As is common, I spent a bit of time over the weekend processing the pictures in our camera. You can see the results here. Among the pictures are a couple of the boys in their new car seats. There's also a shot of how funny the boys look when they watch their videos (Baby Mozart and Baby Bach).
It's been an interesting few days. On Friday Michelle and the girls got a visit from Bonita Hollabaugh and her girls. Bonita and her family moved to Florida last fall but they came up to New Hampshire to visit for a week. The girls all played together for several hours, as you can see here.
Michelle taught step aerobics on Saturday. In the afternoon we took the family down to Cambridge Sound Works to buy a Model 88CD table radio for the living room. It competes against the Bose Wave Radio which is a little better known, thanks to Bose's advertising campaign. We brought it home and it filled the room nicely with sound without taking up much room. Saturday evening we went to Mass and again I ended up volunteering to lector because neither lector had shown up. This is quite common in the summer. After we put the kids down to bed, Michelle and I reminisced about the people we knew in Dayton, Ohio when we lived on base. (More on this in a bit...)
Sunday Michelle made burgers on the grill for lunch. After the boys' lunchtime nap we went to visit the Swopes for a couple of hours. Paul lent me his copy of This Tremendous Lover. Despite its risque title, it's considered a classic in Catholic spiritual reading with 35 printings to date. I read the first chapter this morning and so far it seems very good! When we got home from the Swopes we ordered some gyros and baklava from down the street. Although it wasn't quite the same as I get it at Squabs in Chicago, they did at least put plenty of gyro meat on the pita, which is more than I can say about most places in Nashua.
So as if to make Monday a very deja vu day, Michelle saw someone she knew when we lived in Dayton: Mary Martinez. Michelle called her after they quickly crossed paths at the YMCA this morning. It turns out the John and Mary Martinez moved up from Arizona last month. He is now working here in Nashua for BAE (formerly Sanders). They will come over tomorrow night for dinner, along with their son, Drew. It seemed like an episode of the twilight zone when Michelle called me at work today to say that they had moved to Nashua when only a couple nights before we remembered them and the many other couples we met living on base.
That's about all for the news; now for a little web news. I'll soon be removing some of the older pictures from the Sights and Sounds web page. My MV account gives me 20 megabytes of web space and I'm currently at 25 megabytes, mostly in pictures. In the early part of the year I wasn't very careful about using decent compression in the pictures, which was part of the reason why they took so long to download. Perhaps I'll move the first several months worth of pictures to a Geocities web account. You'll see advertisements, but at least it won't cost me any more.
If you follow my writings a bit, you know that I use a program called the GIMP for digital photo and graphics editting. If you wanted to make logos and buttons with almost no learning curve, then check out CoolText.com. They render logos and such for you. Secretly the power behind their web server is the GIMP generating those logos. It's nifty if you want to make a quick logo for free.
That's all for now. Enjoy the photos and have a great week!