Watson Family News

We got back from our summer road-trip vacation to San Diego last week. We had a great time and the kids did great despite all the time stuck in the car. Sheryl just posted all our pictures. Check them out here.

Before we left we made a big list of random things to take a picture of. The results of our photo scavenger are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/sgedwatson/ScavengerHunt.

We’ve been busy with visitors over the last month. My sister Becca came for a week, followed by my friend Ben and his wife Melinda. Then my brother Christer and his wife Katie. Last weekend two of Sheryl’s cousins were here. As always it’s been really fun catching up and hanging out. Plus we’ve gotten a lot of use from our BBQ.

Here are some pictures from a fun day out with Christer and Katie.

famcation (fam-kay-shun) n.: A vacation taken without one’s family.

Last month I got a chance to visit my good friend Ben for his wedding. I got to see Ed, Kirsti, Ben, Bryn and Dan — all good friends from college. After the wedding we went camping for a few days (except Ben, who wisely opted to spend his honeymoon with his bride instead of us). It really felt great to be with my good friends again, and very relaxing not having young kids to be responsible for.

Although the break from parenting was refreshing after almost a week it felt even better to be back home. There are lots of people I go weeks, months or years between seeing. Somehow just being gone a week was enough for me to see Sheryl and the kids with entirely fresh eyes, though.

Oh yeah.  Eventually the raccoon family just moved out on their own and we returned the trap before we got to find out what other animals visit out back yard.

Back in May we set a cage to try and catch the raccoons under our deck.  I came home on afternoon and found — not a raccoon — but this!

Last weekend I was doing dishes Saturday morning and I noticed a raccoon amble across our backyard and climb under our back deck. On one side their is about a foot of space open under the deck, but the ground slopes up until ground and deck meet on the other side. I went and peeked under the deck but could only see the outline of the raccoon shuffling around. I wasn’t sure it was living their or just thought it might be a nice place to sleep the day away.

Well apparently it (she) was looking for a nice safe place to raise a family. Today a pest removal guy came and informed us that we have a mamma and a litter of raccoon cubs. They put out a live trap and baited it with, of all things, Hostess Snowballs. Once the catch the mamma, they’ll remove some boards from our deck to get the babies, then relocate the whole family someplace a little more remote. Or at least farther away from us. Hopefully we can get some good pictures of the event.

Over spring break we all packed into our van and headed down to the wildlife safari. We met my parents there and spent a beautiful sunny morning driving around checking out the wildlife. The animals were pretty much the same ones you would see in a zoo, but it was so much cooler to see them wandering around in the wild — especially when they got close to the car. I’ll post a bunch of pictures in our photo album soon.

Update: Pictures are available at http://www.thewatsons.info/gallery/v/2006_safari.

This morning we were shocked to wake up to 4 inches of snow at our house. Evan’s school was cancelled and I stayed home from work. The other time it snowed this winter we waited too long to go outside and it had almost all melted. Today, as soon as we finished breakfast, we pulled on our winter snow clothes and went outside.

See more pictures in our photo gallery.

Last weekend the place I have worked for the last 9 years moved to a new office building with more space. The rest of the IT department and I had to work all weekend to move servers and setup all the servers and desktops at the new location. Then we worked a full week again. Today is my first day off after 12 straight days of work and I needed it. The new offices are very nice and a major move up from our last building. Here’s a picture of the building I copied from Google Maps. We have the whole 3rd floor and the red arrow points roughly to where my cube is.

My friend Ben always sends me bizarre ecards for my birthday. Here’s the latest one he managed to dig up (signed “your alien friend, Ben”).