Grand Central Station

Dad met a friend at Grand Central and snapped this photo.

Leah is Home

This is Leah in Port Authority after her trip home from college.

Welcome home Leah!!!

Dad at Work

This is Dad leading a whiteboard session:

Here is what it looked like when he was done.

Cyber bullying

In school, we had to write essays on cyber bullying.  Here is what I wrote:

Bullying is a problem for everybody. Every elementary and middle school has problems with kids picking on each other. With new technology, bullying has taken on a new form. This is a type of bullying called cyber bullying.


Cyber bullying is bullying someone on the internet, with text messages, or through emails. A kid might receive mean emails from a bully. Some people get locked out of their accounts when bullies change their passwords and usernames. Bullies can also pretend to be someone who they are not. Bullies can send mean emails to your friends or send pictures of you without your permission. Bullies can also set up web pages, or post on existing web sites. In our school, this year, someone set up an “I hate ____” Facebook page and invited classmates to join.

Here are some other interesting facts about cyber bullying. Cyber bullying affects girls twice as much as boys. More than 35% of kids have been threatened on line, and more than 1 in 5 had it happen more than once. Most cyber bullying occurs in chat rooms. Seventy-five percent of kids have visited a web site where people are being mean to another student. Cyber bullying has increased in recent years. The number of kids who say that they have been bullied increased has doubled between 2000 and 2005!

There are many ways that a kid can respond to cyber bullying. One way would be for kids to tell trusted adults, but only half of kids who are bullied tell an adult. Also, if someone knows about cyber bullying, even if he’s not the victim, he can go tell an adult. If a kid finds out about cyber bullying, like mean things posted on Facebook, he could go tell the “victim” about it. A third way that a kid can respond to cyber bullying is to refuse to participate, and to tell his friends not to do it either.

There are many ways to prevent cyber bullying. Parents can create safe ways for kids to tell them about bullying and to talk about problems at school. Parents can also keep computers in public places in their houses, so that kids cannot cyber bully in secret. Parents should also know the kid’s passwords and usernames so that they can check on their internet use. This would help if their kid is a victim, a bully, or even just a bystander. Schools can prevent cyber bullying, too. Teachers and principals can make it easier and more private for kids to talk about cyber bullying.

Cyber bullying is a mean way of bullying. It’s even worse than other bullying because people cannot escape from the bullies – it can happen anytime, even when you are at home. It is very important for schools, parents, and kids to be aware of cyber bullying. It is also important to work together to avoid cyber bullying.

Weird Face Time

Every time Leah visits, she and I have a weird face time. This is when we take pictures of each other making weird faces. Here are some weird faces we made.

All Three of Us

To remember this Mother's Day we took a picture of all of us.

Suprise!!

For Mother's Day Leah came up from Rhode island to suprise mom. We had this picture taken at the diner.

Another Day in Tacoma Washington

My hotel is across from the Port of Tacoma so I drove over today and looked around. I took some good videos that I will show you. This is a photo of a container ship that is being unloaded. The boxes get unloaded and then eventually find their way to the back of a train or a truck where they are taken to their final destination.

I spent the afternoon at Chambers Bay park. This photo shows the golf course in the foreground and the Olympic mountains in the distance.

Olympic National Park

Drove to Olympic National Park yesterday. Stopped for lunch at Quinault Lake. Ate at a little general store and then hiked this short loop trail...

The forests in the park are actually rain forests. The area gets 12 FEET of rain per year. The trees grow to enormous size.

I didn't see any cougars, but I would have known what to do if I had...

Then I drove on to the ocean. This photo was taken from the beach looking up. This tree is about to fall down to the beach below.

Here I am standing next to a tree that fell long ago. The beach is littered with these old trees. The forest grows right to the edge of the shore and as erosion happens the trees fall.

A beautiful sunset at Beach 4.

It was a great day. The Pacific Ocean always seems bigger than the Atlantic for some reason.

Safeco Field

Nothing to do this evening so I went to a Mariners game. I got great seats. Wish Seth had been there.

Clear skies in Seattle

Yesterday after work I drove to a place called Chambers Bay that is a public park with a beautiful golf course and walking paths. It was an abandoned gravel pit that was converted to parkland. It was perfect weather for a change, about 65 degrees and no clouds. The people here say that summer is just about perfect weather every day. The problem is that summer only lasts about three months a year. The rest of the time it is cool, cloudy and rainy.

On the drive home I went around a curve in the road and saw Mt. Rainier right in front of me. It startled me it was so huge. It was the first time I had seen it clearly from a distance. It is easy to see why ancient people thought that mountains were gods. It is a massive presence on the horizon. It appears to be so large because it has a topographic prominance of over 13000 feet. In other words it is 13000 feet higher than any part of the valley that surrounds it.

I tried to take a photo of it, but the results did not do it justice. In the photo it looked like a small hill in the distance, but in reality it appears to be huge on the horizon. As the sun set the color of the mountain changed to pink as it reflected the colors of the sunset.

Back to Tacoma

Well, I had to go back to Tacoma. Not happy about being away, especially with Mother's Day this Sunday.
Seth is doing a project about the Mountain West region of the US. It was almost all clouds when I flew over that region today but I did get this one shot of some mountains down below:

Clicked this photo of Manhattan in distance when taking off from JFK.

Wish I was home. It was warm and sunny when I left. It is cold and cloudy out here as usual.

Dancing Time!!

Uh-Oh!! We have to dance!! Actually it was really fun. Learning a part of a culture and learning new moves. Can not have more fun then that.

To the Trees

This is my friends and I praying about the trees.

A Smell of Isreal

Here my friends and I are smelling some spices from Isreal.

On the "Plane"

This is me on the "plane" with my friends.

Going to "Isreal"

This weekend at the temple we had booths set up to look like Isreal. Here are a few photos from the trip.

Dad's Daytrip to Baltimore

I had to go to Baltimore for a one hour meeting. Of course that took the whole day. Rode down and back on Amtrak. Here I am in Cafe Car.