Survey says….

It’s only early July, and we’ve had quite a bit of activity this summer! For those of you who like pictures, there are many.

In early June, we visited Kevin and Linda in their new town and new church. They live about 30 minutes from Calaveras Big Trees State Park, so we spent Saturday afternoon hiking in the South Grove, which I highly recommend over the North Grove if you really want to get into the forest. The weather was amazing, ranging from a sunny 70 degrees to overcast and raining. Along the trail, we found ourselves about 30 yards from a brown bear cub who was just foraging in the bushes. I didn’t have the camera out, so no pictures. The cub ran off, and after we waited quietly to make sure mama bear wasn’t coming to eat us (parents, tell your kids whatever you want about bears), we continued on the hike. Did I mention how big the trees are?

Jen tries to wrap her arms around the concept of how big these giant sequoias really are.

Recreating our wedding dance at Big Trees.

Kevin didn't get the memo...

I’ve been playing in a co-ed softball league with some colleagues, and in our fifth game, I started out playing first base. Even though Jen will say otherwise, I did some stretching and warming up before the game. Apparently it wasn’t quite enough. As I did what any good first baseman would do and stretched to try to catch an errant throw while keeping one foot on the base, I heard a pop in my groin area and promptly fell down without catching the ball. I’ve had groin injuries before, but not this bad. The injury happened on a Thursday, and this bruise showed up on Sunday.

The bruise as it first appeared, 3 days after the injury.

The week after that, we drove down to Santa Barbara for Jen’s sister Amy’s wedding. Amy is the youngest of the three sisters, so you can imagine Dad’s relief!

Whew...almost done with the third wedding!

It’s much different when you’re just in the wedding and not the people getting married. You can actually goof off a little during rehearsal!

Gotcha!

After the rehearsal, we headed to Amy’s then-boyfriend, now-husband Jim’s aunt’s house for a tasty meal of tri-tip. The baked beans were good too, and there was some other food, but I don’t really remember it.

Mmmmmm...tri-tip!

After a week of hobbling around and a total of 13 hours driving to and from Santa Barbara, my bruise changed a little. I wonder if my low platelet count (99k at last visit about three weeks ago) has something to do with this?

The bruise after a week of interacting with gravity.

We enjoyed a quiet 4th of July weekend at home. I took advantage of my holiday off work, and with the help of a few good friends (thanks to Sean V., Eric C., and Rob C.), finally got started on that shed I mentioned last summer by pouring concrete on Friday morning…and early afternoon. I’m pretty sure they made a mixing error and gave me too much concrete, because we had to scramble to build additional forms for places to put an extra 3/8 of a yard of concrete! Either that, or I just miscalculated how much I needed. Since we were pretty busy with that, I didn’t take any pictures of the process. More to come as actual construction begins!

On the actual holiday itself, Jen had to work. It was one of the two holidays that she signed up to work at the beginning of the year. We wanted a quiet (relatively!) evening at home, so we just had dinner alone and watched a movie, and briefly went around the corner to see the neighborhood fireworks.

Happy Independence Day!

Let’s see…what else? Oh yeah, Jen is about 21 weeks along now. We had an ultrasound today, and TJSJr. (XX) is developing just great. Our ultrasound technician happened to be the employee of the month this month, and we experienced no less than excellent service from her. I’ll add an image from the ultrasound tomorrow.

Jen at 21 weeks.

Tuesday morning edit: Ultrasound picture added.

Already sucking the thumb!