WOW - my fifth post. I have been shamed into returning to the blogosphere by Julia, who has promised a reciprocal post. That's worth it in my book, so here goes.

First of all, I just want to cover a few important but weird topics. The first is the alarming appearance of a word that I have been misspelling my entire life. It is: "raspberry". When it was rejected by spellcheck, I knew at once that it fell into an elite category of my misspelled words. That would be the "Gosh - I've never spelled this word correctly, and it's so easy, I really should have learned and remembered how to spell this in the 4th grade" category. I've got other categories available:

• "I seldom use this word and it's so hard that I'm just going to forget it and let spellcheck catch it every time". Examples: daiquiri, colonel
• "This might be tough, but I really should learn this in case I'm authoring a hand-written note to a superior at work, and don't have access to spellcheck". Examples: personnel, millennium.
• "i before e except after c exceptions". Examples: weird, foreign (ok, fine. I've never had a problem with "foreign", but there aren't that many words that violate the rule)

The strange thing is, I really like raspberries, but just never have had to write the word on a computer. I'd like to point out, though, that nobody goes around saying "razP-baireez", which is part of the problem. I suppose that overall, the word "raspberry" is not as put upon as "worcestershire", which for centuries has been robbed of multiple letters in its actual pronunciation for no particular reason. It's also hard to spell.

Because we've just moved, I'm again writing my signature on the back of the new bank cards I get. This process is absurd. Why do I have to try and sign a little box the size of a toothpick on the back of my card in order to make it valid? This reminds me of another silly ritual: signing the electronic pads at the store after swiping my card, or for that matter, signing anything at all. I think it is time to start using some of my favorite names instead of my own, just to enjoy the process more. Some names I have liked for some time:

• Milton Flinders
• Joyce Frankenberg
• Boutros Boutros Ghali
• Deco (famous soccer player AND saves time in checkout line)

Here are some recent pictures - from TODAY in fact. Gpa and Gma Ohki are here for a few days before a Morinda conference in LA. We went for a walk in Torrey Pines State Reserve, and it was gorgeous. Amazing views of the ocean and the "badlands"-like cliffs. We are loving having Gpa/Gma here, as always. Too bad they have to go to LA on Wednesday.






Here are a few other pictures from last week. We finally took Asha to the beach, just to show her that it is as cold as we're telling her it is. We also went to a free Aviation museum run by the Marines. They had lots of new planes and helicopters there, but Kai mostly just liked being in the backpack.