Swimming Lessons

During the summer I have the boys take swimming lessons. They just finish up their first session. So here are some pictures I took of them at their lessons. So you know which boy is which. Ryan has the orange swim shirt on and is with his teacher. Kyle is working on learning his crawl stroke. Tylor is learning the breast stroke and swimming out to his teacher.

Goodbye to Uncle Arlie

We were very grateful to have had the opportunity to have spent one last day with Uncle Arlie before he passed away. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the situation Arlie was Carmen’s younger sister Andrea’s husband. They’ve been married about eight years. Arlie was one of the “fun” uncles for our boys –mostly because of his fun loving personality but the motor cross track in his back yard and quads to take the boys around on didn’t make them like him less. His personality made him everybody’s friend, needless to say we will miss him dearly. His death at such an early age (31) was devastating to his young family (Andrea and Arlie had two small children Samantha 2 and ½ years old and Bruce six months old). Although it was known in advance because of the fact that he died of complications brought on by a sever case of abdominal cancer, it was still a very trying and difficult time. Over the past six months Carmen and Andrea have talked at least weekly about whatever Andrea needed to talk about at the time. I had spoken to Arlie on occasion over the last few months –he and I were of similar disposition in many respects to our personalities, hence he was not only my brother-in-law but a dear friend as well. A couple of months ago he asked when we’d be coming up to see him, when we told him it’d be this summer he replied by asking if we could maybe come up a littler earlier as he didn’t think he’d make it that long (this really impressed upon our minds the severity of his situation). So that evening Carmen and I bought tickets to go up and visit them (and the rest of our family in Oregon) the day after school got out for our boys (May 29th). We were so thankful when we saw him last Thursday the 29th to see him up and around and able to do a little. We spent Saturday the 31st with him and Andrea as his condition was such that he can no longer ride dirt bikes like he enjoyed so much throughout his life, he’d acquired a mid 80’s four wheel drive suburban, which his daughter Samantha called “the burban”. We drove that around on the dirt track a little –the boys didn’t really like it the first time around but that’s the same story as the first time they rode the quads with either him or me. We’d planned to take Arlie with us out to Multnomah Falls on Wednesday and he and I had planned to go to the shooting range on Tuesday. But it was raining cats and dogs (as it occasionally does in Oregon) on Tuesday so he and I canceled that trip. On Wednesday when we were getting ready to go to the falls we called to see if he’d be up to joining us. His mom answered the phone and said that he’d had a fairly rough night and had gone to the hospital that morning. Carmen called Andrea and although he was very sick to his stomach everything appeared to be fine. Carmen and I left the boys with my parent that evening and went over to the hospital to see them as he’d been admitted. We spent a few minutes with Andrea, their stake patriarch and Arlie who was sleeping due to the new medications they’d switched him too. But over the next 36 hours things did not improve they in fact deteriorated, cumulating in Arlie passing beyond the veil of life early in the morning of Friday the 6th of June 2008. Although we are all deeply saddened by his passing we are also extremely thankful to our Heavenly Father for preserving Arlie’s life long enough for us to build more good memories of time spent with him, as well as for the blessing of our Savior Jesus Christ through whom we are all given the blessings of the resurrection and triumph over the grave, providing us the opportunity to see yet again those who we have lost to this mortal existence. Our hearts and prayers are with Andrea, Samantha and Bruce as well as Arlie’s mother, brother and sister. We pray everyday that the hand of the Lord may easy their burden of sorrow.

This is Tylor and Kyle with Arlie on one of the quads. As you can tell the picture is a few years old, apparently we don't take a lot of pictures of the boys on the quads.

Carmen and Nana's Day Hike

While in Portland, I was able to go to an enrichment activity with my mother-inlaw, Georgie. We got a tour of the Vista House at Crown Point and then went on a short hike at Latourell Falls. The purpose was to take picture of interesting things to use in their upcoming enrichment activity called picture this. But you couldn't just take pictures of anything they needed to correlate to one of eight hymns that would be the theme of the upcoming activity.

On the left is Latourell Falls (James asks why they're called lateral falls as it's clearly not falling laterally -no he isn't funny sometimes). On the right is the Vista House at Crown Point. You may ask, why do they call it the Vista House? Here's why.

That is looking west down the Columbia river from the Vista House at Crown Point. And as you can tell by the size of the river we were NOT at all impressed with rivers in UT, CA or AZ they just don't measure up so to speak.

Here is a view from up the Columbia river to the east.

Evergreen Aviation Museum

So I'm sure many of you have wondered what ever happened to the HK-1 flying boat also known as the "Spruce Goose" (a name that irritated Mr. Hughes as it was neither made of spruce nor really a goose it's more of a WHALE -my name for it not his I think he just referred to it as the HK-1, if I'm wrong I'll correct that).
The plane is actually mostly birch because it has better engineering properties. Well after the famous flight on November the 2nd 1947 Howie kept his gray whale hidden away until after his death in 1976! (Mostly because of the ribbing he'd taken on capitol hill about the project THE DAY BEFORE HE FLEW IT!). After than this poor gigantic orphan of American aviation history was bounced around from one foster home to another. Until in the late 90's Evergreen Aviation purchased it with the intent of building a museum to celebrate American Aviation.
The last time we went there Kyle was an infant so he didn't remember but that time we got the full dime tour. See my dad's company is Cadmium plating and other precious metal finishing. The FAA requires that certain steel components on an airframe be Cad (as they call it in the biz) plated as a sacrificial anode (meaning that it corrodes before the steel does so you can improve the life of the steel component and prevent it from rusting by Cad platting it). I bet you didn't think that you'd get an engineering AND history lesson on a blog did you?
This time there were more planes they also have a space museum that they just opened (today) and they had some cool stuff in there -rumor has it that they're going to try and get one of the shuttles when it retires. I may have just made that up -but you'll never know.

So here are a few photos, if you'd like to see more let me know and I'll delete your e-mail and swear you never sent it.


So here are the boys and I up looking into the cockpit of a plane I don't remember which one (sorry I should have taken better notes I know). Anyway that huge gray wing above our heads is the right wing of the spruce goose. That's motors 1 and 2 of 4 on JUST that wing.

Here is one of the tour guides telling some people about some WW-I era bi-plane but in the background is the front of the spruce goose.

There was also a play area for kids to have a little hands on time in the middle of a hands off place.

Over in the space side of the museum there isn't that much stuff yet but they do have some cool stuff. An SR-71 Black bird, fastest plane EVER! -it's top speed is still classified the government will only say it's mach 5+... it's so fast that geeks like me had to redesign missiles because they couldn't be launched from it as the SR-71 was already going faster than the missile could go!


They also had some rockets (obviously) and this quasi-silo with a fairly large rocket that went down into it and then up to the roof of the building.


There was also a V-2 rocket, the first (successful) liquid powered rocket.

As you can see (maybe) in the photo Ryan is taking a picture of Poppie taking a picture of us.

Multnomah Falls

On Tuesday June 3rd, we drove out to see Multnomah Falls. The last time we were there Kyle was a baby. It is a really pretty falls to see and the first drop is over 500 feet. It felt cooler than it was because of all the mist coming off the falls, and being from Phoenix as we currently are it felt VERY cool to us.








We hiked up to that little bridge but it was VERY wet up there. It's funny some of the things you notice after living away from the area you grew up in. Western Oregon IS VERY, and I cannot stress this enough, VERY GREEN!!!! Moss and lichen grow on EVERYTHING! You know that old saying (I don't know if there is much merit to it as it never worked for me as a scout). Anyways the saying about how moss only grows thickly on the North side of a tree. Here is a photo from the trail up to the falls, Multnomah falls is on the south side of the Columbia River Gorge incidentally. So it seems this tree has turned around, or are the rules backwards in Oregon and the North side is the only one WITHOUT moss? The answers are out there...

Zoo

While we were in Portland, we took the boys to the Oregon Zoo. I have to say it was a nice day to go, because it did not rain.

Here they are see how they measure up to bears -because they sure can have a bears temper sometimes.







Here are the boys monkeying around at the monkey house. We almost had to leave them there. The zoo keeper thought that they belonged in there or maybe... it was their Dad.














Would be believe that the Oregon Zoo has a dinosaur exhibit. So of course we had to see it. Alas to our great disappointment and astonishment they were not real, but merely robotic statues with an annoyingly loud sound track. However, the three great dinosaur hunters were not disappointed.