For years we have spent the weekend before Independence Day at my parents because my small home town celebrates big. This year there were a couple of new activities. Danny brought his motorcycle, so everyone got a ride:And Ora 5 and Aspen found picking cherries to be a fascinating time:

We're in Havensville for the Independence Day celebration and we brought our bikes, so Enid and I got up early and rode from Havensville to Onaga (6.25 miles) and back. We are still on our mountain bikes so we were slower than we would be on road bikes, but we had an average moving speed of 9.7 MPH which we felt pretty good about especially since we also hit 3 good hills. This was Enid's first experience with those, but she did fine, but her gears need adjusted a bit.

We went to see Wall-E tonight before leaving for a weekend at my parents. It lives up to Pixar's usually high standards and Ora 5 and Aspen sat through the whole thing; we measure movies by their ability to hold our kids attention. Ewan even made it an hour and a half before he became to restless to stay in the theater. This is especially impressive since the movie has little dialogue. Very few words are spoken for the first 45 minutes to an hour of the movie, but it is still able to convey a lot of information and ...

We found this on our tree today:It's wingspan was about an adult's hand span.

Interesting look at the different players in the Katrina disaster. Like many cities New Orleans had no realistic disaster plan and had never tested it, so when it came time to handle the disaster there were many missteps. My only complaint is that the author points out many of these missteps as if the leaders should have still been able to handle those situations without a plan. The author is very fair to also point out when people, including "Brownie" did things right.

I just got back from Seattle on business. I took some time the first day in to see Pike's Place market:buy a coffee from the original Starbuck's:and go to the top of the Space Needle:Washington is one of the states that I had never visited, so it became state #46. The only states that I have not been to yet are Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Montana.

Aspen seems to have trouble saying "Indiana" so she goes around saying "Banana Jones".

Enid and I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tonight and took Ora 5. I wasn't planning on taking Ora, but he has been begging to go and I remember doing the same to my mom and dad when Temple of Doom came out. They gave in to my begging/whining, so nostalgia took hold and forced me to take Ora.The movie was fun, but Last Crusade is still my favorite. I've seen a couple of comments on why Temple of Doom was not as big a hit as Raiders of the Lost ...

This is a very detailed biography of Walt Disney; the audio version was 33 hours long. The author's emphasis is that Walt wanted control so he could create perfection. When he couldn't have that he tired of it and went on to something else: He began with animated shorts and kept pushing to make them perfect: add sound, add color, make the animations more realistic. He then went on to make movies and left the shorts behind for other people to work on. During World War 2 he couldn't make movies because of the demand for shorts for propoganda and ...

After yesterdays interrupted bike ride, we decided to go out tonight. Right now we are riding walking/biking trails and they all run next to rivers, so we wondered what the conditions of the trails would be. I heard that many of the rivers has overflown their banks and on the way home from work I saw parks that were completely flooded.We began our ride at Mission Park in Leawood and took the trail south to Tomahawk Creek Trail and rode it to the end of the trail at Nall & 124th. The trail was remarkably good, but we ...