Late fall.... aah

Step 1.... the colors peak:

Step 2.... 4 days later the colors are gone ;-).

Boys work, and girls work -- it turns out that the way to get girls to actually participate in yard clean-up duties is to give them POWER TOOLS!  Now I know, she's a power tool gal.  Can you see the grin?

There's also been some reading, some feline cuteness, and some mild torturing of cats... although she didn't seem really that tortured.

Fire and Smoke and Rain

It's raining.

13 days ago the Camp Fire started, and 12 days ago our air turned into smoke.  (Insert obligatory global warming vs. our Nitwit president rant here.)  This fire has been terrifying - it moved so fast, and has killed so many.  It is the deadliest California wildfire in history, currently at 83 confirmed dead, more than double the deaths of the runner up at 29.  It is also the first time that anyone remembers ever having 12 solid days in a row of unhealthy air, a "normal" fire gives us 1-3 days.  We managed to have the worst air quality in the world.  Obviously, our air issues are nothing compared to the horror happening up in  Butte County, but it really brings home the changes that global warming brings to our world.

Images from our 2 weeks:

Our greatest obsession:  the air quality maps from the air district, which we checked constantly, along with a few other choice web sites:

News reports 80% focused on air, and fire

A strange site for us - a garage filled with bikes in the middle of the school/work day.  Iain mostly took the city bus to school, and I drove Ria in.  William got some rides and sometimes took a shuttle bus.  My face mask, N95 quality, waiting at the back door for me to put on every time I left.

But, today it rained, so the map has changed.  We have green skies.  Grey really, filled with clouds, but around here we call it green air ;-).

Fall 2018

Some cats maximize their rotational features.

Other cats settle behind their wall of invisibility.  (She won't sit there without Sailor Bacon and Paddington Rockbottom III blocking the world's view.)

In addition to documenting cat sensibilities, this fall we did our annual Big Basin camping trip, but, uh, I didn't take many pictures this year, mostly just Hope sitting on Carla's lap as a commentary on how chilly that darn soil was.

Both boys are proven to have camped with, at minimum, Perrin... Ria and I, not so much ;-)

Finally, we had James come by again, with a different group of folks!

Fluffy

Just letting you know that Freya officially has the fluffiest belly ever.  Fluffy little kitty bellies.

Ok, maybe not the most earth shattering blog post revelation, but definitely the revelation most present in the here and now.

Good night!

Birthdays, Aker-Ruck style! or Ruckerblom style....take your pick

Having birthdays to celebrate invariably brings out the geek in us all!

In September, Iain hit 15 - supposedly a dreaded age for parents of teenagers, but he continues to be simply a lovely guy.  We had our traditional family party: books, junk food, and (root) beer on the back patio.  The fence to the neighbor is down as we're replacing it, so the yard looks larger than usual.

Then this month, October, Ria turned 12.  Someday she'll actually look her age, rather than looking 2-3 years older!  She decided to shake things up, so instead of books with (root) beer and junk food, we played a game of "Betrayal at House on the Hill."  William turned out to be the traitor, and he lost!  We won!  Hah!

Finally, an adorable video from years ago.  William found this while cleaning out his Google+ pictures.  I had some computer troubles a year or 2 ago where files, generally pictures and videos, got corrupted and went missing, so I didn't have this one despite William's rigorous back-up efforts.  This was 2012, Ria's 6th birthday.  Translation: "(Today is) my birthday, I'm going to have fun! .... Birthday, birthday books!  Hmm hmm hmm hmm. ......mmmm, just birthday books."  Yeah, that girl has always liked her books!

Grandpa Henry, 2 March 1930 - 1 October 2018

Well, Grandpa Henry is gone.  He was 88 1/2 years old, and Mom and he had been married for 29 years.  His obituary is here:  https://www.carpenterjenks.com/obituaries/Henry-L-Whited-MD?obId=3358678#/celebrationWall

 He was a sweet man, and we'll all miss him.  Pictures of him from earlier, easier times.

 

School starts!

 And, school started!  Well, 1 month ago school started, in that crazy California timeline where we start 3 weeks before labor day.  Iain is in 10th grade now, so only 3 years left with him at home... eek!

Ria just started 6th grade, which in most of the US is the start of "middle school" or "junior high school" (it's really town by town, lots of towns start in 7th grade).  So, now she's travelling class to class, with 7 different teachers.  She seems to be doing well with it!  She bikes in with William every morning, and I pick her up by bike in the afternoon.  (Iain bikes too, of course!)

And the official pictures:

Well, now that I'm caught up, and we're into the fall, I'll be quieting down on the posts for a bit. ;-)

End of summer!

Well, I've managed it!  This is the last post of summer pictures, and Iain's school pictures just came in yesterday.... I'm caught up!!!!  This is quite possibly the first time ever in this blog.  (OK, to come clean I've had those 1st day of school pictures sitting around for 4 weeks, not posting them, but my goal was the official school pictures, so I'm still saying that I met my goal.)

After the Canada trip, our 2018 finally slowed down, after 6.5 months of non-stop crazy.  The kids did some short gaming camps, Ria had swim lessons, and we just fluffed about and relaxed (well, except William, he went to work).

My Facebook-fu is pretty terrible - I only go on it infrequently because I hate Facebook, but I love seeing pictures of people.  I timed it perfectly this summer, though, and found out that a friend I hadn't seen in over 20 years was going to be in town.  Tricia and I had an awesome time renewing our friendship.

Facebook again - this is a picture I found on Facebook (thank-you anonymous donor - I found it 5th hand so I have no idea who took the photo) of the California wildfires as viewed at sunset at 30,000 feet.  So much beauty and so much utter devastation.  Fires, floods, droughts... and yet some <bleeps> still deny global warming.  California is lucky, 3 of our seasons are fire, flood, and drought (the 4th is earthquake), global warming in our face.  We don't get the hurricanes, though, <sigh>.

The kids and I had a great end of summer hike starting in Stevens Creek County Park to Maisie's Peak in Fremont Older Open Space Preserve (how's dem for long complicated names?!).  Iain took a panorama with the camera's auto-panorama feature with Ria and I in it, and I did an old fashioned panorama of multiple static photos, stitching on the computer, with Iain in it.  Now we all can decide which ends up with the better panorama!  I should have done 5 photos instead of 3 so that we could match fully.

And, to end out our summer we had a surprise visit from James, William's Cousin Emma's son, and a few of his friends.  They were smoked out of Yosemite and needed a place to crash.  What a nice bunch of guys!

Here's all of us: Rob, Gerben, Ria, James, William, me, and Iain.

July 2018 - Canada continued, Picton & Ottawa

OK, so when we went to Picton to see Elizabeth and Russell, we kinda lost the plot on taking photos of humans.  We mostly just took photos of their cats.  I dunno, I think we were all human photo'd out for a bit.  We do have a little bit of Russell behind a dancing cat, if that counts!

We're totally guessing on the names, but here's Ferdie looking majestic,  Hero trying to avoid us,

Tamara being cute, and being the dancing kitty with Russell (she seriously doesn't seem to mind)

Cordelia's bunny butt made it in, but Bentley (bunny) and McDuff (dog) didn't make it.

Then we drove up to Ottawa, just 'cause.
....Well, because the kids and I had never been, and we're trying to add on non-visiting-people vacationy bits to our trips.  After the hustle and bustle of Toronto, Ottawa felt so much more mellow, a bit more of a Mona sized city.  I really enjoyed it.  It gets really cold, though, and doesn't have the fun underground city features of Toronto and Montreal.

This is my FAVORITE picture from Ottawa:

We did break Ria, though, with too much walking.

We toured the Centre Block of the Parliament, the center building in the picture below.  Tickets were free, and were first come first served on the day of. 

Favorite feature of the Parliament, the library!!!!  We tried not to drool too much.  Our home library just doesn't compare!

I miss card catalogs.  Obviously I prefer the functionality of online catalogs, but there's just something so nostalgic about the old card catalogs.  I remember when I started at Rice there were still card catalogs, though things were already going on-line.

In the Peace Tower was the Memorial Chamber, which was very sensitively set up. There were memorial books for each war, with all the service members who died in the war listed.  They turn the pages daily, I think, and you can find out online on what day your loved one's page will be shown, so you can plan a trip.  I thought that was just so kind.

We escaped the heat after our Parliament tour in the Notre-Dame cathedral, interior on left, and exterior being attacked by a giant spider.  

OK, boring reality, the spider is outside the National Gallery of Canada.  The Cathedral is safe.  Do zoom in on the first image, of the antlers.  They were carved by an Inuit artisan, and are jaw droppingly amazing!  The cool rocks were at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

We played a bit at the museum of nature...

Look, a moose!!

And I periodically gave up control of the camera, just to prove I was there too ;-).

 And then we went home.