San Francisco with the Google desserts

Hot Air Ballooning in New Mexico

Last January for MLK day, we went to Albuquerque, NM for vacation. This was the 1st trip of many wonderful trips last year.

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Whites Creek forest

Some of my colleagues, students, and have plante approx 150 trees in this field at Whites Creek High School. We will be studying the effect they have on the environment.

Chillin’ at the dog park

We decided to come romp at the dog park again. It tends to be more rlaxing than walking around on the leash and the kids get to make some friends. We also drove through Shelby Park for the first time since the flood. The golf course is open.
I have also been messing around with some settings in facebook so I am interested to see if this automatically posts in notes.
It has been some time since I have posted on this blog. I guess I haven’t been feeling like sharing much. We’ll see if that changes. I have been focusing my energies in other places, specifically work and baseball. We have been doing some pretty cool things, but wp has not been my outlet. I think I have been putting a lot of photos from recent trips and what not to picasa.
Part of this is figuring out all of the things I can do with this phone.
Any way, I just felt saying all that.

Baseball field

As you may or may not know, I am the baseball coach at the school where I teach, Whites Creek High School. These are some photos of our ball field in the wake of the recent flooding. We were actually spared compared to the softball field, but you can see from the detritus that the waters must have been quite high. There is debris all the way to the top of the fence. The season is pretty much at the end at this point, but I thought I would share the images.

Land Between the Lakes

Violet and Chippers ready to go!

We spent our Thanksgiving holiday hiking the North South Trail at Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in Kentucky/Tennessee. This is a 60 mile trail that goes from the North Welcome Station to the South Welcome station in the recreation area.

This is one of the many bridges that we had the opportunity to cross, this is one of the very stable ones. They varied greatly in construction strength, like this one that was rated to five tons to others that bounced up and down as we walked across.

We started on Wednesday with the intention of hiking about 15 miles. We were having a lovely day of walking and we took a lunch break at the Moss Creek Day Use Area.

We had a meal of open face bagel sammiches with cheese and bologna.

We had a very nice view of the Kentucky Lake.

We had the intention of spending our first night at the Sugar Jack Spring shelter, but as we walked until after it was dark, we somehow missed the side trail to the spring and shelter. We continued on until we found a suitable campsite that was near water and flat. It turned out to be a very nice campsite and we managed to hike over 18 miles our first day out.

The next day we continued our hike and to keep us fueled up, we must take several breaks. This is one where the dogs were tell us, ya know, I could do this all the time.

We ended up hiking about 18 miles the second day as well. We were feeling pretty sore and tired and were thinking about home so the 3rd day we decided we would try to do the remaining 25 so we could go home. Well, it worked out that our feet weren’t feeling that and we decided to stick with the original plan of 15 on day three. We camped near an old fire tower that was quite high. The dogs only made it part of the way up before they decided that was enough.

We went on to finish the remaining 11 miles or so on Saturday and were extremely grateful to be able to sit down for a while. All in all it was a good time had by all including Chippers who got to experience his first long distance trekking.

Award winning

Award winning

Originally uploaded by reuben257

Peach raspberry cobbler, yeah it’s all gone.

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Fresh meal

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Originally uploaded by reuben257

Sweet potatoes and eggplant fresh from the garden today!

Sweet taters

Sweet taters

Originally uploaded by reuben257

I harvested some sweet potatoes and a couple of other things with my mother in law today. The garden season is coming to end, but it is not here yet. We have another row and half of taters to dig up. We still have a bunch of jerusulum artichokes that we can dig up too.  I am not sure what we are going to with those, but I suppose we will figure it out.

We also got some bell peppers, which are still flowering actually, and some little eggplants, which were delicious I must say.

Land between the Lakes

Land between the Lakes

Originally uploaded by reuben257