Back in Texas

We got back last night from our visit to my daughter/son-in-law/granddaughter in California. My granddaughter is beautiful, of course, I'm a bit prejudiced. I think I'm really going to enjoy being a grandfather. In some ways, it's even better than being a father. For one thing, when you think the baby needs a diaper change, you can just hand her back to mom or dad :-)

The blessing on Sunday was really nice. My son-in-law's father was in attendance, but wasn't able to stand in the circle. I was glad I was able to be there (as the only other family member in the circle), but it made it a bit awkward at the same time.

My wife made a beautiful blessing dress for the occasion with lots of embroidery. Not 15 minutes after the blessing, she had a diaper blowout. And I mean blowout - it got everywhere! My daughter had put on a white onesey under the dress which they ended up just throwing away. My wife and I drove back to their apartment during Sunday School so that we could wash out the dress and hang it up to dry (so it would be clean for pictures afterwards). But, we were back in time for Priesthood and Relief Society.

Speaking of pictures, I took a ton of them. I nearly filled up two 1 gig flash cards. Some of the images on one of my flash cards were corrupted. Fortunately, I had the foresight to copy the images to my daughters computer and had her burn them to a couple of CDROM's before we came home. But, it does have me concerned. Does this mean one of my flash cards is going bad? The card with the corrupted images happened to be the one that was in the camera. Would it have been better to remove the flash card from the camera before going through airport security? I'm going to have to do some more research on this.

As expected, most of the pictures were of my granddaughter. But not all. Being on different time schedules, my wife and I were always up earlier than everyone else, so we would go for morning walks. I always carried my camera and took a few pictures on those walks (mostly of flowers, how gay is that?). We also went to Hollywood on Saturday where I took quite a few pictures. There are a lot of weird people in Hollywood. I saw Spiderman, Jack Sparrow (two of them), Chewbacca playing a guitar (apparently, Jack Sparrow and Chewbacca are best friends as they were always together). I saw Michael Jackson with his Mermaid girlfriend. And there were a bunch of other people that I wasn't sure who they were supposed to be.

Here are a couple of pictures I took while we were walking around the Chinese Theater in Hollywood (an idea for a postcard):

Californians as they view themselves	Californians as everyone else views them

Sorry I couldn't resist.

I hope I didn't offend anyone who happens to live in California. I was actually born and raised in California (didn't move to Texas until after I was married, graduated from college, and had two kids). So, I'm not laughing at you - I'm laughing with you.