Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall

Or with the snowfall, as the case may be. Only a couple of days left in March, and we had snow on the ground this morning.

Winter may be hanging on all it can (Bogus Basin got 18" of snow in the past week), but spring is trying hard to fight back.

Here are a few photos of the daffodils that are in bloom now.






And some other flowers... crocuses, I think.




Another sign of spring -- the birds are coming back. Here's a robin with an interesting color scheme. He (?) has lived in our yard for the last three years.



Ordinarily the birds all look alike, so it had never occurred to me that birds fly south and then come back not only to the same general area, but to the same yard. I wonder how far robins go for the winter. And how do they get that far away, and then remember exactly how to get back and where to come to? Pretty amazing.



Sunny wants to go out and play.




But he gets a lot more spoiled when he says inside.

Pictures At An Exhibition

Recently Daniel participated in the regional National History Day competition.



Daniel and his partner chose to research the Cuban Missile Crisis.



They gathered materials, put together the presentation, wrote a supporting paper, and described their exhibit to judges.



They learned a lot about the incident.



And had fun doing it.



Good job, Daniel!

I Love A Piano

Here are a couple of photos from a piano recital on February 27. Everyone did a great job!



Yumiko enjoyed playing on the very nice grand piano. Maybe someday, if we win the lottery or something...

White Room

We've recently been doing a bit of a remodeling project. With Rachel away at school, Lisa decided she wanted to switch rooms. Her room and Rachel's room are essentially identical, but it's not my job to understand why. Anyway, since we were moving things anyway, we decided it would be a good time to replace the somewhat nasty carpet in the two rooms. And since we were doing that, we might as well paint over the wallpaper in Lisa's room that nobody really likes. And since we were doing that...

Well, you know how it goes.

Here's a "nearly before" photo of Lisa's room, with its rather stained carpet and wallpaper nobody loves.



First we painted primer over the wallpaper...



...then painted with a nice shade of yellow.



We removed the closet doors, took out the old shelving, tore out the carpet, and patched and painted the closet. I wish we'd gotten before/after shots of the closet, which was painted a rather dark tan color, and had about forty holes that we patched.



And, now nearly done! Trim painted to a lighter color, and new carpet in place. The closet still needs new shelving and new doors to replace the falling-apart old ones, but this is what it looks like now.



Here's Rachel's old room with the carpet torn out and the closet patched and painted. This closet wasn't in as bad a shape, but it still had 30+ holes to patch and was a dark tan color inside. We didn't get a photo before pulling up the carpet, but it was the same stuff as Lisa's room, in about as bad a shape.



And, here it is with new carpet.



There's always something to keep us busy...

Seventeen

Holy cow, it's hard to believe Andrew is seventeen already!



On his birthday Yumiko made chicken katsu. It was really good.



Daniel tried to dodge the camera.



We also went out for some teppanyaki. Everyone enjoyed it a lot.



Mmmm, looks good!



The chef made Andrew a "birthday candle" and we all sang to him.



Andrew's cake. The theme is perhaps a bit obscure, but right now he's really into the video game Minecraft.



About to blow out the candles...



Happy birthday, Andrew!