Zev Newsletter May 2003

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was surprised because she had not updated the genealogy information in a year and a half, and her email address was out-of-date on the website.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