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This page has our most recent Byrd Blog entries for 2009
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June 2009
 
In our entry from last month, I was telling you about the photos of our house that I had put into the New House 2009 Photo Album. Since then I have been taking a lot more photos. On the entire west, north and east sides of the development we live in there is a continuous stretch of natural woodlands, swamps, streams, meadows, a river, and wildlife (and I don't mean the party at the neighbor's house down the block!). Within a few minutes' walk from our house, you can feel like you are out in the middle of nowhere!

A few times now I have had the pleasure to meet one of our neighbors, Mr. Cottontail (pictured right ... click on the photo to see it larger with a description). The third time I purposely took my camera so I could get a photo of him to share with you. I've taken a photo journey through the west, north and east sides of the neighborhood wilderness, and collected the best photos into the new Neighborhood 2009 Photo Album. Back in Santa Maria we would have had to drive for hours to find scenery like this. Now it's just a few steps from our house, while still living within the Albany city limits ... amazing! Later this month we should have some more photos of the inside of our house, for those of you who love peeking in the windows of other people's houses as you pass by!

Jeremy's been saving up his pennies, and not too long ago he bought himself an electric guitar. He has really been enjoying practicing on it, and this summer he is taking some lessons from an older friend of his. Even Olivia's been getting in on the action, as you can see from the video below, as she plays the intro to a song written in her beloved mother-country, Switzerland ... maybe you've heard it before?
 
Even though Joanne hasn't been playing licks on the electric guitar, rumor has it that there has been smoke coming from her violin as she has been practicing furiously for numerous recitals at the end of this school year! The latest one (photo to the right and video below) was a gathering of all of her violin teacher's students, giving a recital at the Corvallis public library.

Joanne was part of a quartet, playing the 2nd and 3rd movements of Vivaldi's Concerto for 4 Violins in B minor, Op. 3, No. 10, RV 580, with fellow students Claire, Hannah and Tatiana. The eleven and a half minute video clip below starts when they arrived early at the library to practice together, and finding no music stands, they laid out their sheet music on a counter at the back of the room and went at it.

After running through it once, in order to allow other students to practice their pieces, they then went out into a hallway in the library. But they couldn't very well practice there (you know ... at the library you're supposed to be quiet!), so while one of the girls snapped her fingers to the rhythm, they all tried to play the piece in their heads. Hmmmmm...

Since that didn't work so well, they headed outside to practice in front of the library. Some library patrons stopped in their tracks to listen and watch such a sight. I asked the girls if I should run back inside and grab a violin case to set by their feet ... maybe they would get some quarters!
 

After running through it a couple of times outside, they headed back in and gave their performance at the end of the recital. It was a stretch for Joanne to play with that level of students, but she definitely rose to the occasion. When you're done watching the video to the right, don't forget to visit Tatiana's Web site. (The video file is kind of on the large side, so if it seems to pause a lot while you are playing it, you should probably click on the video once to start playing it, then click on it again to pause it, and wait a few minutes while it downloads ... if you move the mouse over the video, you can see the progress bar ... the gray bar has to get all the way to the right ... your patience will be rewarded with a smooth-playing video. Also, you might need the latest version of the free Adobe Flash Player software, available by clicking here.)
 

May 2009
 
Time flies when you're having fun! We're still digging out of the avalanche of things that need to be done around the house. Between that and going to work (homeschool for Catherine and the kids) there's not much time or energy left over for anything else.

We've been busy with projects both inside and out. In the photo to the right you can see the northern end of our backyard. To see this photo (and other photos of our new house) larger, with descriptions, go to our New House 2009 Photo Album.

Hopefully we will get some closure on some more of our inside projects so we can bring you some inside photos next month. Until then ... have a great Memorial Day weekend ... this is the Byrd Family over and out....

...Well ... speaking of Memorial Day weekend ... this weekend we went for an outing at one of our favorite places to walk: Silver Falls State Park. By 5:30 AM everyone was up preparing sandwiches and making last minute preparations. At 6:00 AM we were on the road. At 7:00 AM we were in the town of Silverton having breakfast at McDonalds.

On our way from Silverton to Silver Falls, we were looking at a deer on the side of the road when our car stuck another deer that tried to cross the road by jumping in front of the car! In the photos to the left, you can see the deer fur jammed into the panel seam above the driver's side headlight, and also the cracked front grill. Yikes!

By 8:00 AM we were on the trail for our eight mile, six hour walk on the Trail of Ten Falls. We have been to Silver Falls numerous times before, but this was the first time we walked the entire loop and saw all ten waterfalls. I, Brian, got a lot more nice photos which I will be adding to our Silver Falls Photo Album in the near future. To see the most recent photos, you will want to look at them in reverse order. The morning was pretty nice, as there were not too many other people on the trail. But by lunch time things were starting to get a bit crowded. The closer we got back to our car at the main south parking lot, the thicker the crowd became, almost like rush-hour traffic on the freeway! When we had first arrive a bit before 8:00, ours was one of the few cars in the parking lot. When we got back to the car about 2:00 PM, the large parking lot was packed out, and there was a line of cars at the park entrance waiting to get in! The early Byrd gets the worm! Yum! You can walk behind four of the ten falls, which makes for some spectacular views and a nice, refreshing spray.

April 2009
 
Wow! Sorry it's been so long since we last wrote ... you wouldn't believe all that's been going on! Right around the time of our last entry, after more than a year of looking, we finally made an offer on a house. And on February 17th we became the proud owners of our first house! All these 19 years of marriage we have always rented. Amazingly, it has exactly twice the square footage of the house we have been renting here in Albany for the past two-and-a-half years!

It wasn't a long-distance move ... only seven-and-a-half miles across town. But no matter how short of a move, it's an incredible amount of logistical and physical work! It's been nearly two months since the house became ours, and we are still trying to dig our way out of the avalanche of things that need to be done. People keep asking how we enjoy our new house. I tell them that we are not enjoying it yet ... it's too much work! But eventually we'll get to the place that we can slow down and enjoy this tremendous blessing.

At the end of March another avalanche hit me (Brian) ... right when I was going to update our Web site for the month, my computer died! I've had it for about 4 or 5 years, and it was starting to show signs of failure ... and then it did! I've been thinking for quite a while what I would do when this happens ... Windows Vista seems like such a dog that I just couldn't see myself going there. So I took the big plunge and made the switch to a Mac. An awesome Mac Pro system arrived 5 days ago, and since then I've been trying to dig out of both avalanches at the same time!

Obviously, any time you have to set up a new computer from scratch, install all the software and organize all the past data, it's a tremendous amount of work. But making the switch from the Windows environment (which I have been using since Windows 3.1 came out in 1992!) to the Mac environment is doubly daunting. For each piece of software I use, I have to find the available Mac options and evaluate which one is the best. Some programs don't have Mac equivalents, but luckly VMware Fusion comes to the rescue, allowing me to run Windows program in the Mac OS, just as if I were in Windows. It's so amazing how well it works that it's almost miraculous!

I'm looking forward to when things settle down a bit ... for the last two months solid I've been spending every waking second (that I'm not at work) working on the transition into our new house, and now the transition into my new computer as well. It's been quite exhausting and intense. At this point there is no end in sight, but hopefully sometime in the summer I will have more down time. Well, I guess I had better run ... the day after my new Mac arrived we went to IKEA in Portland to get some furniture for our enlarged living space, and now I've got a lot to assemble! Until later....

February 2009
 
Before we get into February's happenings, there's one more thing that happened in January. When I took Catherine and the kids to the Portland airport on December 30th, I stopped by a Toyota dealership in Portland to check out their pickups. Then after a couple of days of truck shopping on the Web, I headed back up to Portland on January 2nd, and came back with a new 2009 Toyota Tacoma 4x4 pickup! It sure is a black beauty! I wanted to surprise Catherine and the kids, so I kept it pretty quiet, until now. I'm really enjoying it, and it's already been useful to pick up Joanne's rabbits and their hutch from the family that was rabbit-sitting them. Four wheel drives seem to be pretty popular in the Northwest, with all of the rain and snow and ice. Now I feel more prepared to face what Winter brings.

January 2009
 
New Year's greetings for 2009! The Byrd Family finds itself on different continents this month! Catherine and the kids are spending the entire month in Switzerland, reconnecting with the Old Country, family, friends, food, culture and language. The kids get 30 days of immersive, intensive French language and culture ... ah, the joys of homeschooling! I'm sure we'll have a full report from them next month.

I, Brian, am enjoying silence and solitude home alone. But I have also been enjoying some travelling. One weekend I went over to the coast, and then down to Bandon (in Oregon, of course!). It was incredibly gorgeous there. I took about 475 pictures, so if you want to see them ... don't worry, I narrowed it down to 58 of the best. Click on the photo to the right to go to my Oregon Central Coast photo album.

During my time there, I took three long walks on the beach. There were not too many shells, but there were lots of rocks. I was particularly attracted to the smooth, white rocks I found scattered here and there. You can see an example to the left. It reminds me of the verse from Revelation 2:17 in the Bible. Jesus is speaking and says:
   
I haven't seen a name written on it ... maybe none of those Biblical stones are going to come from Bandon! Or maybe this one is for someone else, and not me! Anyway, it's an interesting, mystical idea, and I'm looking forward to the day when Jesus gives me my own white stone with my new name on it. But for now, since I'm home alone, I guess I had better do the dishes....
 
OK...the dishes are done! Now, it's time to watch a video...it's pretty awesome! I had posted a video by them last year in our October 2008 blog entry, and now they have come up with another winner. If you like it as much as I do, go to CatholicVote.com and make a donation to help them get this commercial on national TV. You can view it larger on YouTube. (Right under the video on YouTube, click on the link that says "watch in HD") Then, pray that President Obama, the other leaders of this country, and the people of this country take this video, and other pro-life messages, to heart. Then, make generous monthly donations to local crisis pregnancy centers so that the women seeking abortions will have viable alternatives.