We hit another milestone today as Stephan turned 18. There were 15 family and friends that helped him celebrate at Gerhardt's Bierstube, the local German restaurant.


His German teacher was able to alter her schedule so she could wait on us. She was the one who led his trip to Greece as well.


We even did the traditional German birthday cheer, which involves lifting him in the chair three times.


I suppose our next milestone will be at 21 since it's 7+ years for Sydney to hit 18.

Meanwhile Samuel has 2 weeks to go before he reaches 2 and is on the verge of being able to climb onto the kitchen counters. God help us!

Soulfeast 2008 at Lake Junaluska, NC, turned out to be a blessed time once again. It was good to get back after missing the past two because of Samuel, who still made it a challenge at times, and we were blessed to have both sets of parents/grandparents join us this year. Again we drove down on Saturday and spent the night at my parents house near Burnsville, NC, before driving the hour and a half to LJ to register Sunday afternoon.

They had a good mix of plenary speakers and workshops so even our fathers found something that interested them. I believe it was the first conference of this type either had experienced. There were really too many choices so at least for the rest of us we had to miss out on some things we would have liked to have seen.

I'll admit my recent "obsession" with photography, especially time-lapse and waterfalls, caused me to not be as focused as I should have been perhaps, but as it turned out they had a workshop on Spirituality & Photography, too. :) I discovered 2 weeks ago that many Canon Powershot cameras with Digic II or III processors can be made much more powerful with some added firmware called CHDK. The best part is that it's temporary so you don't have to use it if you don't want. It's simply loaded on the SD card.

Anyway, I uploaded 28 pics and 2 time-lapse videos from this trip to my photo album. Here is one of my family.


We're already looking forward to next year, which will feature an excellent speaker that we enjoyed previously. Hopefully our parents will want to go again.

Gatlinburg traffic was every bit as bad as I had heard, but I still had an enjoyable time on my first trip to the area with much of Merrie's family the week of July 4th. We went to Ober Gatlinburg the first day and I quite enjoyed the "alpine slide", which is essentially a luge on concrete rather than ice.


We saw some wildlife, and a raccoon stopped to check it out also.


The weather was pretty nice the whole week, with just a little rain the day we left. I was able to hike several times and even managed to see a few bears. My brother-in-law and I did the Chimney Tops climb - that was awesome (and somewhat unnerving) at the very top. We had sort of a worship service at the top as a youth group from Marion, IN, was also there.


I learned that I really have a thing for taking waterfall and stream pictures. I suppose it's partly because they look cool, but I love the soothing sound of running/rushing water. It sort of turned into an obsession as my last two excursions were only to see waterfalls. This is Grotto Falls, which I reached when the rain started to fall.


I also watched the fireworks over Gatlinburg and my pics turned out fairly well for not having a tripod. Most exposures were 1.3 or 1.6 seconds.


You can find a few other pics at my photo album. All in all, it was a good vacation though Merrie's mom was ill most of the time. I have no interest in all the touristy trappings (or the crowds or traffic) outside the Alpine Slide, but will certainly go back for more hiking someday.