AM didn't try to ski. JA got in the water to try, but got too scared.

Video coverage and commentary were provided by AM. (Unfortunately I have been trying for the past week to load up these files and they just don't seem to load even though they are under the limit, so all I can post are a few extracted still frames)






JP making his first attempts at waterskiing. He gave it several tries and almost got up once.







SD trying to remember how to ski. This first run was fun if quite shaky, but unfortunately a later run resulted in pulling his hamstring muscle again for about the sixth time in three months. Old and broken before 40?






The mermaid HT.







The pro LT shows how it should be done.

Preschooler Graffitti

Our front walk was swarmed by preschoolers practicing their writing (or was it their tagging?) skills. AM is in a preschool co-op where each mom takes a week and teaches the preschool on those days. You can see in the graffiti that a certain girl has reach an important milestone.

visit to NIH

Spent what turned out to be a really exciting and invigorating two days at NIH mingling with other "innovative" scientists.

The NIH director gave a very interesting speech outlining what he thought the future of science would be and the best way to move forward, although he didn't mention that he was going to step down as the director until this morning in an e-mail.

Heard a lot of very interesting talks including one on limiting the cognitive problems associated with seizure disorders (had a good talk with the speaker Frances Jensen afterwards), one on the underlying causes in the surge of autism cases (not vaccines, partly looks to be the older age of parents at time of conception), using light to control mouse movements, and many others, plus had good talks with most of the others.

After the symposium, I met up with NG and we had a nice Thai dinner and he gave me a ride to the airport. That was great and next year I will be sure to set aside time to be able to go up to Pennsylvania.

11-04-08

HO
PE

is on the way...

I hope.

I scream for ice cream

This is JP blogging. On Saturday our stake had a deacons/beehives activity at our ward building. The theme was summer Olympics. Some the events were water balloon volleyball and the jelly-bean shot-put. But my personal favorite was the ice cream high jump. For all of you who don't know the rules, here's the deal. A team member will lay down on the ground next to a ladder, with a ice cream cone in their mouth. The rest of the team take turns dropping a scoop of chocolate ice cream from one of the ladder rungs. The team that gets the most scoops in wins. I was the team member on the ground with a cone in my mouth. Let's just say my teammates weren't the most accurate. I got ice cream all over my face and shirt. Boy was it sticky. One of the young men leaders took some pictures of me. It wasn't pretty. But it was all in good fun. And it was fun. I made new friends and met new people.

TN State Fair

The pumpkin weighs 1,089 lbs. WOW!!!
















JA and EM enjoy petting the bunnies.



EM, JA and AM went to the State Fair. Kids in school here get a free day pass to the State Fair. The girls fell in love with all the rabbits. They came in different sizes, color and shapes. Now the girls want to have a rabbit as a pet. AM would not mind having some chickens. We were amazed with all the sizes of the watermelons and pumpkins. EM and JA got the chance to ride one of the rides. AM is afraid of all the rides.









JA in the caterpillar ride and EM in the jeep ride. Looking at them made AM very dizzy.

Labor Day BBQ

For Labor Day, we hosted our usual BBQ at our house. We tried to make this a more intimate affair by inviting fewer families than normal, so that everyone could be included in the same conversation streams. (An experiment in the social sciences if you will.) Whether this actually happened or not is not so clear, but we certainly had a good time and hope everyone who came did as well.

"Bend It Like Becham"

JA's teammates the "DYNAMITES"

Our league sure makes the little kids uniform huge......but EM sure looks so CUTE!!!!

EM's teammates and Coach.

EM and JA had their first soccer game on September 6. EM team's name is "Bluebird" and JA team's name is "Dynamite". EM's team need more practice running towards the soccer ball. After one kick they all pretty much stand still and wait for their coach to tell them to follow the ball, plus some of EM's teammates kick the ball to their own goal. But all and all the Bluebirds had a wonderful day playing soccer. JA's team won their first game, but JA got hit really hard on her right head with the soccer ball, so she had to sit on the bench. Luckily there were only 5 minutes left before the game ended.