I've been teaching Alex how to play a little blues harmonica. He seems to get into it. I think he's got the knack! He's especially cool playing the blues with his Winnie the Pooh sunglasses on! 

I'm going to kick your butt!! 

It was great to have our son visit us during the Thanksgiving weekend!!! As you can see, we only barely managed to get him to sit down and eat anything. We love feeding him whatever he wants--although his request for milk in a bottle was a little shocking. You can see, he was serious! So anyway, he finished that up quickly before... 

he got on the phone while learning to work his new miniature digital camera, before... 

he sat down to do some research on his Mac laptop. 

Here's my little sweetheart listening to the Children's story at church. She's often the ONLY little one at church now (pretty sad) but she's not shy about going up front by herself. She's not shy about gathering the offering by herself! She takes a LONG time and makes sure that she walks up to each person in the pews and holds out the little basket until they come up with something. But she does it so innocently, no one gets upset. She just figures she's supposed to get the offering and the grownups and supposed to give the offering!! That works, you know? 

Here I used a really neat 25 cent filter on my digital camera. It's one of those plastic things that you look through and it's got a lot of angles on it and it's supposed to be like a fly sees or something. So I got it out of a cheap claw machine and held it up to my camera's lens. Okay, it's weird, but hey.... 

Vienna and Alex really love each other and have a lot of fun together! 

The lighted truck parade was fun, as always. This display was advertising the RV sales and repair place at the corner of 20 and 1. If you look closely, you'll see that the door to the travel trailer is open. There were several people inside the trailer standing by the open door waving to the crowd. That would be fun, I think, just because you could never do that legally any other time! 

Heidi and Alex in front of the Guest House for the tree lighting ceremony. Just after this we all went inside the Guest House living room to visit Santa. As you can see, Alex was just too cool for all the silliness. 

Vienna liked Santa this year, she just didn't want to look him in the eye when he asked if she'd been good ALL year. :-) 

Here's a cute kid! He sure is a happy little guy. 

The Mendocino Headlands on a Sunday morning recently. 

The Pudding Creek Trestle, viewed from the end of Glass Beach Rd. 

The Pudding Creek cypress trees. 

EDITORIAL

You know, Google is totally cool and everything they come up with is exactly what you wanted. Picasa works great...Blogger is very easy to use...It's all free...Now they've stuck their logo at the end of each post! I think you can tell from our expressions that my friend Clifford the Big Red Dog and I are not really happy about this thing at the end right here!!-----> 

Heidi's Family Christmas Tree Expedition

Heidi and her family head out to get a Christmas tree. Vienna is a little nervous to be making a decision of this importance--her hands really started shaking. Alex, on the other hand, has already developed the habit of pulling his stocking cap down over his eyes to look cool. As you can see, he's giving Vienna the hand sign to try to calm down and play it cool. 

They're pretty sure they've found the right one. (You can see Vienna's nervousness is still affecting the steadiness of her hands. But Heidi's staying calm to be a stabilizing influence on Vienna.) 

They survey the choices once more, just to be sure...but no, they find that the one they both agreed on is perfect! 

Having decided on the perfect tree, they head inside to pay for it. 

Mom and daughter actively worked together to get their tree fixed up. 

The crew is just about finished with their creative task. Vienna enjoyed this as much as Heidi did. She really did help too. Alex didn't really care.... 

And here's the final product! Looks pretty good, huh? 

An Unusual (Unusually Nice!) Sabbath

We had a varied, but really fun Sabbath yesterday, June 25. First we went to Sabbath School and church. Here's a really blurry, time-exposed picture of Greg Webster, pastor, on the left and Dean Jennings, elder, on the right. Pastor Greg preached a really good sermon about Moses at the burning bush. He preached until 12:25 but Vienna was really good the whole time. She's sitting with me in the sanctuary now--not the Mother's Room.

After church we went down to Noyo Beach and played in the sand for awhile. The ocean was calm and sky was mixed sun and clouds. Warm with only a little breeze. Very nice! Much too soon, it was time to go.

After we got back to the truck, I looked across the river and there was a weird sight. This is not a great picture, but there is a patch of dirt, about the size of a sheet of plywood, with grass and flowering plants. It's flexible and rolls with the waves, but it isn't coming apart and it looks like a little island! It slowly made its way to the sea.

Looking back toward the harbor I got this shot of the new Noyo Bridge. It's huge, but not as ugly as I had expected when they began.