Strange rumblings in the night....

We are having the craziest storm here tonight. We had huge winds, blowing rain, and then from inside the house we started noticing a lot of light flashes outside and neverending thunder sounds. Which is what it was. There is nearly constant lightning in the sky, but horizontally, up in the clouds, not from sky to ground. And the thunder isn't stopping. Hasn't for a good 20 minutes at least. I'm waiting for the 10:00 news to see what the weather man has to say, because I'm sure this will be the lead story. Any weather around here usually is, but this is truly unusual. I've never seen anything like it before. I tried to get a little bit of video, and if I ever figure out YouTube, I'll try to post it, but it probably won't do justice to what we've been seeing.

Matt's Saturday night

No pictures for this one, but Matt got to go to the Diamondbacks vs. Florida Marlins game last Saturday night. Misty May-Treanor, half of the Olympic beach volleyball gold medal winning team, was there. Her husband is a catcher for the Florida Marlins. Matt said they put the camera on her at one point so that you could see her up on the fancy new screen at the ball park and she held up her gold medal for everyone to see, and the crowd went crazy! He said it was a lot of fun!

A few more Utah pictures

Here's the closeup of Collin. Real baby men wear purple.

At the resting point of our Snowbird walk, Christopher took over the camera: Here is me with Jimmy, from a lower point of view.

Here's an almost centered, just slightly skewed picture of Jimmy and Daisy, taken by Toph.

A quite nice picture of the scenery around us.

Finally he handed the camera back to mom and posed for one last shot before heading back down the hill.

Utah trip

We went to Utah the first week of August to be at the blessing of my brother's new baby. It was a really good week!

We stayed with my parents in Taylorsville. They have a canal that runs behind their house. Christopher liked to go out every morning to feed the ducks. Here he is with my dad. You can see how the duck feeding went: one piece for the ducks, one piece for Christopher, one piece for the ducks...

Christopher had a very good time getting reacquainted with Grandma Hail. We live so close to Matt's parents that when we got to Utah Christopher was saying: "I have two Grandmas? And two Grandpas? Cool!"

The star of the trip, little Collin Matthew Hail. We got a closer picture of just the baby, but this really captured how sweet Christopher was with him. He wanted to help with everything - holding him, feeding him, making him laugh. It was fun to watch. At one point he said "Baby Collin is my cousin? Another cousin? I'm going to have to come visit him again more!"

On Friday we drove up to Snowbird with Jimmy & Daisy to meet up with my parents (my dad was up there for a conference for a few days). It was very pretty and we had a really good walk up to this lookout point. Christopher climbed up on this bench and proceeded to give directions: "Mom. Take my picture right here. Just like this. Wait, let me look out at the trees. Okay, now!"

Christopher with Uncle Jimmy. Toph got tired about halfway back down the trail, so he got to ride on some shoulders and take a little break.