I’m way behind on my photo-editing and blogging right now. Life has been so interesting and full recently that I’ve had very little time to write about it. That’s a pretty good problem to have, as problems go.

Usually I’m on my laptop, editing photos or blogging or answering emails, in the evenings while we watch TV. But lately we’ve been watching TV on my laptop. My mom and brother finished watching the Season 1 DVDs of Chuck a few weeks ago, so when my mom got here a week ago we started on Season 2 on my iTunes. Good thing Chuck episodes are easy to watch multiple times. I always catch something new when I watch one again.

Anyway! That’s why I’m just now getting around to blogging about a visit that happened almost two weeks ago.

Kristen and her kids, Kaitlyn and Ryan, are friends from our church in Maryland. They live in Texas right now, coincidentally in the same town as another family from our Maryland church. We saw them last fall when we visited Texas.

A couple of weeks ago it turned out that Kristen’s husband had to come here on a business trip, so the rest of the family tagged along and did the whole beach/Disney vacation thing. And they spent a day with us!

The first thing we did was take them to lunch at In-N-Out. They’d never been to In-N-Out before, and I figured it was my duty as a California resident to take them there. You can’t really say you’ve been to California if you’ve never been to In-N-Out, can you? It was a hit, everyone liked the food. Especially the milkshakes.

After lunch we hit Snail Mountain. It’s fun to take guests up there because there’s a panoramic view of the city. You can see all the way to downtown and the Pacific from up there, and even the hills of Mexico.

Plus it’s a great playground for kids, with tons of rocks to climb on, lizards to chase, and treasures to gather. Annalie found an old bottlecap and used it to collect teeny acorns. Then she set up a lizard trap of her own invention on a rock, carefully arranging the acorns in a line leading to the bottlecap. Exactly how that was supposed to trap a lizard, I’m not sure. It was fun for her, though.

The area around the cross, you might notice, looks a little different than it used to. That’s because a local Boy Scout is re-doing all the landscaping as his Eagle Scout service project. I think local businesses are chipping in for new soil, new plants, and a new fence, but he’s organizing it and providing the labor. I think that’s a pretty cool project.

After the kids chased a few lizards through the bushes and climbed on the rocks for a while, we headed back to our house to swim. (That big green inflatable pool has come in SO handy this summer.) Kristen and I sat under the lemon tree and chatted while the kids played. I got a couple of cool photos while we were outside:

First, this little lizard sat patiently on a tree branch while I took his portrait. It was kind of funny how still he was, because usually lizards zoom away when you get this close.

I thought this guy sitting on the Christmas lights still in the tree (we kept them up, thinking we could turn them on for special occasions, also because we’re lazy) was a grasshopper at first, but on closer inspection he turned out to be a fuzzy bumblebee.

While I was photographing the wildlife, the kids were busy planning a jumping contest. I’m not sure who won, but I did dutifully record several jumps for posterity.

It’s hard to believe that when we first met Kaitlyn at that Wednesday-night Bible study, she was the age Annalie is now, and Annalie was only 16 months old. Now Kaitlyn is going to be a 4th-grader, and she’s as tall as I am! The past four years have flown by.

The day flew by too. All too soon, it was time for Kaitlyn and Ryan to dry off and change out of their swimsuits.

We said our good-byes and gave hugs and waved as they drove off. I just hope they tell the rest of our Maryland friends what a good time they had, so we get more visitors soon. (Lynn, Bekah, you do know I’m talking to you, right?)