Puzzling!

We have had a lot of fun in the past couple of years working on jigsaw puzzles.

They are keeping our brains sharp, right?

It's also a fun souvenir of some of the places we have been.

Usually we stick to 500 piece puzzles.  We can do them in a couple of days.

But I couldn't resist this National Park puzzle from our recent trip even though it had 1,000 pieces!

We got off to a good start:

It was fun to work on as there was a lot of information about the National Park System on the puzzle itself: Note the magnifying glass we needed.

(Who knew that the remote Dry Tortugas National Park, almost 70 miles west of Key West Florida, is a 100-square mile park which is mostly open water with seven small islands.)

It took us less than a week!
Dan did most of his puzzling facing the puzzle upside down.
He is amazing!

And now we have some new places we'd like to visit!

Easter Weekend!

Easter egg hunt in Kansas:

Leaving for Church the next day at 8:30 a.m.

Cousins come for Easter dinner

 Utah:

Easter bonnets?

Hunting in Clinton

Hunting in Texas:

Florida checks in!

Nathaniel waiting for his brothers and sisters:

Puzzlers in Elk Grove:

Sunday in Folsom:

Girls side of the table

Boys side of the table

Easter bunny cake

Each person got to request the exact part of the cake they wanted starting from youngest to oldest

Here is what was left!

Christmas Gift Outing #4: Elk Grove and Dixon!

 We had a very fun April outing!

The first part of the outing was a trip to Elk Grove where we got to spend a couple of hours with these two fun kids!

 For decades we have been seeing signs for this restaurant.  There are several along the I-80 freeway to the Bay Area, but there are none in our area and we heard it had pretty good food. 

So we decided to take a scenic route to Dixon and try it out.  

It was a really pleasant day: fun grandkids, beautiful scenery on the drive and yummy food.  And yes, I did try the giant meatball!

Happy Easter Weekend!

Probably taken around Easter time:

Easter Bunny Day party 2012:

Surprise On Monday!

Dan had just gotten back from a bike ride this afternoon when he checked his email.  He received the following message and photo from our Temple President:

"Hello President Harrison.  Look who I just saw at the temple!  Boy oh boy, what a sweet family I met at the temple just now!  See attached photo:

President Papa was outside helping his grandson ride a scooter when he saw this cute family and engaged them in conversation.   It didn't take long for them to make a connection to the two of us.  It was so nice of him to take this picture and send it to us!  We didn't realize the Perrys were up a the temple doing an FHE activity at about 4:30 p.m.

I texted to MaryAnn: Any chance you could stop by? We have enough food for dinner.

And she answered: Sure!  We'd love to see you and we like food too!

It was great hosting our first patio dinner of the season with this great family!!

Our Weekend!

Another trip to Sea Ranch for General Conference!

That's me out on the bluff:

It's such a beautiful and relaxing place.

We thought to ourselves: We probably won't take many pictures this time since we have taken so many in the past and they would be repeats. 

But each trip is unique and we ended up trying to capture this special visit.

It was windy and that made for large waves and lots of crashing against the rocks.  Can't get enough of that!

 We could see some of the crashing in the distance out the windows as we watched Conference.

And then there were the birds!

We saw so many birds this time. 

It looked like they were migrating north.

The first day we happened upon the sheep and we had to check them out every day:

I love seeing the ocean in the distance!

 And finally a lot of wildflowers were in bloom!

Love the poppies!

These are so pretty!

Loved the wild iris!

Loved everything!

Always hard to leave this magical place!