First Day of School 2008

His eyes may not have been open, but he was nearly smiling.

Road trip

To inaugurate our new car, EZZ, Blue and I took a terrific road trip to Washington (State).

Blue wanted to check out Evergreen, as a possible future college, and he wanted to do it independent of his parents - the mistake we made taking Alex and Ellie was to see the college ourselves.

So, Blue stayed with Peter R. and Ruth H. our first night in Olympia, and I got to spend the afternoon with Cappy and the evening and night with Jean and Joel.

I totally fell down on job as far as photo-documention went for that first part of the trip. Since I didn't manage to take a picture of Peter, I've stuck in one I found on the web.



I couldn't find any pix of Ruth, and the best I could do for Cappy was an impossibly lit cell phone pic:



Likewise - no pix of Jean and Joel. Here is a tiny one of Jean from the Evergreen Faculty directory:



After that I got the picture situation in hand. Blue and I reunited for an assault on Colyar who led us on a crazy tour of Capitol Peak - a smallish, partially clear-cut mountain with a lot of radio towers on top. It shouldn't have surprised me - he once took my on a tour of the Redwood City storm sewers in a little zodiac inflatable boat.



Blue didn't actually ride this motorcycle, as it has neither brakes nor clutch - made for a racing oval only.



And here we are with the some of Welsh-Goltz crew. We were in a prenatal class with Mary (on the far right) and her husband before Ellie and their daughter Elizabeth was born. That's their youngest, Maureen and her friend Colleen.



The we headed up to Seattle, did a whirlwind tour of the high spots including the troll under the bridge and Archie McPhees,

Troll

and headed out on the ferry to Port Townsend to see the house that Mike and Betty built



More about Port Townsend next time...

The Data are coming, the data are coming

Ellie's application to use a restricted database for her dissertation has been, at long, long, last, approved! Called the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 , it includes in-depth questionnaires from high school students, parents, teachers and school administrators, along with transcripts over a significant period of time. It also appears to have tighter security than, say, Los Alamos Labs.

Yipee!

Visitors from far and near

July was a great month for visitors.

Letty came down and we took Sparky on a walk at the Beach:



There were huge Jelly fish all over the place. God knows how far they came from, but I haven't seen them again since.



Janet surprised us with a visit from Mexico.



and McKeever came through, He had been in Mexico as well.

New Car

Well, I really tried to buy a Prius - I plunked my deposit money down a couple of days after the accident that ended the career of my old foop.



But alas, after a few weeks of paying for a rental, I got an email from the dealer sayin, essentially, maybe, if you are lucky, in a week or two we will be able to tell you whether or not we'll be able to tell you how much longer the wait will be.

So, I bought a honda fit. Actually my dream car in a lot of ways.



And it's purple!

After considering naming it Fitts's law (that's a human factors joke), or the Little Easy (Blue's idea) I think I'm going to call it EZZ (Ezizi) after the first three letters on the license plate. I'm retiring the Foop plates, along with the Moop ones that came before.