birthdays are to be celebrated

R's 12th b'day! 


Uncle Karl lights candles to an enthralled audience









Goofy Uncle George makes sure all those candles stay under control



The Blakes and Herbers met in mass, plus a few more... I think the number was around 45. We even exceeded our Thanksgiving numbers.  As at Thanksgiving, Callie and Karl hosted the herd.  

Grandpa H gives the birthday girl advice on the attack

"Hey, I'm not too sure I'm into the part about cut your own cake"

"Oh, yeah.  This is more like it"  Aunt Callie to the rescue

Grandpa  and Grandma B visit with friend Vickie W

another follow up from Maranatha media

If you get the quarterly magazine Maranatha Volunteer or you watch Maranatha Mission Stories on TV this is not new stuff... but if you haven't and would like to follow up a little on the Vanuatu project, check out these links.
When you get to Maranatha Mission Stories scroll down and click on "Earth, Water, Fire, Spirit" episode
Click here for a look at the winter 2011 issue of Volunteer.  Vanuatu stuff mentioned on pages 9,14 and on the back cover
photo credit: Dick Duerkson

message from Kit, Glenn Research Center, Cleveland

Happy 70th Birthday, NASA Glenn Research Center. Of course, NASA is not that old. That’s because GRC was created as an aeronautic research facility during WWII, exactly 70 years ago today. When NASA was created, GRC became one of the founding centers. I thought it deserved an email from my NASA account.
Also, I attended one of the internship lectures on Wednesday. It was about the Colombia accident investigation and NASA’s return to flight. The man who gave the lecture also helped produce a video commemorating the Shuttle program, “Ascent”. It’s a 45 minute movie that shows all the engineering films used to evaluate the launch and make sure everything happened according to plan. Things happen very quickly at launch, so all of the cameras are state of the art high speed HD. Almost all of these cameras exist in response to the findings of the Colombia accident investigation. When played back at normal speeds, it could take an hour to just watch a few seconds of the launch. The video was originally produced with just some light background music, but commentary was later added because people were interested in the significance of many of the images, and there was also lots of confusion about the fact that many of the clips were extremely slow motion. We each received a copy of the DVD this week. The video was also added to YouTube where you can watch it. There is a voice recognition closed captioning option that works fairly well on the YouTube video, though it does mess up some of the technical terms. Also, unlike most YouTube videos, the entire 45 minutes is contained on one video. This may cause some problems if you have a slow Internet connection. Or not. Ascent can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2VygftZSCs

Enjoy.

-Kit

Note from the mom:
You can check out NASA Glenn Research Center at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/index.html

change of pace

Starr decided she was really not interested in purchasing another pack of school photos, especially when she had the last several year's worth sitting around gathering dust.  It wasn't like she needed each year's school photos to document her past year's changes, like her students did.  So, when it turned out that picture day fell on a day I was there volunteering, she got the wild idea to have us take one together....an answer to what to give the grandparents for Christmas. When she asked me that morning what color I was wearing and I told her blue, she grabbed a bluet t-shirt, too.  Surprisingly, it turned out to be the same shade.  The kids noticed it the first thing when they saw us that morning...."Mrs. Schwinn.  You and Ms. Katie Jo are matching!"  So this is the photo that resulted which the grandparents opened under the tree. 

liking that sunshine....

It is a gorgeous day in Arizona! 
When I got up this morning for my quiet time, this is the view that greeted me through the window by my "study chair".  Of course, the real thing was far more spectacular.
About mid-morning I went for my walk and actually felt like shade would be welcomed.

Days like this is what makes it worth while to live in Arizona.

Belated report on Christmas

Can't believe we are well into the first week of January and I still haven't gotten my Christmas Day photos on the blog.  Don't know if "late is better than never" but I'm posting them anyway.

We started Christmas day in church.  Kristopher was guest organist and we really enjoyed that.

Asleep where he sits

After running home to change and pick up our contribution to the family Christmas dinner (lunch), we made our way out to meet everyone at Mom and Dad's.  We finished around 3:00 pm and then had Starr open her birthday presents and cards.  I had been working on a patchwork quilt for her but had run out of time... it still had areas with incomplete quilting and it needed to have the edging done...but I gave it to her anyway. (I finally finished it yesterday.)



What an enthusiastic bunch!

 Napping, gabbing, walks, and playing in the park filled the afternoon.  By evening we were ready to start the traditional family units photos by the tree...and then the gift exchange.  My word, twenty-two people make for a lot of paper and ribbons!





Camera toting family being briefed by the peanut gallery

With all the excitement we almost missed this glorious sunset

The cousins

The birthday girl, the eldest grandchild, and the only canine

The baby of my family is the only sib that is a grandparent!



Me and mine

Finally to the important part of the evening!  What a haul.

No formal supper after all the over eating done earlier in the day, but some heavy duty grazing on leftovers took place... The deserts we had been too full to eat earlier were probably not the wisest food choices, but...they really looked good and tasted even better!

partial shot of game players...Geo in his new MN Viking sunhat

Ben and Sarah broke out their "Apples to Apples" game and we did a lot of laughing, finally breaking it up when it was time to take the littlest one home for a very late bedtime. 

what a bunch of hams