One year has passed...

Monday June 18th, 2007 - our 1st Year wedding anniversary. Cynfor and Jessie left on Sunday to stay the summer with their father in China, so that leaves Tara and myself here in the US with some time together. Obviously we miss the kids very much, but Monday was our wedding anniversary - and we had a lovely time alone together.

The pictures below are from the restaurant we had dinner. The Portland City Grill, which is located at the top of the US Bank tower. As you can see by the photographs, the view is spectacular. Even more so when the weather is quite clear.

After completing our fantastic dinner (left over cookies in the front of us)

A view out the window of some of Portland

Mount Hood in the distance

Mount St Helens in the distance

Big Balloon Festival

Last night we headed down to Tigard (a suburb of Portland), and enjoyed the Hot Air Balloon display. Cynfor and Jessie originally were not that keen on going with us, but after they got inside, and saw the balloons being inflated, they changed their minds.

As you can see by the pictures below, it is a pretty impressive site. In the first picture - the balloon that is in the main part of the picture is quite large and was designed to look like a truck. Sadly, because of the wind during the night, they had to let it down pretty quickly after it was inflated - because it was quite dangerous - but it looked very impressive anyway. (You can see it in another picture further on.)

The Portland Rose Festival - 100th Anniversary

The Portland Rose Festival is a little similar to Melbourne's Moomba. There is a parade, a carnival, and a lot of activities which happen mostly around the waterfront in downtown Portland.

This year was a special year as it was the 100th Year celebration for the festival. We did not go down to watch the parade as we had other things on, but we did see the floats on the day after along the street where they park them for people to look.

Below are a couple of pictures of us with the floats.

Jessie's big performance.

On June 9th, 2007, Jessie was part of a group of 15 students from their music school to perform in a recital. She was very excited, and was about the fourth person to play.

It was a great night, hearing all the different levels of capabilities from students who could sing, play drums, guitar or piano. She was lucky to have the opportunity to play on a lovely grand piano - and played very well.

Here are a couple of pictures from the night.

Aussie Day...

I was volunteered into presenting at the 2nd Grade "Aussie Day!" The idea was that I gave experiences of living in Australia. The photograph below is before the class was broken up to visit different "stations" which had all sorts of information about things in Australia. There was someone reading an Australian book - "Possum Magic," other things they did was made lamingtons, ate Kiwi fruit, and "Aussie bites", learned about the "cork hat", made paper boomerangs and many other activities.

In my station I spoke to them about the money we use in Australia, showed them - as well as talking about Aussie Rules football, meat pies and among other things.

In the afternoon there were more activities - they played "kanga ball" (a variation of cricket), saw someone throwing boomerangs and demonstrating the differences, sheep dogs and sheep herding, some Emu's, didgeridoo playing and other native Australian animals - including some small kangaroos, and sugar gliders.

The day was great - weather wise - both Tara and myself volunteered to help all day - which was fun, but quite hot in the sun!