November has been a busy month, and a big hilight was having the Cam & Coralie Koch family visit us.  (By way of explanation, Coralie is my younger sister, Cam is her husband, and they have four children Ellie, Kayli, Kiersten, and Ethan who are good friends and cousins).  They spent a week at our place in early November 2014, and we were able to spend two Saturdays together on outings in the Houston area .

On the first Saturday together, we spent the day at Space Center Houston, the tourist part of the Johnson Space Center.  I have a lot of pictures that I will post (likely spread over 5 blog posts).  Rather than a lot of words of explanation, I am going to attempt to use the Gallery format, and embed a lot of the stories into the “Description” field of each picture. OK (says Ben about a week later – that is not going to work – so it is going to look like a traditional post with inserted pictures). On to Space Center Houston.

Upon arriving at Space Center Houston, the first thing that you see is this large, real Boeing 747 carrying a real Space Shuttle. The technical NASA term for the aircraft is the SCA – Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. It (and a sibling) were used to take the Space Shuttles from wherever they landed (typically at an Air Force base in California, although I could be mistaken) back to Florida for the next mission.

And a bit later (on the tram tour which you will hear more about in future posts) we had this view of the Shuttle and the SCA.

The next picture taken in the parking lot was this great picture of Heidi. It was pretty cold that day, so she is sort of bundled up and is possibly shivering.

The rest of this first SCH post is just going to be some of the random people pictures (random pictures of people you know rather than pictures of random people – although upon review, there are random people in the background of some of the photos). Most of these were taken waiting in line for a specific theater showing of current happenings in space.
Here is Heidi and Kiersten, good friends.

Next up are some pictures of Lori, Danaya, and Daelynn.

And last up are some pictures of Brock, those are always a hit (with us anyway), and we always end up with quite a bunch of them. He’ll be growing up quickly, so enjoy them while you can.

And that’s it for this post. The next posts will have a little more detail about the rest of the Space Center Houston visit.

Ben

I was just playing with an Adobe app on my iPad (Adobe Shape CC) which creates vector drawings from pictures taken. So, here is the test – what is going on in the following “inkblot” picture?

For the past few (18?) years, we have chosen to do a family activity rather than go trick or treating at Halloween.  This year, some of the folks at the culdesac we lived on last year invited us over for their Halloween block party.  Ben, Lori, Davison and Brock headed over to join in the festivities. 

Danaya, Daelynn, Mikaela, and Heidi hosted a Girls’ Night with some friends at our home, which included pizza and ice cream, handing out candy (we’re in a quiet area so not much activity), a fire in the fireplace, and watching a movie.

The boys had fun with their costumes.  Davison wore the armor that Rett made for him Christmas 2012 and toted a plastic sword and shield.  Brock went all out, getting the girls and Mom to help him create a robot costume. 
I didn’t get a picture of Davison in costume, but here are some Brock pictures.  Both boys ended up with a whole lot of read “way too much”) candy.

Things are cooling down in Houston, although it is still 81 degrees as I write this just before 9:00 pm on a Friday night in early October. The cool down includes the pool, so last Saturday we got out the wetsuits (originally purchased way back when for our Oregon trips). In Fact over the years, you’ve probably seen pictures of all of the kids wearing them. They work quite well in cutting down the chill from the water. But they also provide some extra buoyancy, which is welcome to some of our kids who have heavy bones and don’t float well (like Davison).
So here are a couple of pictures from this evening. They aren’t very good as I took them with my iPad (no flash) and then used Photoshop Touch to jack the light way up.