Morp

Every year at our high school they hold a "Morp" dance. That's "prom" backwards, and as you might imagine, it's sort of a backwards prom. It's held every year a couple weeks after prom, and it's everything prom isn't: it's girl-ask-guy, it's casual, and so on. This past Saturday (May 15th) was Morp, and from that comes one of my favorite photos ever!!! Above is a picture I took of their Morp group Saturday evening. They're all jumping, and isn't that just great?! Very fun pic!

The Morp theme this year was Cops & Robbers, and everyone in Brianna's 5-couple Morp group had custom shirts where the front said, "I used my one phone call on..." and on the back it had the name of their date. As you can see in the picture above, each couple had matching color shirts, and they were really cute. Here to the right is a silly pose of Brianna and her date. We had a lot of fun taking pictures at our neighborhood "DeMeyer Park."

In addition to the traditional pre-dance dinner and the dance, the school events here in Boise are all-day affairs with a daytime activity, as well. For Brianna's group's daytime activity, they did a Jell-O fight. Messy!!! The all hosed off in our driveway after that was over.

Enjoy these couple of pics, and you can see a lot more of their various poses. Posing in trees, laying down on the ground with their heads together, all sitting on a slide, and many more (34 to be exact), here on Flickr, or here on Facebook.

Crazy Spring Weather

Spring weather in Boise has really been weird. For example, we'll wake up and the skies are blue and bright, with temps in the mid-60s. But by afternoon, it's cloudy, temps in the high-30s, VERY windy (gusts up to 70mph this week), and we'll get hail storms, as you see in the two pics in this posting. Last night our overnight low was right at the freezing mark. On some days, we've wished that we didn't pack away all of our winter clothes! Many here feel that Boise weather should just pick a season and stick with it. Call me a weird sick freak (many do), but I actually kind of like the daily variety.

Today, we're actually supposed to see consistent, stable weather. Bummer! :-)

Back on the Pitch

Andrew's been back on the pitch again, playing Spring soccer. He plays in a coed recreational league, Merdian PAL, and has played with most of the same kids over the last few seasons. They have A LOT of fun together. In particular, he's been on the same team with a friend of his, Stuart Walton, and they are both powerful attackers. We've seen more assists/goals with those two than I think I've ever seen on the pitch. It's really fun to watch them.

Many people have commented on this, but Andrew makes some GREAT faces when he's playing soccer. This first one here has got to be my new favorite photo of Andrew. :-)

This one on the left here is another pretty good one. Andrew stole the ball from this kid on this play, too, so it was pretty fun.Yellow cleats may be snazzy, but they can't keep you from losing the ball to Andrew!!! But isn't that a great face Andrew is making???

At the game yesterday, there was an instance when Andrew along with a defender and one of his other teammates had a NASTY collision. It was like one of those cartoon sequences when a character gets clotheslined. It was like Andrew got clocked at chest level, flew up in the air, and came down on the pitch HARD!!! I was standing very close to there taking pictures, but Michelle said that they could hear him hit the ground, a good 70 feet away. We were ALL absolutely shocked when he just popped right back up and kept playing. He honestly looked a little pale and staggered rather than ran, but he got up. He actually THOUGHT about going back down and we all sort of expected him to, but he kept on going. He's still pretty sore from that collision today. Still... our only regret is that I didn't get any photos of it! :-)

Sadly enough, though, they lost their game yesterday, 6-5, and it was their first loss of the season. But here is a picture of Andrew taking a shot from the edge of the penalty box in yesterday's game. Did it go in??? He's scored plenty this season, but I'll just let my reader guess here as to whether or not it went in. :-)

I am posting all the pics from this season on our Flickr site linked here. There are 63 photos uploaded there to date.

My Son Has a Cooler Job Than I Do

Oh wait a minute... I actually don't have a job right now. I guess the point is still valid, though: Christopher's job is still cooler than any job I've ever had. This weekend at his National Guard drill, he was out on the aircraft firing range. He does avionics and weapons systems repair and maintenance on the Apache helicopters, and this weekend the birds were out on the range practicing. The birds would come in, and then he and his team would run out, reload the 30mm cannons (them are BIG rounds!!!), and the birds would take off again. As you can tell from this picture here, he came in a bit dirty!

Below you can see a video of one of the birds coming in. Check out the amazing dust cloud that it kicks up. At a point where the video becomes invisible, a rock flew up, hit the phone and closed it. Yikes. Christopher loves his job; just like Boy Scouts but with cooler toys! :-)