This picture was taken at an old silver mine outside of Republic. The tailing piles are left from all the rock that they didn't take, and you can dig through them and find crystals. The whole area around there is full of crystals, we talked to a Job Corps group out that day and one guy had found a rock about the size of a small dinner plate that had 3 inch tall crystals sticking up all over it. The kids just like to go and throw rocks while I dig around. We didn't find any crystals that day though.

Simon bowling.

Dylan bowling. He didn't fall down. He carries his ball up, places it on the lane very carefully, then lays down behind it and pushes it.

So we found the camera, carefully hidden away in the glove box of the van. Faith found it when she was going grocery shopping, and I had already told her to buy a new camera. She bought a new one anyway. It snowed here about a week and a half ago. There was about 2 inches above 4000 feet or so. I took the kids up to play in it the next morning, and most of it had melted. We drove up to a spot called Bodie Mountain, which is an old fire lookout, but the tower is gone. The top of the mountain is just barely big enough to turn a pickup around on, and is surrounded on all sides by pretty tall cliffs except where the road is blasted through. We drove up until we hit snow, but the only turn around on the road is at the top, so I drove up there to get turned around. When I got to the top and nosed up to one of the cliffs to turn around, Dylan suddenly screamed "I don't want to die!" I said "What?!" and he told me he didn't like it up there and wanted to go back down. So, death narrowly averted, we got turned around and drove back down from the top a little ways and stopped. It's too steep off either side of the road, so I just parked in the middle of the road and we had an awesome snowball fight, started to make a snow man (which turned into a "Biggest Snowball Ever" fight) and I showed the boys how to shake snow off a tree onto someone standing underneath it. Most of the rest the time was consumed by the boys giggling and asking me to "Come look at right underneath this tree." The snow all melted, but it's supposed to snow tonight or tomorrow again. The next week I went to Portland for training, and saw Mom and Dad there. Leave it to me to ruin their vacation where they "didn't want to visit anybody." It was great to see them when the circumstances weren't linked to a funeral. My training was about two steps above completely awful, but I guess it was somewhat educational. The training was on how to use a new database we're supposed to track our fuel treatment monitoring in. While I realize that's probably complete gibberish for most normal people, maybe somebody will understand it. I stayed with my friend Mark and his family, which was nice. I left my truck parked at his house and took public transportation everywhere I went, which is awesome. If you're ever feeling sorry for yourself, just go ride the bus and/or train in Portland for an hour or so, and you'll realize you're actually doing pretty darn good. I got home on Friday, right into a three day weekend (Yay Columbus showing up after a whole slew of other people and getting all the credit!) I slept and watched movies and played games with the boys the first day, went crystal digging/rock throwing the second day, and went bowling on Monday. It was a pretty good weekend. Back to work and school tomorrow though. Simon's class took some tests a couple of weeks ago to see where they're at academically, and Simon is the only one in the class to test out at where he's supposed to be for his age, everyone else in the class tested below where they're supposed to be. We were pretty excited about that. Simon sits right in the front row on the bus, and his bus driver told Faith the other day that he is surprised at the level of intelligence that Simon shows when talking to him. Dylan's doing alright in school, 3 days into him starting I went to pick him up and was asked to stay and talk to his teacher after everyone else left. He had apparently gotten mad at his teacher's assistant for not giving him yogurt (preschool eats breakfast at school, but Dylan eats before he goes, so we just pack him a little snack, which didn't include yogurt until this incident) and had backhanded her in the face during his little tantrum. I asked Dylan why his teacher wanted to talk to me while I was waiting for all the other kids to leave, and he told me right away "Umm, I got in trouble." "Why?" "I hit my teacher." "Oh. Great." The upshoot is that if he hits a teacher again he has to go home. It hasn't happened again. His teacher told us at open house that Dylan has a really hard time transitioning between activities, which is normal for his age. Other than that, he really likes going. That's about it for now, hope everybody's doing well.