Family Mellmann

All summer we have been busy having fun and taking pictures. I finally have updated the website with a *portion* of the 1,800+ photos that we took during our travels to Montana and Illinois and our activities back in Vermont with camps, visitors, and summer fun. I still hope to add some videos of parts of our summer, but for now you can enjoy the photos. Joerg plans to manipulate the videos so that they are smaller file sizes (and therefore quicker to download) before I put them on the website. In the meantime, enjoy this photographic update ("Fishing" and "Tae Kwon Do Ice Cream" are the beginning of the additions).

Cooling off at the pool...brrrrrr

Greetings from Old Faithful!

This day started out calmly (it started rather early for me, as a matter of fact...somewhere around 04:15) and quietly as I spent the first couple hours in the office planning the day and how I was going to get everything done - or at least a few things - along with some fun kid time. By 07:30 Joerg and Patrick were both up and my morning silence was over. I started right off with Patrick's room cleaning - similar in magnitude to scaling Mount Everest - followed immediately by the cleaning of the play room - more like K2 - and by the time we got all that done it was time for a few quick errands and a trip to the park. Alas, our trip to the park was short-circuited by the threat of rain (it had already started to sprinkle while we were running errands) so we shifted our plans to Pizza Putt (a local indoor fun house with pizza, mini golf, arcade, climbing structure...you probably get the picture). While we were there (and, of course, at the same time we were planning to leave) th...

April and May have been busy months. April found us in the middle of our largest ever rental vacancy with three simultaneous vacancies including one with a legal component. By the time we got that under control and filled each of the vacant units it was almost May. Somehow the days always feel full even though the outcomes don't look that impressive, but we have accomplished several things. The vegetable garden is planted, a few flowers are potted and ready to grow and add color to our otherwise minimal landscaping (new construction is so barren), and we have made several attempts to bring a lawn back to life (with only modest success, which is quite disheartening). With May comes the end to many of the activities that we do; MOPS and Cross Connections end, AWANA ends for Patrick, and many end-of-the-school-year activities begin - concerts, recitals, tournaments... There are many new pictures on the website including the most recent from Patrick's Tae Kwon do tournament yest...

I can’t believe it!    Now I can blog via e-mail!   This is great.   Text messages to the blog are great and handy when we’re out and about, but e-mail is much faster.   I don’t know that this will improve my productivity in the blogging department, but it sure is fun what technology can do!

Sunset

Now we wait for the cement to dry.

Dr. Katherine helps the dentist place my new crown.