I am one big slacker - no blog updates since March. Oh well.

I just returned from Uncle Nick's funeral. He passed away a week ago Friday after a long illness with cancer. He was doing very well up to the last month and then went down hill rapidly. The family is taking it well.

The week before, Lucinda and I visited Craig to help refinish his basement. We did a little electrical work (Matt and Craig did most of it), a little insulation and a lot of drywall. I think that it turned out OK. I was the chief drywall cutter, which makes me responsible for most of the gaps. Its tough to visualize how the piece will hang when you are cutting it sideways and backwards. I only messed up one piece.

We had a tons of visitors this summer. Thanks to everyone who made the trip. Below are some pictures.

Canoeing the Cedar River with Hannah and Andrew

Archery off the back porch

Pictures from the family campout:

Hi everyone,

We made it back from Mexico.

We stayed at a very nice, adults only, all inclusive resort which was about one hour south of Cancun. The food was good. The beach was nice and it had a fresh water swimming pool. There were a lot of Europeans at the resort including many Italians. It was really very similar to a cruise ship with a little more room and without the sea sickness.

We rented a car to get around. Once we figured out the signs, we did OK. We drove to church (it was cancelled because of stake conference), to Tulum, and to Chichen Itza.

We were stopped on the way to Chichen Itza at a police check point because the car didn't have a front license plate. The policeman didn't speak much English.  I tried communicating with my high school Spanish, arm waving, and an occasional Italian phrase. Luckily, the policeman had experience in these things, and once I payed the appropriate bribe, he sent us on our way. After that, Lucinda ducked down each time we passed a check point thinking that she looked too much like a tourist.

Hope you enjoy the pictures

Love, Dad

Our resort
Lucinda lounging on the beach
Chitzen itza 6th Wonder of the World
Haggling for trinkets We felt as if we were in India

Hi everyone, Last night the temperature dropped from 47 degress to 5 degrees this morning.

Mom went through the wall this week when she tripped on the last step. He ankle is turning nice colors.	Last week we went to Nauvoo and stayed in a cabin.

Pictures from 1982

Pictures from 1979, 1980 and 1981

Michelle	Michelle	Michelle
Michelle	Michelle	Emily
Emily and Michelle	Emily	Michelle
Lucinda, Michelle, Doug, Emily	Michelle and Emily	Doug, Emily, Michelle, Emily

Hi everyone,

I have started to scan the pictures from our photo album and thought that you, or maybe your children, would like to see some on them. 

Who are these young kids anyway?

Picture taken before we moved to Iowa

Watch out for next entry, there will be pictures of our children or maybe our grandchildren. We'll see if you can tell who is who.

Just so that you don't think we're slackers or that we not extremely happy with out newest granchildren, I've enclosed a picture of additions to our family flag.

 

Hi everyone,

 

We had a great Christmas vacation.  We visited my parents, Brice, Breann and Hazel, Hannah and Andrew and Craig, Heidi, Owen and Kent. 

 

On Christmas day we walked down to Temple square with Craig and his family and enjoyed all the lights.  It was a bit cold, but the snow added a nice touch.   

 

While everyone was at my parents, we decided it would be nice to have a picture of four generations of Johnson boys.

We then went down to Prove for a few days.  We had a good time when we went to dinner with Martin and Cindy.  Their girls like to torment Craig and Brice (or vice versa) and loved to play with Hazel.

We went to the dollar movie in Provo.  Later we watched 'Contagion' on DVD and spent the remainder of our vacation washing our hands.

Thanks to everyone for hosting our trip.

Lucinda received a Kindle Fire for Christmas.  As part of her present I decided to put her book, "Letters from India", on it.  We printed the book through Blurb for the hard copy.  One of Blurbs's options as to make a PDF file.  That was easy but a PDF file didn't work.  Shrinking a picture book size book down to a kindle size made it really difficult to read.  Another option was to create a file for an I-Pod - that didn't work either.  Then I opened the book file with WordPad and found out that I could almost read in the XLM code.  So, I transferred the file to XCEL where I wrote a macro to take out most of the extraneous code and was left with plain text.  Unfortunately, the original book file did not have the text in sequence as their program put it in order (what were they thinking?)  So I had to reorder the text.  Finally, I added a few HTML tags so that the Kindle could read the book.  Did I tell you that all the pictures were in the wrong place?  I only fixed about 1/2 the pictures.  Maybe next Christmas I can give mom a present of her book with pictures.

Love,
Dad

Hi everyone,

We visited Amber's house during Thanksgiving. We had a great time: shot bows and arrows, went on hikes, ate real Tennessee barbecue and welcomed Bianca into the family. The weather was nice.  We had lots of fun but decided it was best to have children while you are young.  We had a hard time keeping up with the children. 

Both coming and going we stopped in Peoria to see Matt and Emily and Craig and Heidi and their families.

On the return trip we delivered Amber's old van to Craig in Louisville. While in Louisville we visited the Louisville slugger bat factory. Too bad I don't play ball anymore - they had lots of bats that you would buy.

Love,
Dad

Grandma and baby Bianca

 

Bianca posing for a family picture.

 

While in Bristol, we took a family picture for Amber.  We took lots and lots of pictures of her family and one or two with us and her children.  The best picture (all the children with their eyes open,  looking at the camera and standing up straight) was with us - life is just no fair!