Brianna's "Smile" - An Original Score

Tonight was Centennial High School's talent show, and there were more than two dozen performances. Everything from clogging to a "Who's On First" comedy routine to singing - we were amazed by all of the talent at the school. At the piano, Brianna played and sang a song that she composed on her own, "Smile." She won second place overall in the competition, and we thought she did pretty well. Her performance is embedded below, and you can also click the link here.



The full-length video of the host's introduction, the song, and the judges comments is also linked here (but not embedded). 

She also accompanied another song there, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sung by her friend Danielle Després; Danielle also did a beautiful job and won an Honorable Mention. That video is also embedded below, and you can click the link here.

Beautiful Sunset/Rainbow

Yesterday was a different kind of day in Boise, at least as far as the weather is concerned. When we awoke, it was pretty clear and about 64; however, it got COOLER as the day went on as a storm rolled in. By afternoon it was cloudy with REALLY strong winds, and pollen was blowing everywhere (much to my allergies' dismays). Then by late afternoon, we had massive hail; the streets were white with chunks of ice everywhere, before it turned to rain. The boys and I took Shadow for a walk in the evening, and though it was cloudy, it was quite pretty out. Then after that walk, I was sitting at our dining room table working over a WiFi connection, and I saw this (this first photo here). The sky was almost dark, but the sun was hitting the top of a tree just visible through a round window in our entryway.

Brianna had gone outside to check it out further and she came dashing in, "Come check out this rainbow!!!" So we all ran outside to check it out.

Hmmm... you can't have pretty rainbows without rain - I suppose there's a life analogy there.

But I digress...

Indeed, the rainbow was pretty, but I was more blown away by the panoramic scene playing out over the top of our house. The sun was nearly set and the clouds had made the sky pretty dark, anyway. The first photo I snapped was one of birds flying probably a quarter-mile away. It was cool how the sunlight was reflecting off them.

Then I snapped four pics that I stitched together to become this panorama. I thought the way the sunlight was hitting the tops of the trees against the nearly-dark sky was really pretty. In the right one-third of the photo, you can see the rainbow, as well. Christopher might think that the coolest part of this picture is his new Acura Legend in the driveway. :-)

I've uploaded nine pics to both Facebook and Flickr, viewable via those respective links. Only via Flickr is it possible to see them in their original resolution (though it takes a few clicks).

Fun In Virginia

Michelle and I were able to attend Christopher's AIT graduation (as previously posted) this past week. Much of Christopher's time was spent doing outprocessing, etc., so Michelle and I had some time to kill while we were in town. We really enjoy spending time on the East Coast (and in the South), so enjoy the photos, like this one here on the right; it's so picturesque eastern seaboard!

We flew out there using my American Airline miles, and getting award tickets from Boise on AA partners is getting increasingly difficult. Therefore, we woke up at 4am Monday (3/29) and drove down to Salt Lake City to fly out from there. Nothing quite like driving 5.5 hours to then fly for 5.5 hours (in two flight segments). It works, though; we're getting used to that BOI-SLC drive.

On Tuesday, we had the opportunity to crisscross the state, driving three-and-a-half hours (each way) to visit a friend of Michelle's in Front Royal, VA, in the Shenandoah Valley. We spent a couple of hours with Lanette, one of Michelle's former missionary companions from Rouen, France. We had a very nice lunch and visit with she and her husband. We really enjoyed all the scenery on the drive up there. Pictured here is an example of the many farms we saw on the drive up there and back.

Christopher was done with his activities on base for the day on Tuesday, and we were able to pick him up for dinner. He took us to one of their favorite places to eat while he was on base, the Quaker Steak & Lube. Pretty yummy place! Then after dinner we went and flicked out. Saw the new Jennifer Aniston movie, Bounty Hunter. A chick-flick love story, but with the prerequisite number of explosions, etc. so that Christopher and I were not required to turn in our Man Cards. :-)

On Wednesday after Christopher's graduation, he had to finalize all of his outprocessing, and while he was doing that, Michelle and I went to check out their local and very exciting (note the sarcasm) Patrick Henry Mall. That entertained us for all of about three nanoseconds, and then we went to check out a local Civil War site, a place called Civil War Endview Plantation. It was actually a pretty cool place. Though the formal tours and the buildings there were closed, we were able to walk around the grounds, and it was easy to envision Civil War battles being fought on the fields of that plantation - in fact, they do war reenactments there.

After we dropped Christopher off at the airport Wednesday afternoon, Michelle and I went out for an anniversary dinner (our 22nd anniversary was five days earlier, on March 26th). We went to a GREAT restaurant right on the boardwalk at Virginia Beach, a seafood restaurant called "Watermans." And after dinner, a nice romantic walk along the beach, where we got to see the moon rise (and dang... I did not have my camera!).

Wednesday afternoon, too, I took a bunch of pictures down near Christopher's barracks on base. You can't see them in this shot here, but in front of their barracks are a lot of plastic alligators. Their unit name is the "Gators" so the alligators out front were appropriate.

Anyway... Michelle and I flew back to SLC starting early Thursday morning, and after arriving there early afternoon, made the drive back to Boise, arriving late Thursday evening. We had a GREAT time while away. To see all 64 photos and 1 video of our time in Virginia, including Christopher's graduation, you can check them out here on Flickr.

PFC Goodale Earns His Wings

Christopher had his U.S. Army AIT graduation ceremony on Wednesday of this week at Fort Eustis, Virginia. He was the Distinguished Honor Grad from his unit, meaning that he graduated at the top of his class. This was a 28-week training course that started immediately after his Basic Training graduation last September. He is now qualified to maintain and repair the avionics and weapons systems on Apache helicopters.

This first picture was after the ceremony, and as you can see, he has earned his first set of wings. No doubt Christopher will want to go on and earn more wings throughout his career!

Michelle and I were able to go back for the graduation (thank you AA miles!!!), and we were really glad that we had the chance to go back there and experience this with him. It was way fun to be there. We also had a chance to visit one of Michelle's former missionary companions, do a little bit of exploring of Virginia, and have a wonderful anniversary dinner while back there (albeit five days late). I'll do a separate posting on that later.

Christopher is now back home, and getting reactivated in his local Idaho National Guard unit. He still will have three more months of additional training in the (hopefully) near future, and he'll likely be enrolling for school at BSU soon, while continuing his Guard service.

Of course, before Christopher left for his Army training, he was always working on cars for friends/family/neighbors. Oh great... now he'll be working on their attack helicopters, too! :-)

There are 16 pictures that I took at the graduation ceremony; to see them all, please click here for Flickr, or here for Facebook.

Video of Christopher getting his wings.

Steelheads Hockey

As posted earlier, we went to the Steelheads hockey game here in Boise last night. Michelle stayed home to do homework, but grandma went to see/hear Brianna sing, then Brianna and grandma left. However Andrew, Mark, Steven and I stayed for the game. Before moving to Boise, we weren't in to hockey at all. But with each game we attend, the boys and I love it more and more. These games are so fun! And there's so much "culture" in hockey.

Oh... and a really cool part about the game is that when Michelle called to order extra tickets so the boys and I could go (they normally only comp us two tickets), the coordinator at the Steelheads told us how wonderful Brianna has been in singing at so many games, that he comp'd ALL of our (fifth row from the floor, down at one of the corners) tickets last night. Mark and Steven eating Dippin' Dots on the left here, by the way. Saweet!!! But back to the culture part...

For example, in just about every hockey game we've been to, there's a pretty serious fight that breaks out. Or... as it's often been said, "I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out." Some of these fights have been pretty vicious, and one we saw even left blood on the ice (yikes!). For the most part, the zebras (officials) just let the fights go on, until the players fall to the ice. It's only then that the zebras break them up. In last night's game, though, the big fight near the end was totally staged. I guess for a while the ECHL (the NHL's premier "AA" league, as they call it) became the WWE. It was still an entertaining fight, though. The crowds go crazy when a fight breaks out. And YES... of course I took pictures! :-)

Another interesting cultural point is the "hat trick." It's when a player scores three goals in a game. This pic on the left is of a shot on a breakaway - we scored. Anyway, I'm not sure why they call scoring three goals a "hat trick" - maybe somebody could look that up for me. Last night when one of the Steelheads players, John Swanson, scored his third goal, fans in the stands started throwing their hats on to the ice. Those hats are expensive!!! I don't know that I could sacrifice my hat like that!

We won the game versus the Victoria Salmon Kings, 5-0, and after every goal we scored, the normally nice, polite Boise crowd would shout out a nice little taunt: "He shoots! We score!! Hey goalie... YOU SUCK!!!" Naturally, I was appalled; what awful behavior! You can be sure that my boys and I participated in no such nonsense!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Oh... and at the Steelheads games, always in the third quarter they play this one song over the loudspeakers, and the whole crowd does this hand-bouncing movement. I'm not sure what that's all about. If you can figure it out from the video embedded below, please let me know!

I hope you've enjoyed the pics as much as we enjoyed the game. To see the 32 pics/videos posted, please check my Flickr page here.

Oh Canada Can You See

No. Canada is not apparently needing glasses; I just mixed the two national anthems together in the blog entry title here. Oh great... I've probably just offended both Canadians and Americans! Oh well.

Last night my daughter Brianna and her friend Danielle Després sang to kick off last night's ECHL hockey game between the Idaho Steelheads (affiliate of the NHL's Dallas Stars) and the visiting Victoria Salmon Kings (affiliate of the NHL's Vancouver Canucks). Somebody help me out here... what, exactly, is a Canuck??? But I digress...

That's "Victoria" by the way, as in British Columbia. Therefore, they first sang the Canadian national anthem, and then the U.S. national anthem. They've done this a couple times before, and it's always fun. I wonder how many people from the U.S. have the Canadian national anthem memorized. Oh well... at least two in Boise do! :-)

Enjoy the videos embedded below. Just for your reference, Brianna is singing the soprano part. It's not in every performance that Brianna sings that really high note at the end, but she decided to last night. It was funny... where I was standing filming, everybody in the stands was facing ME. OK... so they weren't facing me; they were facing the U.S. and Canadian flags behind me. :-)  When Brianna went up to that high note, though, about a third of the people I could see turned and looked at Brianna with an expression like, "Where did that come from?!"

Oh... and who is the guy that shouts after they sing, "I love you Brianna!!!"??? I'm gonna kill 'im! Oh wait a minute... that was ME! :-)

These still shots, by the way, were taken by Mark while I was filming with the other camera. Mark's getting pretty good with a camera!


Brianna and Danielle singing "Oh Canada"


Brianna and Danielle singing "The Star Spangled Banner"

Mark's 7th Grade Band Concert

This past Monday night (March 22, 2010) was Lowell Scott Middle School's 7th and 8th grade band concert. Lowell Scott's 7th grade band is actually bigger than their 8th grade band, and they've made a ton of improvement over the year - they sound pretty good!!! Mark played in the concert that night, despite having a nasty ear infection. His ear is totally plugged up and painful, but he played his trumpet with style! :-)

Lowell Scott has recently started doing all of their concerts at Centennial High School's new Performing Arts Center, and it's SUCH a better venue than the old middle school gym! We really enjoy the concerts.

The 7th grade band played three songs at the concert, which they will also play again at the district's Spring Festival during school hours tomorrow. Wish them luck!

The videos are embedded from YouTube, below. And a great big THANK YOU to their great director, Sarah Frazier. Enjoy.


"Winchester March" by John Edmondson


"Country Wildflowers" by Larry Daehn


"Beyond the Seven Hills" by Michael Sweeney

A Grinding Experience

For those of you whom have been following Andrew's Eagle Scout project (previous posting from October 2009 here), we had another Eagle Scout project work session yesterday. Andrew has sold, built, and installed four benches at Lake Lowell out in Nampa. The day we went to install them last Fall, we were told that the arms on the benches did not meet ADA requirements. So we installed the benches, but removed the arms so that we could take them and make them ADA-compliant. The problem was that they were too wide. They were very VERY solid and could support an elephant standing on them, but they were too wide. So we had to make them narrower.

That wasn't so easy, because these arms were secured to the benches with custom-made cast iron brackets. We literally had to have those cut in half lengthwise - no small task when it comes to cast iron! We got those back, and of course they now had VERY rough edges. So we had a bunch of guys come over from church and from scouts to use grinders to smooth these down and to repaint them (before and after shots on the right).

As you can see from this pic here, the penalty for NOT working hard enough on the project was pretty high. No... kidding... they're just playing around. Really. As you can see, they have a lot of fun at these Eagle Scout projects. Nothing beats Scott Ableman's air guitar poses, though!

For all 40 pics from yesterday, you can go here on Flickr.

BBQ Season is Back

Ahhh... thank goodness for Spring temps and beautiful weather! Though I'm sad we had a "warm" winter and very little snow this year, I don't miss BBQ'ing in January, dressed to the gills (the rumor is true - I have gills) in heavy clothing trying to keep warm while BBQ'ing in temps in the teens. These California natives BBQ in Boise year-round, but it was nice to BBQ yesterday in temps near 60! And thank goodness for frozen steaks out in the freezer, from when we bought that near-side-of-cow several months back. :-)  In the pic here, do Andrew and Mark look like they're happy they're gonna get a steak dinner, or what?! In steak land, there's well-done, medium-well, medium, medium-rare, rare, and "with some tender loving care the cow would recover." Our propane tank ran out of fuel midway during the BBQ, and our backup tank was also empty, as well, so the thicker of these steaks were the TLC-recovery variety - Andrew and Mark loved it!

Another year-round activity around here is Rock Band on Wii. You see Andrew, Mark and Steven jamming here. Apparently, Steven is going to be a guitar-smasher, and Andrew will make silly faces while drumming!

Good times!

Wheeler Family Reunion 2004

That's right: I'm getting caught up to 2004. :-)

We had a VERY fun Wheeler Family Reunion in Wyoming in July 2004 and I'm finally getting around to putting up the pics from that great event.

Of course we ate, we played games, we had a program, we sang, we sat around and talked... We really had a GREAT time!!!

One of my favorite parts of the program was when Mike and Jennifer Dillon and their kids "dressed up" (or did they???) and performed, "I Am My Own Grandpa." Enjoy the photo here on the left, plus the short snippet I caught on my digital camera, below. Michelle actually recorded the ENTIRE song on our VHS-C camcorder, so the whole thing exists on magnetic tape. Does anybody have the equipment for us to convert that to digital format? It would be AWESOME to have up on YouTube! :-)

I have posted 150 photos and videos online; the photos can be found here on Facebook, and all can be found here on Flickr. Enjoy.

Brianna Singing National Anthem

Brianna and her friend Danielle continue to make the circuit singing the National Anthem at our local sporting events. They regularly sing at BSU games, Idaho Steelheads (ECHL affiliate of the NHL's Dallas Stars team) games, Boise Burn (Arena Football League) games, and so on. Normally they sing it as a duet, but back on January 13th, Dani was unavailable and Brianna sang it as a solo. They sang it as a duet this past Wednesday (March 3rd), but that was the last good thing that happened that night. After they sang, the Steelheads lost 3-1 to the Bakersfield Condors, and I was rear-ended on the way home from the game. You'll see both the solo video and the duet video embedded below.

The next time they're scheduled to sing is on Wednesday, March 24th, when the Steelheads play the visiting Victoria Salmon Kings. That's right... from Canada! So Brianna and Dani will be singing both the U.S. and Canadian national anthems that night. Buy your tickets now! :-)

National History Day

Today was the Treasure Valley regional prelims for the middle school "National History Day" competition. Each year, middle school students have the chance to write an essay, build a website, or prepare a documentary honoring some great event in history. This year's theme was Innovation and how it impacted history, and Mark did a video documentary on the evolution of the transistor. The transistor certainly is something that people just take advantage of today, and don't even realize how it impacts their lives. Mark's video documentary is embedded below, and I particularly like the part that says that if cell phones used vacuum tubes a cell phone today would be ten-and-a-half feet tall. :-)  Watch and enjoy.

3-Car Mix-It-Up

This past Wednesday night (March 3rd), my Acura MDX decided to put its manliness on display and mix it up with two other cars. My car won, but at a bit of my expense. I was sitting at the red light in the left-hand turn lane on Chinden, waiting to turn left on to Five Mile, when I heard a horrific BANG!!! And literally in the middle of the thought, "What the heck was that???" there was a second BANG, and my MDX jerked violently forward and upward.

A car two cars behind me, which I'm guessing was doing about 45mph, hit the car immediately behind me, and that car ricocheted in to me. The first car was an older-model minivan, I think something like a Dodge Caravan. The second car was an older-model sedan, I think something like a Honda Accord. The first car was about two feet shorter, its front end all smashed in and steam flowing from the smashed radiator. The poor car in the middle was significantly shorter on both ends, totally sandwiched. Because they were both older-model cars, my guess is that the insurance company will total both vehicles.

My back bumper was kind of scratched and dented, but nothing awful. Just enough so that the texturing cannot be fixed, and they'll replace the entire bumper and bumper insert (more of a dent there). But as you can see from this picture on the right, my dual exhaust was definitely messed up. The muffler on the right has been pushed in by about six inches. That in turn bent all the exhaust piping, normally shug and cozy up in the chassis, so that it dropped and wasn't too far away from the ground (see picture below). Fortunately, the driver who caused the whole thing is taking responsibility for it, and his insurance company is being great. They got my car in for repair early Thursday and it should be fixed by Monday afternoon. They've arranged for a rental in the meantime, and all is well there. :-)

Fortunately, at the time of the accident, we all appeared to be fine. The guy who caused it was 18, the guy in the middle car was 17, and those young whipper-snappers are probably still OK (I have not spoken to either of them). But I'm sort of a wreck. Maybe it's because my car didn't give at all (I still can't believe how little damage it sustained!), but I've got whiplash really bad, with my neck and back really aching, and that in turn giving me a wicked headache. I've spent most of the last three days in bed with a heating pad and/or ice.

We've got a chiropractor that we like, and on Friday I finally gave up and went to see him. Hopefully he'll be able to help me recover a bit more quickly, and I can get back to normal. So that being taken care of, now I just hope that the auto body shop doesn't actually CLEAN my car when they fix it. As you can tell, I'm undergoing a bit of a scientific dirt test with my MDX.  :-)

Klondike

I wrote about Special Olympics at Bogus Basin and I also wrote about the Sweethearts dance. But... I had not yet written about the other big event this past weekend: Klondike!!! It's where many of the Boy Scouts in this area do a big snow camp and "Klondike Derby," where more than 600 scouts camp out overnight in tents or in hand-dug snow caves, and they have all kinds of activities up there. It's a HUGE event each year, and the boys love it!!! Mark (pictured at left, kneeling just to the right of their troop's sled) went to that this year, and for about the first two hours after he got home Saturday evening, he would NOT stop talking about it; he was so excited. Then tiredness overwhelmed him and he fell asleep on the couch! :-)

I did not go up there, nor did Mark have a camera, so we've got to rely on the blog postings of others to report on the event. Our Boy Scout troop's scoutmaster's wife posted an entry on her blog, so you can check that out here.

Mark as a Guinea Pig???

She has posted three pictures up on her blog, including this at the right. In it, Mark is walking in a snowfield lined with sticks, all alone, while the other members of his scout troop look on in angst, like the expect it at any moment to go crashing through ice or something. Hmmm... I'll have to ask about this one. Was Mark a guinea pig???

Sweethearts Dance

Yesterday was our high school's "Sweethearts" girl-ask-guy dance. Brianna went with Scott Briggs and they had a great time. Brianna chose this pic on the right as her new Facebook profile picture, so I suppose it's OK to put here on the blog. :-)

Though we didn't experience this when we lived in California, here in Boise the high school dances are day-long activities, with a daytime activity in addition to dinner and the dance in the evening. For their daytime activity, the group they went with had "paint wars" where the loaded squirt guns with paint and had battle. I don't have any pics of that, but Brianna does, and I'm sure she'll post them on Facebook later.

Andrew and I were up at Bogus Basin yesterday afternoon, but Michelle took a bunch of pictures for Sweethearts yesterday afternoon. Personally, I think this one here on the left of Brianna and Scott is really cute.

Cutest of all, though, is the pic I've posted below. The girls in the group posed for a silly shot, and WHO KNEW that my beautiful daughter could make such a silly face???!!! :-)

For all the Sweethearts pics, you can see them here on Facebook.

Lovely expression, Brianna... lovely!!!

A Day at Bogus Basin

Today we had a really great day up at Bogus Basin, our local ski resort. Michelle, Andrew, Steven, and my mother-in-law Nancy and I volunteered at the regional Special Olympics Nordic events up there this morning, sort of in honor of Michelle's brother Michael and his love of Special Olympics. Our family worked at the main staging area, with Michelle leading that area, in which she did a great job! We were responsible for getting the athletes from the lodge area down to the next staging area and the starting lines. At the right here is Michelle with one of the athletes.

Since moving to Boise, where there is a much smaller pool of volunteers to draw from, we've had quite a few more opportunities to help with Special Olympics than we did down in Southern California. Justin and Christopher have both been coaches for Special Olympics; I think some of the best memories Justin will ever have is getting to run alongside a blind athlete to "show" him the way. No doubt Justin and Christopher would have enjoyed being there with us today.

As you can see in this panoramic shot on the left, it was an absolutely gorgeous day up there. If you click on that photo to see it enlarged, you'll notice Andrew in the lower right hand corner. And being such a gorgeous day, this afternoon Andrew and I stayed up there to snowboard and ski. Andrew has become a really good skier, and especially with my bad wheel, he would normally blow me away on skis, and I would have rarely if ever seen him. But for the first time in about four years, he decided he wanted to try snowboarding again today. That was REALLY cool for dear ol' Dad here, because with Andrew on a snowboard, I could keep up with him. We got to spend the whole afternoon together, and I don't know that Andrew will ever know how special that was to me!

Andrew did pretty well on the snowboard, though - I think better than he expected. I was able to ski near him and take quite a few videos - that was fun! Below is one of those videos. He and I are talking to each other on this run, so turn the volume up when you take a look at this. He does pretty well right up until the end, when he eats it. Though he said it was harder than skiing (of which I have no doubt), he said it was more fun, and that he'll be doing a lot more boarding from now on. Here's the video:



You'll find all 27 pics and 6 videos from the day on our Flickr site here. The pics can also be found on my Facebook account here. Meanwhile, enjoy some more pics below.

We had to be up there by 8am this morning, so we got to see the sun come up while there; it was really quite pretty.

Michelle and Nancy with Sheri (sp?) one of the organizers of the event.

Steven playing in the snow.

Michelle organizing the troops.

Andrew and I are going down one of the CAT trails at Bogus (Andrew is in front of me, at the bottom of the pic).

Virginia, Days 2-3

After spending the day in Colonial Williamsburg last Friday, we drove out to Lynchburg, Virginia, about 150 miles inland. We stayed overnight there, then in the morning visited Appomattix. This is where the last of the Civil War battles was fought, and indeed where the South surrendered and the war ended (in this court house, pictured at left). The community there has been restored nicely to 1860s condition. We wish Justin could have been with us; he would have loved it, and he probably could have told us a few stories.

While driving around in central Virginia, we were surprised at the lack of big roads there. It seems everywhere we had to go, there were just two-lane undivided highways - sort of tough to drive. It's no wonder they had such a hard time moving troops around in the Civil War! :-)

After Appomattix, we took several of these quaint roads to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson's mansion and property. Pictured here are Christopher and Mom behind the mansion. Way impressive house and furnishings - it's not tough to figure out how he died with so much debt! Thomas Jefferson penned our nation's Declaration of Independence and was the Minister of France for five years, but what's amazing is that his headstone doesn't list that he was POTUS (President Of The United States)!

After Montpelier, we drove on to Montpilier to see James Madison's mansion and property. Though James Madison was also POTUS and was known for such, he perhaps is best-known for authoring our great Constitution. 4,440 words (man... I've seen IP licensing agreements twice that long!!!) that are incredibly inspired - we ignore them at our nation's peril.

Whew!!! I almost waxed political in that last paragraph; I'll do my best to keep neutral here. :-)

Digression: They say that Thomas Jefferson wasn't a good speaker because he had a speech impediment, though he obviously was a very gifted writer. I like two quotes attributed to him, the first being "Science is my passion; politics is my duty." He also said, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing." Hopefully we'll see that in the Massachusetts Senate election today, with the electorate realizing the HOPE was merely HYPE. Uh oh... I waxed political again!

To the left here is Madison's house - it was nice but far less ornate than the Jefferson mansion. It's tough to believe that little 5-feet-4-inch, less-than-100-pounds Madison was the father of our Constitution. I think in today's TV and internet-world, the U.S. would have a hard time electing such a little guy. James Madison had a very successful entrepreneurial life; it's too bad he had family that squandered his fortune away, leaving good ol' Dolly Madison to die a pauper.

There are also a couple of quotes from Madison that I like. He said that under the new Constitution, the nation's powers would be "derived from the superior power of the people" (really trying hard here not to make a political comment). He also said, during the War of 1812, "I flung forward the flag of the country, sure that the people would press onward and defend it."

Perhaps you can tell here that during our tour of some of Virginia's historical spots I was way impressed with our Founding Fathers and what they accomplished, as well as for most of the values that they held.

Right up there with that was the greatness of George Washington. After staying in Fredericksburg, VA Saturday night, we went on to Mt. Vernon Sunday morning to see Washington's home and grounds. Though the weather thus far had been great, Sunday it was VERY rainy, and it made it tough to see things. In the pic here on the right, you can even see rain drops falling in front of the rain-soaked "Bowling Green" in front of the mansion. I hear that the view from the back of the mansion, overlooking the Potomac River and Maryland beyond, is really spectacular. Unfortunately, the weather was so poor that we couldn't see it.

OK... continuing with my trend of listing quotes by these great Founding Fathers, I do like how George Washington was offered the position of "King" and how he promptly refused that, saying that power should be in the hands of the people. His quote here is awesome: "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is a force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."

Wowzers!!! Today's politicians please take note! Anyway... pictured here at the left is one of the original trees at Mt. Vernon - more than 300 years old!!! My children would probably tell you that I'm about the same age! Again to check out all the pics (more than 60) from the trip, please click here for Facebook, or here for Flickr.

Though I didn't get any pictures of this last part, I honestly believe it was the best part of the trip. Michelle, Christopher and I spent Sunday afternoon and evening with my cousin Steve Detton and his family at their house in Springfield. My cousin Matt Jensen and his wife Melinda also joined us there, and we really had a great time!!! Shelley made a delicious pasta dinner, and despite what she might tell you the cookies she baked were also awesome. We really enjoyed hanging out with family back there, and hope we get an opportunity to do so again in the near future!!!

Colonial Williamsburg

After getting in to Virginia around midnight Thursday night, we picked Christopher up from Ft. Eustis Friday morning and spent most of the day in Colonial Williamsburg (see pic at right). What a totally awesome place. In most of the major sites there, they have guides dressed in period costumes, and they tell stories, relate history, and answer questions. They were all very knowledgeable and entertaining - it was great fun!

After Colonial Williamsburg, we drove over to the "Presidential Park" there where they literally have like 20-foot busts of each of the Presidents. It was closed (what's with the historical places closing at 4:30pm?!); however, and we could only get glimpses from outside. The place looks cool, though!

Then last night we drove to Lynchburg, VA and we'll check out some historical sites around here and as we drive northeast from here on our way to northern Virginia. What a great trip, and it's so fun to be with Christopher!!! Oh... just in case you were interested, to the left here is a picture of Christopher's barracks - this is where Christopher lives.

To see all 40 pics I've posted from yesterday, please click here for Facebook, or here for Flickr. I haven't added descriptions to all the pics yet (sorry I'm such a slacker!!!), but there are more descriptions on the Facebook album.