Grace and Shannon spent last night on The Pilgrim with Grace’s 4th grade class. It stays tied to the dock, but students and chaperone’s have to take turns keeping watch all night. It was supposed to get down in the 40s.

The original plan was to go to Sedona to bike and hike. My parents came from UT to watch the kids and we hit the road. Saturday morning we discovered what was causing the bumpy, rattling ride: the Finnish snow tires, designed for cold climates, had separated. When we left the hotel and headed to the van I noticed that the passenger-side rear tire was low. A nearby tire shop pulled the tire and showed us the giant hole that was forming. We had worn thru nearly all the layers in one 6-8 inch section of the tire. Since I had trouble finding the weird tire size in the past I figured we were spending the weekend in Bullhead City, AZ. Amazingly they had two of the tires we needed in stock, so with 5 guys working on the van we were out of there in 20 minutes. We drove I-40 thru Kingman and Flagstaff. Just before Flagstaff we ran into some pretty heavy snow. The snow continued was we drove down 89A to Sedona. By the time we got to Sedona it was raining, but VERY cold and low clouds were obscuring the view of the red rock hills. We decided to keep going south to Scottsdale and see what Hotwire could come up with for us. Got a $500/ night room in a 5-star luxury resort for $117/ night. It was a beautiful property: Intercontinental Montelucia. Pappadeaux, one of my top 5 restaurants in the world was booked Saturday night, so we went there for lunch on Sunday. Had filet mignon and it was amazing. Sunday night we watched the US vs Canada hockey game. First time that the US has beaten Canada since the 1960 olympics at Squaw Valley!! Awesome! We headed back home Monday.

Gavin and Grace had a band concert last night. Grace played the flute in the beginner band and Gavin played the trumpet in the advanced band. He practices once a week at the middle school with kids from other elementary schools and some middle school kids. The middle school concert band also played. All three bands sounded great and you could definitely hear the progression.

Shannon had all of her siblings and most of their kids in town this weekend, so it was a non-stop party. Thursday all the boys and Grace went to SpeedZone while Shannon and her sister went shopping. SpeedZone is awesome: mini Grand Prix track, real dragsters (on rails), kid go-carts and the crowd favorite: slick track go-carts. They throw baby powder on the track and all of a sudden it feels like you are driving on ice: four wheel drifts on the turns, bashing into sons and nephews at every opportunity. Friday we met Boatmans and the local Rennies at Universal Studios after school/ work then headed to our house to watch the Olympic opening ceremonies. All the Vancouver natives were bursting with pride (and deeply embarassed at times…prairie dance girl/boy?…malfunctioning flame holder). Saturday we went swimming at the Claremont Club during the day and had a big party for Ty that evening. More Olympics. Sunday we went to Griffith Park observatory. It was an amazingly clear day: could see the ocean and snow-capped peaks by San Bernardino. The Hollywood sign was covered with a protest sign that said “Save our Peak”. Some developers were trying to build houses by the Hollywood sign. A bunch of groups got together this week and bought the land for $12M. After that we drove thru Hollywood, Beverly Hills and stopped at the LA temple. Next stop was Santa Monica beach. On Monday the Boatmans headed home. I went dirt bike riding with Dave and Paul on a really cool trail that starts just off I-15 at the Palmdale exit and goes thru tunnels under the freeway, up and over the hill to Victorville. Shannon and the girls played, shopped and went to lunch. Good times!

Another gigantic rainstorm yesterday turned streets into rivers with class IV rapids. We’ve already had ~17 inches of rain this year!

It’s been an exciting week for nephews: Ty had his central line surgically removed on Tuesday. Less than a year ago he had innumerable tumors in his lungs. The last CT, after months and months of chemo, was clear! Christian, Shannon’s brother’s son, received his mission call. He is going to the Democratic Republic of Congo, French speaking.

Saturday we went to the Getty to check out an exhibit of Rembrandt sketches I heard about on the radio. Apparently he didn’t sign his sketches and had dozens of students that did similar work, so many sketches were falsely attributed to him. Over the last 30 years specialists have systematically come up with ways to figure out the artist behind the sketches. They paired similar Rembrandt and student sketches side by side and explained how to tell them apart. Most of the time it was immediately obvious: Rembrandt’s usually had fewer strokes and shading but conveyed MUCH more feeling. Even the landscapes. Very cool exhibit!

Next we went to Universal Studios which is about 20 minutes northeast of the Getty. It wasn’t too busy for a Saturday: 20 minute wait for the Simpson’s ride, 30 minute wait for the Studio tour. The studio tour highlights: Wisteria Lane, Skull Island from latest King Kong, flash flood, earthquake and the tour guide. We finished up at the animal show where Shannon was selected from the audience to get pick-pocketed by the parrot from Ace Ventura. She held up a dollar bill and the bird flew across the stadium, grabbed it and flew back. With that and her conversation with Craig Ferguson a couple nights before, she made quite a splash in Hollywood this week. We went to the taping of Friday night’s Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson Thursday evening. The guest was Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite). It was fun, but we missed out on the musical performance by Corinne Bailey Rae (saw her in the parking lot) and the commedian who both taped with the afternoon show. That audience also got a Sirius satellite radio with a 2 month subscription. They also cut our close-up audience shot! We were sitting right behind a pregnant lady who they zoomed in on during the email portion of the show. Also cut: CF kept trying to get Heder to swear, but he wouldn’t do it.

Friday I went snowboarding at the resort up the road from our house. They got 5 feet of snow last week, so I was anxious to get up there. I had to work last weekend, but Dylan went snowboarding with his cousin and uncle Saturday, the first clear day after a week of snow. The ski resort is only 10 miles away, but it took them 4 hours from when they left our house until they were skiing!!! Could have almost been to Mammoth in 4 hours. They had to put on chains, even though they had 4WD and the ticket line takes forever. They still had a great time. Friday my biggest delay was the line for lift tickets: 45 minutes. The snow was still in great shape and the lift lines weren’t bad. REI has discount passes, so a day pass was only $25.

Dylan and Gavin have been wanting a PS3 for months and months. Mom and Dad say: “NO, 5 game systems are enough”. We told them that they could buy it with their own money. They have been saving birthday money, Christmas money, allowance, etc and still fell well short of the amount they needed. Saturday Gavin asked what he could do to earn $. I told him to collect our various stashes of coins in drawers, jars and cars and take it to a coin counting machine. He separated out the euros, pesos, loonies, toonies, Turkish lira and Austrian schillings and put the US coins in a emesis basin sized container. I figured it might be $40 worth of coinage. Turns out it was $123.33 worth of pennies, nickels and quarters!! On the Coinstar counter if you get an Amazon gift card they don’t charge a fee. PS3 is on the way! And there was much rejoicing. They play Blu-rays, right?

I went with Dylan and his scout troop on an overnight to Anza Borrego State Park last weekend. We explored a series of mud caves. Spelunking tip: remove sunglasses before going inside caves. I’d been wearing mine all day and forgot they were on, cruised into the cave and couldn’t see the two foot wide, 20 ft deep chasm on the side right near the entrance. I promptly fell into the chasm and the crunching sound was the water bottle in my back pocket. Sounded like bones breaking. Luckily my knee bent and wedged me near the top, breaking my fall and ripping the crotch of my pants!!

Grace got a telescope for Christmas. One of the surprises we discovered on moving to So. Cal is that you can actually see stars in the sky when it’s not cloudy and rainy every day!