Daniel's Birthday!

Guess who turned 21! It sure is fun to be able to share in a few of these occasions with the Swiss boys. Adrian, Audrey, and Daniel came over for hamburgers, and then we had a yummy chocolate pie that Audrey had made. The kids picked out very special presents for Daniel at the Dollar Store. It was nearly 90 again today and so we ate outside--a pretty lucky late-September treat. Oh, and the outlaws are here and we are all loving it!

Blowing out candles:



opening presents:

Chico memories

Two weekends ago, we went to Chico for Christina's funeral. It was a special, sobering, bittersweet day.

We rode over with Becky and Lana and stayed at Irv and Aleta's. Of course I didn't do anything as organized as actually take pictures of the nice people we stayed with, so here's one of the kids reading books at their place in the morning:


Saturday evening we had a mini-early 90's reunion at--where else--Burger Hut:

$$$$What does it all mean????

I will be the first to admit that I have a hard time understanding much about Wall Street and money management in general and this is why I was so interested to understand a little bit of the mortgage mess through an episode of This American Life a while back. You can listen online to The Giant Pool of Money It is worth a listen and is entertaining as well. I also found some further podcasts through itunes by some of the same characters that did the Giant Pool of Money show explaining some of the things we have been hearing or reading about explained a little simpler for the rest of us. The blog site for Planet Money is here and the podcasts are here hopefully you will learn something new not that it will change anything but it is nice to have a little bit of a clue or at least pretend you do. I am still too scared to look at my 401K and 403b I prefer to bury my head in the sand.

So we've been a little busy...

...because in addition to the normal hecticness of life, two Swiss guys, two kids, and I went to a friend's orchard last Saturday. We got out into that orchard and gorgeous, sweet, yummy peaches and nectarines were just hanging there, begging to be picked. So pick we did.

235 lbs worth. Yep. If you ever wondered what that looks like, here it is:

The pictures don't really do it justice; we've made 5 batches of jam and have gone through 4 containers of Fruit Fresh. So if you visit our house this winter, expect to enjoy peaches on waffles, peach ice cream, peach cobbler, and...probably peach smoothies on 20 degree days.

We picked peaches Saturday am and went to the homecoming game Saturday evening. We get to ride our bikes along the river to the game and back:

Hard to tell, but in the front row above are some suspects some of you might know. The row behind them includes some of our friends too--squinting in the sun.