Air hockey

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Cooking Pine Cones

Step one : find unopened pine cone and wonder how to open it up ...

Step Two : consider and choose a heating option

Step Three : monitor with enthusiasm .. and patience 

Step Four : when no one is looking steal the pine cone from the oven, leaving it wide open to heat the house and hide it somewhere leaving those experimenting alongside you quite puzzled.

Step Five : explain the obvious to fellow experimenters "you should have looked in this box in this cupboard cause of course that is where I would hide it." 

Step Six : delight in the outcome 

Step Seven : wonder some more about where the seeds went .. did they drop out in the carpet during the hiding stage of the experiment .. are they growing in the oven .. where there even seeds inside to begin with .. what does a tree seed even look like .. 

Where there is a stage

.. the Loucks boys will perform (until an audience shows up of course)

KJ with the IPHONE

.. here's what picking up Daddy from work looks like through the eyes of KJ

Mitchel's swim posing

Mitchel hired me as his photographer and insisted I follow him around and "capture my best jumps and some splashing"

Pool Fun

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Happy Hallow Zoo and Park

A big hit though KJ was hoping for more animals.

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String thing

A fabulous creation by K

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When the Wii's broke

Find one that isn't .....

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More with the Mario brothers

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Mario and Luigi

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After

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Before

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The ride home

With traffic it took us close to 1.5 hours to get to our gathering and with five hours of play time ...it is no surprise that this is what the boys looked like
on the way home








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Box maze

The boys and I trekked out past Berkley to a perpetual recess gathering. We brought along lots if boxes as there was a promise of some fancy connectors to make cool box creations. And indeed we did!

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Pajama Easter

.. we discovered much to our relief that even though things like Good Friday and Easter Monday are not official holidays here in sunny California, the Easter Bunny does indeed deliver large amounts of candy and other such treats

.. and because our new vehicle is named Jelly Bean it only seemed fitting to take a spin on Easter and we ended up in a lovely heavily forested national park, just in time for the skies to open up and dump rain in to the afore mentioned forest

.. we are rough and tumble islanders so we got out and went hiking in the forest in our newly adjusted california wardrobes that do not include the kind of protection one generally wants when in a torrential down pour

.. this lead us to race back to the vehicle soaking wet and vow to get in to our PJ's as soon as we got home and stay there .. and that is how we came to celebrate our very first Pajama Easter



Dinner is served

.. Mitchel doing the happy stuffing dance, apparently my first go at stuffing was a hit .. or perhaps he is just thrilled that this stuffing eating did not involve anyone taking a trip in an ambulance

.. then we thought we should document the whole event with portraits ... someone how we missed the one of just Puck and I

and a look at our turkey ... post eating .. it really looks like we did a lot of damage .. however .. the darn thing came without legs, wings and the back spine .. so it was rather odd looking to begin with .. note to self .. buy turkey earlier and carefully read packaging 

and finally we closed out the night with Banana splits, apparently at this point pants were optional 

KJ building a bear.

KJ told us on the way to the mall, that he had seen a commercianal (his own word) for a place where you make your own bear and that he was certain he had seen one near the LEGO store. And that he wanted to 

"check it out' .. the results are showcased above. 

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Life outside the Apple bubble

I have to confess .. I am sometimes less then generous with my attention to all things Apple as of late ... I mean really how many times can I listen to a guy go on about how great it is inside the Apple Bubble with their pizza parties and cake, without feeling a little jealous, resentful left out. And not all of us, would know Steve Wozniak if we bumped it not him at the mall just moments after confessing a strong desire to meet the guy. Some of us .. are just trying to get by in our day do day-ness .. outside the bubble in a foreign country.

Cause you know what folks it is foreign. There are things missing that we are all used to having at our fingertips, there are behaviors, and norms that are implied, that can leave a person looking well, less then normal if they don't know about these hidden social cues. And mostly there are super important people missing from our day to day ness .. and sometimes, that just feels sucky (for lack of a more grown up refined word).

This post is meant to amuse and entertain .. and not as a public admission of marital strife .. Puck and I had a good chuckle this morning .. the conversation ..

Shannon "you have food in your teeth,"

Puck, "Oh ya, they had fresh made bagels at the office,"

Shannon, "beside the scantily clad woman waiting to massage you?"

Puck, "she was not scantily clad!"

Burst of laughter from both followed with, Shannon, "you do understand why its hard to hear your tales of life at Apple."

Nod of affirmation, with out diminishing the smile that has been plastered on his face since Mar. 1st.