Tue 8 Jan 2008
Posted by Ken Atherton under Scrapbook, vacation
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We took a family vacation to Tennessee during the kids’ fall break this year. I’m finally getting around to putting together some scrapbook pages about the trip. Here’s the first:
Local Tags: carissa, celia, digital scrapbooking, gatlinburg, sadie, tennessee, vacation
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Fri 18 Jan 2008
Posted by Ken Atherton under Scrapbook, vacation
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Here is another page I made from pictures we took on our vacation to Tennesse last fall.
Mon 21 Jan 2008
Posted by Ken Atherton under Scrapbook, vacation
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Family vacations are expensive. The girls probably enjoyed the mirror maze in downtown Gatlinburg more than anything else we did on the entire trip, but it cost us $40 to get in. Seriously, with a coupon, even.
The maze itself is pretty interesting, and they do let you go through it as many times as you want. I think we went through it at least 5 times. It’s a little hard to tell from the pictures, but the maze is full of flashing lights and at times it is virtually dark. This significantly increases the difficulty of getting through. Plus, since all of the mirrors are set at an angle to the direction you are moving, you often don’t realize that you are near a mirror until your hands hit it. That’s why they make you wear the gloves.
The gloves don’t help with face prints like the one that Sadie left just after the picture in the lower right was taken. “Sadie, watch out for that…” < whump > “…mirror in front of you!”
Local Tags: carissa, celia, digital scrapbooking, gatlinburg, ken, sadie, sandi, tennessee, vacation
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Fri 25 Jan 2008
Posted by Ken Atherton under Scrapbook, vacation
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Here’s another scrapbook page from our trip to Tennessee. This one’s from Chattanooga. As it turns out, there’s not a whole lot to do in Chattanooga if you aren’t already on Lookout Mountain. We knew that one first Coca-Cola bottling plant was there, as well as the Moon Pie Factory, but neither of those things are open to the public. The clerk at the hotel found out that the Coca-Cola bottler was sponsoring a pre-football game event at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga that morning. We didn’t have anything else to do that morning, so we went to check it out. The company was rolling out a whole fleet of new trucks and was promising to give out free stuffed polar bears to the first 500 kids who attended the parade. We got there an hour early, and got in line to wait for the stuffed bears. The “line”, as it turned out, consisted of a Grandmother who works for Coca-Cola and her two granddaughters. It wasn’t bad, though — they handed out plenty of free drinks, and I scored a free “World Hamburger Eating Championship” T-shirt (only available in XXL – go figure) from Krystal burger. The stuffed bears turned out to be pretty cool as well and probably were worth the wait and the $5 for parking.
Sandi took this picture of Sadie while we were waiting in line while the kids entertained themselves with whatever was at hand.
Local Tags: chattanooga, coca-cola, digital scrapbooking, factory, parade, park, sadie, sandi, tennessee
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Sat 26 Jan 2008
Posted by Ken Atherton under France, Scrapbook, vacation
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This one is from a trip we took years ago, but I was reminded of it the other day. I was driving home from work, and this beautiful snowfall started. It was made of really big clumps of flakes drifting and blowing in my headlights and it reminded me of our drive to Spain in February 2005. We were trying to get to Spain via Andorra, a small protectorate that isn’t really it’s own country, but is sort of shared between France and Spain. They have a different tax structure (no VAT) than the rest of Europe which means that many things can be bought there less expensively than any other place we were likely to shop.
Unfortunately, a big storm dropped a lot of snow in the mountain pass between Ax-Les-Thermes and Andorra, so the gendarme turned us away from the pass. It was pretty late by then, so we stopped to look around in the town and find a hotel for the night. It was a quaint town, but heavily snow covered so that it was hard to see very much. The kids spent a fair amount of time climbing a big pile of snow that had been cleared from the road in the town square. We also saw one of the hot pools that the town is apparently famous for (that is why it’s called “Les Thermes”), but the good ones are inside the local spas, which we didn’t go into.
We got a room at a hotel just outside town. Sandi remembers it as being pretty nasty, but I don’t remember the room very much at all. By the next morning another 5 inches of snow had fallen. The pass was clearly not an option, so we decided to stay on the east side of the mountains and drive down to the southern coast of France and cross the border into Spain there.
Unfortunately, we didn’t realize from our map that we were still going to be in a fairly mountainous region cutting through to the south. We probably should have backtracked all the way to the autoroute which is in the plains, but we didn’t. The roads had been pretty well plowed, so we turned south and headed off. Within a few minutes, we were on a winding road and the snowfall was resuming. By the time we realized how much trouble we were in, it was too late to turn around and head back. We were lucky, I guess, that we were the only people stupid enough to be out on the road which at least allowed me to use the whole road for driving so that I could worry less about sliding off.
What I really remember about that morning is how beautiful the snow fall was and how amazing the forest and mountians surrounding us were. At the same time, I was driving white-knuckled and Sandi was from moment to moment switching from panicky to outright fearing for our lives. Even as slowly as we were going, I remember going around one corner and even just tapping on the breaks caused us to go into a slide that could have taken us off the edge of the road. While the incline at that point wasn’t steep enough to have done any real damage, I still could imagine us getting stuck in a snow bank without any clear indication of which way to walk from the car to get help.
I don’t really know how long the whole event lasted. At the time it seemed to go on for hours, but I know we couldn’t have left the hotel much before 9. And then, before noon, we were driving on flat land in 50-degree weather again.
Sat 26 Jan 2008
Posted by Celia Atherton under Daily Life
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Sat 26 Jan 2008
Posted by Carissa Atherton under Daily Life
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I built a pyramid made out of foam board for an extra credit project at school. It is 2 ft. tall. My friend Maddi and I put it together with a lot of help from my mom. The top comes off. When you look inside it, you can see some burial objects we made from modeling clay, like pots and the tomb.
Sat 26 Jan 2008
Posted by Ken Atherton under Uncategorized
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As you can see from our last two posts, we’ve acquired a new art program called Art Rage. The program allows you to draw with tools that look like art media like oil paints, glitter, pencils, crayons, and so on. The girls love to play with it. It works pretty well with my Tablet PC because the girls can use the pen and draw directly on the screen. Sandi likes it because it doesn’t make a mess and require lots of paper. 
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