Carlo at Picnic Day, Irvine

Winter light in Huntington Beach

Forty hours in New York

Labor Day at Huntington Beach

Half Dome 1968

We're with family in Laguna Niguel this weekend, celebrating a joint 80:60 birthday. Among the fun was reminiscing about a hike that Dad and I made to Half Dome in 1968, when I was 12 (and he was 32). We dug through files of old photos and found these, which had already been converted from 35 mm slides to JPG format. I cleaned them up a bit in iPhoto and post them here for a memory of old times.

Redwood Regional Park, Oakland

We did a ten-mile training loop, starting from the Skyline staging gate (about 5 miles from home), hiking French Trail to the end and returning via Stream Trail. Why training? Ingrid and Daniela are preparing to hike Half Dome in mid September. This loop hike took three hours to cover 9 miles with about 1600 vertical feet.

SG50 Sampler

Sunday, 9 August 2015, marked the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of Singapore's independence. The weekend featured many celebrations. We spent the afternoon walking from our apartment to the Singapore Botanic Gardens, about 6 miles to the northeast. There, we joined many Singaporeans to watch on large screen television the broadcast of the National Day Parade (NDP), which was taking place in the Padang, near Marina Bay.

The logo for the 50 year celebration of Singapore's independence.

Strange sculpture of bathing, reading man at an HDB apartment.

Dempsey Hill seems a throwback to colonial times.

Beautiful parrots in an open aviary at Dempsey Hill

Sculpture at the Museum of Contemporary Art (photo: Ingrid)

Arriving at the Botanic Gardens

Monitor lizard greets us near the entrance (photo: Ingrid)

One of many impressive outdoor sculptures

Large crowd enjoying music before the NDP broadcast.

Red is definitely the color of the day!

Cuteness! (Photo: Ingrid)

Our vantage point was far but still effective.