Nutritious Blue Spray - Lots of catching up to do..

I last posted on our 4th housiversary.  We did nothing this year to remark the event, or the house's 101st birthday.  Well, it was Father's day so we had Rita's (I think) just like we did for Mother's Day.

We took Heather on a long car trip to meet more of her extended family.  She got lots of presents but endured the car ride slightly less well than she had the first time we made this trip.  She's beginning to not like the car seat very much.  She's at least generally very eager to get out of it at the end of any trip in the car.

At the end of June my parents visited us.  We spent the day on the front porch (mostly) giving Heather attention.  We took many fine photos.  I've been working on my focus techniques to get more-professional photos.  Oh, and this time I took over 600 photos in one day so that I could capture all of the best shots.  It worked--but that was a lot of photos.

The beginning of July marked the return of Indian Pipe in the park.  There are a number of healthy stalks of it now.

I painted the garage trim and some of the house trim with new paint that matches the old blue trim.  Yay.

Heather helped us pick out a new tent for our camping trip.  Actually, a very nice salesperson at REI helped us put up one of their larger tents right in the store--only it wasn't big enough.  We ended up getting a large 6-person tent.  Then I put it up in the back yard one evening and Heather absolutely loved it!  We had never heard her giggle so much...

We had a short but very strong storm one evening that knocked out our power for 3 hours.  I found out that my small UPS can power the TV for about 10 minutes :)  and my larger UPS can power my Linux firewall, wireless access point, and switch for 1.5 hours.  Anyway, at around 2 hours I went to the store to get batteries and ice.  We loaded up 2 coolers with stuff from the refrigerator since it seemed like it was going to be a long outage.  And I had my battery-powered TV running so we could see the news to find out what had been happening.  Then just when we were prepared to deal with the outage, the power came back on.

We finally packed up that tent and ourselves and headed camping.  On the way there and on the way back we stopped at my parents' place.  Heather enjoyed camping a lot.  We went on several long hikes--she ended up asleep at the end as usual.  It got a little cold overnight so she ended up in a sleeping bag with one of us by morning.  We all got in the pool at my parents' place on the way back.  Heather was uncertain at first how she would like it when her feet first entered the water, but she adjusted well and had fun splashing.

We've gone on several (sometimes) long hikes in the park now.  Heather really loves it.

I updated several community web sites to Drupal 5.1.  Then to 5.2.  That included taking a large hit on converting sites from an old version of CivicSpace to straight Drupal.