jacko the weblog » chris

Puppy!

chris — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:21:23 +0000

Holidays are like a Roller Coaster

chris — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:55:11 +0000

They say that spending time with the relatives over the holidays has it’s ups and downs. This video demonstrates that this is true. Literally.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXN2uvMRr8s[/youtube]

Front seat: Uncle Buzz and myself. Back seat: the nieces Madison and Brianna outta Texas. And the car in front: Aunt Susan and cousin Brenda.

Filmed the day after Christmas on the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. At right is a picture snapped by the coaster cam, revealing my filming technique, using my not-so-steady-cam. This done with my new Olympus 790SW.

Natalie’s Passion for Pottery

chris — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:41:01 +0000

At Natalie’s school, they have an activity period every day and they gt to choose what activity they want to do. These activities range from academic things, like science and reading, to arts and crafts, like painting and weaving, to physical activities. Natalie has been telling us that she’s been spending alot of her school activity time in the clay room this year. But we had no idea what she was really up to. Last year most of her clay time was spent turning dry clay into dust, and then back into clay again with water. Why? Because it’s fun, of course.

But this year, being in fifth grade, Natalie’s old enough to use the pottery wheel. And it turns out she really has a knack for it. As Christmas approached she started sneaking pots home. Occasionally she’d show one to us. But it wasn’t until after Christmas that we realized how many awesome pots she had made. I think everyone in our family got a Natalie-spun pot this year, and they’re all beautiful. The picture at the right shows just a few, but we counted twenty of them!

Natalie’s Tenth Birthday: Bowling!

chris — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 02:01:20 +0000

Natalie’s birthday bash was hosted at the Redwood City Bowl. It was wild. It was Crazy. There was pizza. There was cake. There was a dance-off. Oh, and there was bowling.

See all the birthday pics!

And then I let Natalie’s friends, Shayna and Becky, use my camera…

See all the wide-angle madness!

Costa Rica: The Summary

chris — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 19:26:33 +0000

Here’s a summary of all of the Costa Rica postings we did over the last couple of months. All blog entries were written by Edie on location.

Getting There… – From San Francisco to Tortuguero
Tortuguero – Our first destination, the water jungle.
The Green Sea Turtles by Night – An egg-laying adventure.
Tortuguero – Part 2 – More Jungle experiences.
Tortuguero to Arenal – Getting from the Caribbean coast to the volcano.
Arenal – A few days around the erupting volcano.
From Arenal to Monteverde – The wild ride to the Cloud Forest.
Monteverde – Adventures in the Cloud Forest.
From Monteverde to Osa Peninsula – From the jungle, to civilization and back into the Jungle.
El Remanso – The amazing lodge on the edge of nowhere.
Exploring the Osa Rainforest – hiking and hiking and hiking the peninsula jungle.
Exploring the Osa Rainforest – Part 2 – More hiking! in the Osa.
El Golfo Dulce – Boat trip to the Osa Wilderness Sanctuary.
From Osa Peninsula to Civilization – The last few days and home.

Boo! Photos From All Hallow’s Eve

chris — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 05:03:01 +0000

See all the Scary Photos!

Is it Chipolte or Chipotle? Don’t ask Thunderbird…

chris — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:49:48 +0000

I was trying to spice up an email tonight by adding interesting words. “Chipotle” was one of them. Thunderbird, my mail client, usually does a pretty good job of helping me find the correct spelling of fancy words like that, but my attempts at spelling chipotle seemed to have stumped it. Is it chipolte…

Or is it chipotle… I guess I’ll never know.

Wow, surprisingly I don’t think that Jack-in-the-Box commercial where Jack can’t pronounce “chipotle”.. chippa wah, chipa-who.. is on the internets. I just spent 15 minutes looking for it. I didn’t find it so it’s probably not there. I did find this one though:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3je86z5b42U[/youtube]

Squirrels in our Hood Hate Halloween

chris — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 03:24:20 +0000

This is what we came home to this evening. Some nasty squirrel had bored hole in the pumpkin we just paid too much money for, excavated it’s innards and left it to rot on our front porch. If it were closer to Halloween we might have been able to improvise… “oh, well the hole left by that horrible rodent can be the mouth”. Maybe we can still make pie. Does the baking process kill rabies?

The Devil is in My Car

chris — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 03:04:44 +0000

Driving home today I noticed that the Temperature was 66 degrees, I had driven 66 miles since my last fill-up and I had 3566 total miles on my car. That’s simply got to mean something! If I had been driving 66 miles-per-hour at the time, might I have been sent straight to H-E-double-matchsticks?

From Easter to Costa Rica

chris — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 06:29:16 +0000

Ok, time to get back on the ol’ blogging horse. We’ve got some great stories to tell about our Costa Rica vacation, so here’s a little lightening round of the happenings the four months leading up to it. Let’s see… I only really remember the things we took pictures of, so…

April, a big family picnic on the beach. What better way to spend Easter.

May, Natalie’s debut in the Peninsula School rock concert. It was incredibly amazing to see her up there singing and playing guitar in front of hundreds of people. You can see from the pics that she was dressed for the part. Kids from fourth to eighth grade performed songs from The Beatles to the Chili Peppers to Kelly Clarkson. It’s the high point of the school year, for sure.

June? Hmm…

July, Fourth of July fireworks in Livermore (Ooooh, Aaaaahhh). Natalie and cousins making funny faces. And a watching the US Women Soccer team defeat Japan.

August, Natalie returned to Camp Kennolyn for, as it turns out, her fifth year. Also, old friends who moved to Switzerland (Wendy, Patrick and their son Daniel) came by for a visit.

Onward…