Melissa, Andy and the kids' Blog

For starters this is my wife, and a woman, and a baby.  I don't know the woman with glasses or the baby, but Melissa says they are nice people.  Anna taught with Melissa at Amelia Earhart Elementary her first year there and now she lives in Houston. Melissa went to see Anna while Mark and I went to his shop to change the fluids in the truck and get everything ready for the drive home. The real driving force behind our trip to Texas (ha, "driving force") was to purchase a truck from Mark while he still worked for a dealership. This is the truck, 2007.5 Chevy Silverado 2500HD Duramax diesel which Mark found for me at auction.  I gave him a long list of must haves and a budget to accomplish them and he did it!  He found me my dream truck on budget. Friday we went for a drive to Galveston. These are the Larsen's, Melissa served in Alvin, TX as a missionary when Bishop Larsen was serving as bishop. We stopped to share a snow cone and chat...

After we went to the East Coast, we decided we would hit Houston on the way back home.  Yes, I know it isn't exactly on the way, but Andy was more than willing to make it on the way because he was getting a truck. However, I would say that we went to visit my brother, Mark, and his girlfriend, Ashley, and I was also going back to see my mission.  Well, we arrived in Houston the evening of March 13th.  The next day we toured some interesting parts of Houston with Mark. We ended up going to an industrial lot where an artist (David Adickes) stores his sculptureworx.     The sculptures were huge. We had a little fun with them!!!         Some weren't completed yet, so Andy and Mark thought they would finish a couple.       Here are some that were actually completed.     Then we dropped by the beer can house.  Some guy retired, and ...

Our second day we wanted to see the White House and the National Mall. Our hotel was just a few blocks from the White House so we thought we'd walk there to start our day. It was raining and we were soaked through by the time we'd made it the few blocks. On our tour the day before the tour guide told us that if the President is "home" there will always be snipers on the roof, there were snipers there on our day 1 and no snipers day 2, so either the President wasn't home or the snipers are afraid of the rain. We walked the whole perimeter of the grounds and enjoyed the rain. We amused ourselves with silly faces and Melissa's instruction to "look cute" resulted in me standing with my head tilted to one side (Zoe looks cute when she does it, so I gave it a try too). Sorry for the self portrait photos, but the kind middle eastern couple who offered to take a few pictures for us somehow managed to miss getting the White House in the ba...

Time to catch up on my blog!!!  On March 11th we left Pennsylvania for a 2 day trip in Washington D.C.  We decided that we would take the trolley on the first day.  That way we would get a good look at everything. There was so much to see, so we were only able to get off at a few stops.   Our first stop was at the Jefferson Memorial.  It had a beautiful view of D.C.            The walls of the memorial are inlayed with beautiful quotations about God and country.       Back on the trolley!   There were some cool statues on our drive to Arlington Cemetery.     Due to the trolley schedule, we only had 30 minutes to speed walk it through Arlington Cemetery, but we saw unspeakable sights.     Then we had a quick stop at the Lincoln Memorial.   We even ran into a LDS missionary couple, who were more than willing to ...