Hiking!

Hi all,

Below is a slide show, or it might be above. Frankly I'm not entirely sure how this things works. It's taken me damn near 4 days to figure out how to even post a slide show, and it moves a bit faster than I want, but I don't know how to change it so deal with it. My friend Adam and I went hiking this past Saturday to a place called Rainbow Lakes. He had been up in the area a couple months ago and said it was a really neat area and so we decided to go and check out these lakes. We knew it was about 3 1/2 miles in, and he had said that there was an elevation gain of only about 1200ft over those 3 1/2 miles. Gentle slope, I thought to myself. So we parked and started hiking. It ends up that all of the elevation gain is in the first 3/4 mile, and it was super steep in parts. Maybe not quite 1200ft, but a considerable amount. Anyways, so you come to the top of this ridge and then drop down in to a basin and there's about 7 lakes total that you can hike to, all within about 3 miles from the top of the ridge. It was way cool and very pretty up where we were. We fished a lot on a couple of the lakes but didn't catch anything. When we got back to where we were parked there's a little lake and I wanted to try at least once more so I cast in and landed a decent sized rainbow trout. I got it in to shore, was crouched down and had just got the hook out when a voice behind me said, "You got something there?" It startled me and of course, I dropped the fish back in the water. I turn around and there's an older guy with his grandaughter standing there looking at me. I didn't say what I wanted to, but took my loss and skulked away. Just kidding. I told him I did have something but I lost it and then thanked him for distracting me, then I fished for another hour and didn't catch anything. It was still a lot of fun though. Colleen and Silas went and hung out with her brother and sister and other family, because I know you were all thinking, "Well what was Colleen doing while Matt was gone all day?" There's your answer. We just back from the park and took some photos so I'll post those in a couple days.

More Pictures

Here are some more pictures. When it's getting close to his bedtime but we're not quite ready to feed him we take him out in the back yard to distract him. He was being extra cute last night, so naturally Colleen took 500 pictures of him. As you might be able to tell by the first photo here, he was starting to get a little irritated with Colleen and was showing his displeasure by motioning with his finger.

Here's a picture of our hay bale garden. It's not doing too good. The tomatoes are going really good, but everything else we've planted has been getting eaten. Except for the radishes, too. We got a few of those.

Gigantic boy!

Here's a video we took earlier this evening. Sorry it's a little dark. And only 9 seconds long, but Colleen was having issues operating the camera. Here are some pictures.

He got his first shots last week on Friday. He did pretty good. Was fussy for a little bit then we gave him a dose of tylenol and he was fine. Slept almost the whole night, and was laughing and cooing before we put him to bed, so we were pleased. He weighed 14lbs 8oz, and the doctor came in and said, "Normally the goal is to double the birthweight by 4 months but he did it in less than two, so he's doing pretty good. " He's a chunky boy, and still cute as ever. It was funny the doctor gave us chocolates before he got the shots and said that at least she can soothe the parents since there isn't much they can do to soothe him. Not much else is going on. I start school on August 23, so I'm getting pretty excited for that. Hope everyone else is doing good.