Since today is Sam's birthday, I decided to scan some old photos.

After looking at our albums on our 38th anniversary, we decided to preserve these 1971 photos and mementos digitally.

Sam and I spent a week with my grandmother and Oom Frank & Jan in Den Haag. My mom was also there but stayed the whole summer.

Betty had an open house on Sunday to show off her bonsai and tillandsia collections. Quite impressive, especially her 12-year-old ginko trees she started from seed. Looking at all her ceramic figurines and rocks was also fun. A woman after my own heart, Betty loves growing plants and collecting rocks and things to put in her garden!

Summer has arrived at our house!

The clouds finally blew through and we had a beautiful summer day on our last full day with Paul and Carol.

Carol and I spent the afternoon at this wonderful national wildlife refuge less than ten miles from Paul and Carol's cabin(s) at Blue Lake. I had no idea how beautiful the prairie is until visiting this refuge. Besides seeing the prairie as it is being re-established, we also saw oak savannah full of songbirds!

While Carol and I were at the wildlife refuge, Tom and Paul fished on the lake. When we got back, our hosts cooked a wonderful tri tip BBQ and Aaron came out from Maple Grove to join us. Much later that night, I got some night shots of the sky and lake.

We woke up to a cool and cloudy day but had fun time. Tom and Paul went fishing and Carol and I visited Templeton, a town a few miles from the cabin with a great rock store and rescued pet store. Later that day, we all went for a chilly tour of the lake on the pontoon boat.

We left Chicago and flew to the Hubert Humphrey Terminal where Paul picked us up. He drove us directly to his and Carol's cabin where we were pampered for the next four days!

Our first full day dawned with a little rain but not enough to stop a baseball game. We took the train to Wrigley Field and had a fun time watching the Cubs and Cardinals before it was time for the first ALA event. The next four days were spent between library conference and sightseeing - more photos definitely to follow!

It was nice to fly during the daytime. It was pretty clear from LAX across the country until we got to the storms in the Midwest. We arrived in Chicago with plenty of time to check-in and explore our temporary home between the Loop and the Chicago River.

After missing Annual Conference for the first tiime in many years last year (I had broken my leg just days beforehand), it was great to be back! It was shorter than past years, ending on Saturday night instead of Sunday afternoon. Instead of staying in a dorm as we have in the past, Tom and I stayed at the Comfort Suites so he could read and relax at the hotel and meet me for dinner and worship services. I finished my term on the Board of Higher Education and Campus Ministries with one last meeting and by helping with our booth on the quad. The weather was hot but tolerable - a tiny bit cooler than usual with a little breeze in the afternoons.

Don't know what possessed these night critters to come out - maybe it was still cool and dark enough, but I startled the kit who climbed up one of our trees. It took a while for Mom to locate it and join it, but they eventually made it back down under our back porch. They have been washing stuff in our water bowls but appear to have learned that our pond is too deep and steep to catch the fish (hopefully!) [July 1 update: for two nights in a row last week, these two were running and playing on our roof! Now there has been no sign of them and the possum seems to have returned, so I *think* they've moved on.]

I putter with the pond every day, but with the warmer water and new flowers beginning to bloom, it was time to get in and clean out more algae than normal.

We don't get a lot of rain anyway, but rain in June is really unusual. We got .1 inch of rain; a lot for us! (I love the way our late-spring flowers looked after the shower.

Our volunteer from Alan's Swiss sunflowers is tall and strong; still have to plant the seeds I harvested last year!

Sam, Jenn, and Meg came down Sunday night after our Mozart Requiem concert and we had a fun day at UCLA the next day. Later that night, Jenn made strawberry preserves while Sam posed for pictures with me. Too bad he was coming down with the flu so they weren't the best shots but good enough.

As soon as the tulips died back, the irises (even the ones in the pond) went into full bloom. The ones in the frontyard and in the pond started blooming at the end of April and the first couple of days in May. The backyard irises began to open by May 5th.

It took a group of Tibetan monks six days to create a beautifully intricate Compassion mandala out of colored sand at the University Art Museum at UCSB. (Unfortunately, photos were not allowed inside the museum so you'll have to see what it looked like elsewhere.) After completing it on Saturday afternoon, they swept it into a container during a beautifully chanted ritual, shared some of the sand, and then dumped it into the ocean. It was a beautiful experience!

About a month ago, we started hearing a frog croaking loudly every evening. We knew the sounds were coming from around our pond but we never saw the source until the frog stopped making those sounds. We've seen the frog twice - once when it jumped onto the pump fountain, and last Friday when I found it inside our plant hanger.

These bulbs were planted in December 2008 after ten weeks in the refrigerator . . .

After checking out of the Cottage Inn and saying goodbye to Sam and Jenn, we took the 80 east to Reno and and the 395 south for a scenic drive home. Along the way, we got some great views of Mt. Rose and passed Mt. Whitney at dusk and sunset.