Eduardo se formou (graduated)

My friend Eduardo from Brazil graduated with a degree in Business. I talk about him, but in case you don't know what he looks like, here are some more recent pictures. Bethany met him when we went down to Brazil. His mother made her specialty beans and rice for us.

The top photo is a picture of him on a school conference in Brasilia. He flew for the first time. He was selected from his school because of his good grades. This is amazing because his public school education wasn't sufficient enough for him to even take their equivalent of the ACTs. He had to take a semesters course just preparing him to take the test. He was in a motor cycle accident his last semester and was in the hospital for weeks. He had to have surgery on his ankle. He was able to make up the work and in late June graduated.

The bottom picture is his family, left to right: Lucia, his mom, Eduardo towards the back, his older brother ( Andre if I am not mistaken) and his sister Carmen. Their brother Jorge isn't in the picture, and Carmelo, his dad died the week Bethany and I flew out there.

Bryce

This is a photo from cousin Bryce's facebook page from when he was an interpreter in Iraq. I think that it is the coolest.

July 4th

Yellowstone

Yellowstone trip turned panoramic:

Ketchup

Went with Bethany and Celeste to the Bingham Copper Mine.


I have a strawberry patch in my flowerbed.



They replaced the bad concrete in front of my condo.

Hiked with Crenshaws up to some pictographs at Parish Canyon (Centerville).

Annie

My niece Annie was born with a baby mullet.



She likes to suck on her fist, and keep it up to her face.

She has adoring fans.

And she wears bows when she has to.

Memorial Day

Rawlins, Wyoming. Home of Penny's Diner, where we ate dinner and this two-sided car.

We drove past Devil's Gate and Martin's Cove, as shown here, as well as Independence Rock, which is just a few miles north of here.

The Black Hills are pretty. We ate a lot of buffalo burgers, steaks and ribs.

This is the view from our hotel room in Keystone. Lots of tourist traps in the black hills. This creek would become a raging river two days later due to all of the rain from Sunday and Monday.

Saturday we drove down to the Windcave National Park. We were fortunate to get tickets for the 1:00 tour, and saw the delicate box work in the cave.

We kept driving south and saw the mammoth pit museum that houses tons of mammoths that fell into a sink hole. We liked the telephone tours.

We ate at a nice restraunt in Custer, then went to Crazy Horse for the Lazer Light Show. It broke into rain just after this picture was taken, and didn't stop until Monday. I was impressed with how a Polish sculptor who apprenticed on Mt. Rushmore was asked to do a monument for the Dakotas. He decided to devote his life to it. His family of 10 kids have continued the effort. It made me want to be a billionaire so that I could donate money and help them finish it more quickly.

We caught glimpses of Mt Rushmore through the fog. I will never forget the lighting of the monument ceremony in the pouring rain that resulted in a pink glowing fog because the light couldn't penetrate through to the faces.

We did return the next morning and got in on a 10 minute break in the fog and rain. It closed in behind us as we walked back to the car. You can see the unique veins in the granite rock that show up when it rains. Seeing this monument made me want to study American History more. If I took that class in New Mexico, I sure don't remember any of it.

We drove up through Dead Wood (home of Calamity Jane and others) and up to Devil's Tower. The road was washed out, so we had to go a long way.

I wanted to go up to one of the columns and hug it. You had to have a climbers permit to get off of the trail, so I settled for hugging one that fell down the mountain next to the trail. They are huge. There are 5,6,7,8 and 9 sided "Crystals".

Fun trip. Crazy girls. We're already planning a reunion where we watch the slideshow, and I will hand out Mt. Rushmore Rain Ponchos and we will eat buffalo wings.