Spring is being quite fun this year (albeit pretty rainy). In the picture the tree on the right is in our back yard, while the two farther to the left are in our neighbor’s yard. I think the dark pink one is a peach tree. I have no idea what the tree in our yard is, but it dropped a lot of leaves and pods into the pool over the past few months.
On this Saturday afternoon Mikeala and I were taking a walk in the next door park. We came upon huge patches of clover, and we kept seeing beautiful flowers and picking them until we had a bouquet full of wildflowers. We talked about how God can make such little details, and how thankful we are for them.
On the Friday before Valentine’s Day, we participated in a church sponsored progressive dinner for couples, being the final stop, serving desserts. Being inspired by the photo booth at Grandpa and Grandma’s 50th anniversary party, we decided (the day before) to do something similar. We happen to have a lot of dressup clothes for girls, ladies, Knights, monkeys, dogs and M&M’s – but not a lot of dressup clothes and props for grown men. So we scrambled for props, and managed to come up with a few. Meanwhile, Danaya and Daelynn were focused on making the desserts to serve our guests. They baked up a wonderful set of desserts including cheesecake, creampuffs, a chocolate caramel flan, and something else I think. We realized after that we missed taking a picture of the food layout.
Here are some pictures of our kids (with friends) taking advantage of the photo booth setup and props.
it is starting to be springish here in Houston, and I’ve been out doing some yard work. In our front yard there is a section which used to have a couple of large trees in it (as you can see in this picture from Google street view).
Here is what that part of our yard (to the right of the driveway) currently looks like.
One of the things that we’ve done in that area is planting a couple of peach trees. It will be at least a couple of years until we get any peaches, but here is a picture of one of them with some blooms on it.
This one had blooms on it when we purchased it so, We can’t lay claims to having green thumbs yet. We also planted some raspberries and grapes in the back yard, and are also hoping to plant a lemon and a pomegranate tree as well.
On Christmas morning (after we opened stocking stuffers, but before we opened presents), we sang some songs, read a scripture passage and then did a wee bit of reminiscing about Christmas’ past. Here’s the video of the reminiscing part.
http://youtu.be/2m2pGP1vJV8http://youtu.be/2m2pGP1vJV8
Hmm, according to my thesaurometer, I’ve already used up my quotient for the year for the word “reminisce”.
Ben
One of our family traditions is to open stocking stuffers during breakfast on Christmas morning (and to make sure everyone has a few small stocking stuffers). Part of this tradition is that the Huber guys get one or more matchbox cars as part of their stuffers. For your enjoyment is a timelapse video of our fun Christmas morning breakfast together. The young man in black with his back to the camera is Rett, who was able to spend a couple of weeks with us around Christmas this year.
I opened one of my regular gifts before breakfast, as I knew that it was a kit for the iPad which provided a tripod mount for it. I setup the iPad on a tripod, and kicked off the time lapse video recording, taking one shot every 5 seconds. Post video, there was some additional doctoring done to slow to down a bit (extending the video from the original 35 seconds out to about 2.5 minutes, adding some old video artifacts, and a (questionable) soundtrack.
Hope you enjoy it! Today we’re hoping to head off to Galveston and to hit Rudy’s BBQ with Rett.
One of the areas at Space Center Houston that the younger set enjoyed was the kid’s play area, with an Angry Birds theme. Many thanks to Daelynn who took most of these pictures.
The second stop on the tram tour was at the Rocket Park. Out front, they had some older rockets which were used for early Mercury missions and to push early satellites into orbit. The big feature was inside the building, where a Saturn V rocket was on display. This is the rocket that got men to and from the moon back around the time that I was born. My photos from this part aren’t really complete, as I was engaged in some other creative work, which will show up in one of the next couple of posts. But there are pictures of people here who you know and love, so if you want to find out more about just the rocket side, there’s some good sources on the Internet.
This was the second and last stop on the tram tour, I think I have two more posts and then we’ll be done with Space Center Houston.
Ben
On the tram ride, there were two buildings that we stopped to tour. This post is about our tour of the
Space Vehicle Mockup facility. We were pretty happy to get there, as we were all pretty cold from the Tram cross-campus trip.
That wraps up the first building of the tram tour. Please forgive any mocking tone that you detect while discussing NASA technology. I’ve heard (but need to get this post done without being sidetracked any further, so am not researching this) that the computers in the space shuttles were 386 computers, like the one that I bought in 1990. Given that the last one flew in 2011, that’s pretty old technology.
I didn’t get a picture of this, but one of the strange things about driving around the Johnson Space Center campus were all of the classic-type bicycles (i.e. pre-dating 10 speeds, anyone remember those?) parked around the campus. My take is that people use them to get around the large campus from building to building, or maybe ride them from their cars to their offices. There certainly wasn’t room for any of them to hop on the tram.
Ben
Right after we arrived at Space Center Houston we needed to find bathrooms. Right after the bathrooms, we saw the lineup for the tram ride, which was leaving in just a few minutes. So, we decided that it would be good to go for the tour.
Ben
