Family adventures

Many years ago I was at a little kindergarten thingy for Javin watching the festivities through the viewfinder of the video camera. The viewing of the video proved unsatisfying and I can't remember ever looking at it again. I do enjoy looking at old photos of my dad and such but when looking, I can't smell the Old Spice cologne that he wore, I can't hear him etc... My memory is so much more three dimensional than any photo or video could ever recreate. In the years since that kindergarten program, I have tried to strike a balance between experiencing life as it happens and fully partaking of it with my senses-if I can snap a picture or two along the way it's a bonus but I try to not let it be at the expense of the experience itself. It's a delicate balance.

My dad used to have to set up a screen and a projector to view family photos and it was a bit of a chore and if one person wasn't interested in a slide or a set of slides they just had to wait until the projectionist moved on to another slide. There was still some value in the communal experience of a couple of families or another group of people watching together but it had its downsides.

Gramma Ross lamented on our Thanksgiving trip that she doesn't have any current photos of us and we are going to get that corrected shortly but I realized that the world has evolved again from what was a slide show to a scrapbook/photo album to what is now an online photojournal or blog. This particular posting has a fair share of photos but we still tried to let the picture taking be secondary to the experience itself. I have been a "digital" DJ for a decade now but I still get people coming up once in awhile with a CD... "Ummm... can you play this?" I respond with, "Oh, a CD, how quaint!"

Here are our adventures since we last posted.
Hiking in the local desert on Christmas Eve.
I think this may be one of the best pics ever taken of Shaw. He's just the handsomest brute ever!

That's Red Mountain in the Distance.

The camera doesn't show it but he's about 8 feet up on that rock. Enough that it would hurt if he took a tumble.

Lesa and Shaw made Graham cracker houses. This one above is Lesa's.

This one is Shaw's- cool feature of note is the diving board on the right side that goes into the pool of blue M&M's. Shaw has a gift for landscape design with the green grass M&Ms and the vanilla wafer stepping stones and everything.

Bar-b-que ribs at Lucilles in Tempe and the view from the front porch there.

Artificial snow falling at the Christmas tree you see in the last pic. It's just glycerin/dish soap stuff but once the kids get all excited it's hard not to get excited with them. Lots of laughter and hugging and picture taking and stuff....

I'm getting more comfortable with my grey hair... but it looks worse with the fake snow in it.

Here's another shot of the snow.

Lesa has had this crazy-awesome bag for some time but I've never got a shot of it.

Family gathering at my brother, Garry's house with all my siblings. That's Garry on the left, then Lauri, then Cindy then me, Curtis. Shaw's cousin, Ben shaking his fist in the background between Lauri and Garry.

This is Shaw and all of his Whipple, Benson and Hale cousins.

Visit to the Gilbert Temple site. The fence that had blown down in the wind on the last visit was righted so it was hard to see any progress that could be photographed. Since I worked in construction in my past life, I was able to detect the progress but there's not much to see for the untrained eye. It may be several months before anything starts to rise above the fence line.