Swimming with the balls

We had lots of fun last week, with visits from Zach, Tiffany,  and Nick.   After being here for 6 months, I finally got to go see the Great Salt Lake.   At 2,000 square miles (4th largest terminal lake in the world), it was surprising hard to find.   I knew where it was, but finding a good beach to wade in took a few tries:

 

Nick found a shrimp, which are harvested from the lake for fish food:

That picture reminded me of this one, taken 16 years earlier in Australia:

We took a short hike up the hills up the road, but I messed up and made it a longer hike then intended.    We forgot the sun block and Tiffany got burned:

But we tried to take good care of her after that:

The next day we took a tram at the SnowBird ski resort to the top of a 11k foot mountain:

Z & T are experts at getting their picture taking, but I didn’t get Nick turned around in time:

Zach let Tiffany get away from him (he was trying to give her his shirt to protect her sunburn):

He eventually caught her:

And peace an tranquility ensued:

We also had a nice visit with Nick’s co-workers, Scott and George.  In between the fun, they had several productive Skritter company meetings:

This was another hike we took, to the top of Signal Hill.   We climbed up an abandoned tower with Nick, despite his fear of heights, leading the way!

Zach was chiding me for having a mis-adjusted wine bottle shelf,   I acknowledged it was indeed crooked, then ignored it.   But Zach can not ignore such things, saying if I left it as is, a bottle might fall and break.   So he springs to action to fix it, and promptly drops and breaks a wine bottle:    

We all laughed for 5 minutes.  Then we discovered blood mixed in with the wine.    Zach spent an hour picking out 20+ shards of glass from his feet:

But that didn’t stop him on our Mount Olympus hike the next day:  6 hours, 7 miles, 5,000 feet up (10k ft summit):

Nick got so excited on this part of the climb that his legs fell off:

For you curious hikers, here is a Google earth view:

Here is a 360 photosynth view from the top:

http://photosynth.net/userprofilepage.aspx?user=brucewinter&content=Synths

We had lots of pool fun:

Here I was teaching the boys my childhood trick for getting on the diving board directly from the pool:

After which many un-successful attempts were made:

Until Zach discovered the secret, which involved some alcohol:

We also had some nice visits with Abby:

And lots of fun with our desk chair balls.   One of the challenges was to try to get a ball fully submerged.   Many techniques were tried:

In the end, a 3 person team approach worked:

But not on this try:

Here we are seeing who can head bounce a ball the highest:

And here we are seeing who can stay balanced on top of a ball the longest:

Zach and George were the masters of this, but out of the water, Nick was the master ball balancer:

He is also the master of upside-down-ness:

And master of the one legged squats:

I can do 1/2 of these … the downward 1/2.

If you haven’t had enough photos (hard to imagine), there are a bunch more here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/zachwinter/SaltLakeCityUtahJuly2011

Bruce