The theme for May was hobbies.Our newest hobby is called
Geocaching. In geocaching, someone caches a collection of objects
somewhere and publishes the latitude and longitude of the cache on the
web. We then take our GPS and try to locate the cache. When we find
the cache, we are supposed to leave an entry in the logbook, take an object,
and leave an object. It's sort of a cross between a hike and a treasure
hunt. Caches are rated on the internet with regard to difficulty and terrain.
We've gone three times and enjoyed each one, although the last trip was hotter
and harder than we had planned. For more information, go to www.geocaching.com.
One thing that occupies Marc's time is speaking to high school classes on sex
education topics for Planned Parenthood. In May, they sent him to Sacramento
to lobby legislators. The day was a success, and Marc had a good time.
Jackie's hobby is genealogy and May had two major genealogical events.
First was a family get-together with cousins from Houston. Several
cousins that we rarely see attended and Jackie was able to gather a bunch of
information from them. In addition, it was fun to see the reaction of
several cousins when they saw 1930 census pages with their parentsnames that
Jackie had found.
The second event involved Marc's family. Jackie was pleasantly surprised
when Ann, a distant relative of Marc's, contacted us after happening across her
name on Jackie's genealogy website. Jackie was surprised because she had
not updated the genealogy information in a year and a half, and her email
address was out-of-date on the website. Ann proved up to the challenge,
and managed to track us down. She then provided Jackie with lots of
corrections and additional information. Jackie has since updated her
website, a task that was harder than expected, as after a year and a half and a
new operating system, neither the program nor the report she uses to generate
the webpages worked.
Theater is a hobby, right? We saw "The Producers" on Mother's day (sans
kids) excellent show! Jackie's parents also treated us and the boys to
"Annie Get Your Gun". While "Annie Get Your Gun" is more appropriate for kids
than "The Producers", it's basically a love story, so the kids did not enjoy it
as much as they had other musicals. Afterwards, they did have a really
good time inventing new verses to the song "Anything you can do, I can do better."
Another family hobby is pets. Last month, we wrote about our ancient
hamster. This month, he proved that all good things must come to an
end. We were sad to lose him, but it was not traumatic, since we had been
warning the boys for months that he would not last much longer!
The other thing that ended this month was track. Marc and Jackie were not
sad to see it end, as it had been a tremendous time investment. Jonathan
was actively glad to see it end, as it was more work than he really wanted to
invest. Benjamin really enjoyed track, as can be seen by the fact that he
repeatedly chose to run the 1500 (4 laps around the track!)
We hope life is treating you well,
Marc, Jackie, Jonathan and Benjamin