This is my nephew Jake teaching a couple that lives on a man-made floating island on a lake in Peru.

Shannon’s nephew Christian has his farewell this weekend. He is going to Uganda!!

Grace did a great job at the 4th grade year end Gold Rush play/ musical. She wrote and memorized her part. At crunch time she nailed it: spoke clearly and confidently.

Gavin and Grace had another band performance last week. Probably Grace’s last.

From going to the Craig Ferguson show I’m on an audience waiting list. Last week I got an email offering tickets to the American Idol finale part one THAT DAY. I said “Yes, please” and got 4 tickets! You have to be 12, so I took Dylan, Gavin and their cousin Bobby. It was a LOT of waiting around, but fun. The email confirmation was a ticket to wait in line for a ticket outside the Staple’s Center. After an hour in line we got our actual tickets, but had ~1 hr to kill before we could get into the Nokia theater. There’s an ESPN Zone right there, so we headed over there. Saw Brooke White up close doing the TV Guide show. After the Zone we headed to the theater. There was an interview area for TV stations to interview previous Idol contestants. Saw Scott, the blind guy and a few others. Matt Girard was practically begging people to get his autograph. We passed. Once we were in the Nokia we waited some more. It was cool to see the stage with all the neon AI signs. We sat near the back of the main floor. A few rows in front of Jason Castro. From the live audience you can barely hear what the judges are saying, probably by design. The girl, Krystal (?) was way better than Lee on all three songs. She got standing ovations every time from a crowd that was favoring Lee by a big margin. Lee seemed to have low energy and like he was just kind of going thru the motions. It was fun and the boys had a blast. The best part was the HUGE smile on Gavin’s face when I told him why he was getting out of school early!

I spent most of last week in Orlando meeting my new employer. Stayed at the Rosen Shingle Creek, near Tiger’s place. Very impressed with the new owner and the corporate staff. I got to meet the greatest American mountain climber: Ed Viesturs. He was a guest speaker and I got to chat him up for ~30 minutes at a banquet before he spoke to the group. Very interesting, amazing and adventurous person. He has climbed all of 14 of the 8,000 meter peaks in the world WITHOUT OXYGEN! He’s climbed Everest 7 times and was there in ’96 with the IMAX crew when all those people died. Got to see my high school buddy Tom while I was there.

Saturday the whole family participated at our stake’s Mormon Helping Hands project. About 300 of us went to a huge children’s shelter to work on various project. The youth were tasked with organizing their 13,000 rubber ducks that they use for a fund raiser. We had to sort them in order, record them and package them up. It was a very tedious task! There were 75,000 of us working on service projects across the state.

Saturday night we had a birthday bash for Gavin. Took the group of 12 kids bowling then went back to the house for swimming and games.

Happy Mother’s Day to my babies Momma and all the other Mommies in my life!

We had a tough decision last weekend: boating at Lake Mead or boarding at Mammoth. The original plan was to go boating at Mead until I saw that the water was only 60 degrees. I checked Mammoth and saw that they had ~2 ft of new snow in the past week, the temps had stayed cold and it was about to get sunny and warm. We had a blast: the snow was in great shape, off season ticket prices and we were able to ride/ski together all day. Downside: mom and dad got fried. Despite multiple applications of sun screen, the 10,000 elevation, bright sun and reflective snow conspired against us.

We drove to the NW for spring break. We stopped in Portland for a couple days to visit friends. I got dropped off to work for the week. The manager that replaced me there decided to move back to Michigan to be closer to family, so I will be spending some time covering until they find someone else. Rest of the family drove up to BC to visit Shannon’s parents. They missed the open house for the new Vancouver LDS temple by a day or two, but luckily the temple president is a lifelong family friend so they were able to get a super deluxe private tour. They all loved it. More visiting in Portland, then we made our way south to Shannon’s sister’s near Sacramento.

My sister Margo lives near the Paul Kruger’s family in Utah valley. He was a beastly, defensive superstar for the University of Utah football team and now plays for the Baltimore Ravens. He is Ty’s favorite football player since they are both running on one kidney. Kruger lost his from an ATV accident when he was young. Margo asked his mom if she could get Paul to autograph something for Ty. He sent Ty an autographed Ravens ball and two autographed 8 x 10 photos. Awesome!

Dylan and I went to the Kings/ Canucks hockey game tonight. The Kings are resting their starting goalie (backup goalie for US olympic team) and called up a kid who had only played 6 games in the minors. He had a shut out a couple nights ago for the Kings. His winning streak continued tonight going up against gold medal goalie Roberto Luongo: Kings won 8-3. I was happy, Dylan was sad. They gave out Ryan Smyth bobbleheads, so Dylan took out his frustrations on the poor guy:

Gavin made this awesome helmet for his 3-D ancient history project. It’s a modified lacrosse helmet we had in the attic: removed the face mask and chopped the chin guard. He was turned on to Greek history by playing Age of Mythology.

Gavin and Grace competed in Piano Festival last Saturday. Grace played Downhill Daredevil and Elegy, Gavin played Snake Charmer and Beethoven’s Sonatina in F, 1st Movement. They both played great and scored a rating of “Excellent”. They had to have the pieces memorized and play in front of a professional judge following their sheet music AND an audience. They worked REALLY hard practicing every day for weeks and weeks. Grace is also taking figure skating lessons until she starts working on the next musical: Alice in Wonderland. Gavin and Dylan are taking a break from hockey to get caught up on Scouts and PS3. Gavin just finished book 2 of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.