Here is the whole collection of photos we took of the pandas at the Chongqing zoo when we were there in May…

In May we spent 5 nights in Chongqing, China at the Empark Grand Hotel in the Jieng Bei District. I believe the main street in this video is called Guanyinqiao. We had already taken a number of these time-lapse videos from our perch there on the 16th floor, at different times and angles. One night (May 7th, 2008) we were getting ready for bed and the camera had already been recording for a while when we noticed a rope suddenly appear in our view. We watched it for a while and talked about it, wondering what the deal was… A while later I heard Kim exclaim, "I just saw the top of a man’s head!" I didn’t stop the camera to see if the man had been recorded but when I reviewed it in the morning, sure enough I noticed the man cruising down the rope. You’ll see him in the last few seconds of the video. I chopped out that section of the video and slowed it down from 15fps to 3fps so you have a longer look at him. I also boosted up the brightness and contrast a tad to try to make him more visible, but all it really seemed to do was make the video a little noisier…

We had a wonderful time celebrating our friend Bella’s 5th bday on Saturday.

Photo album

Or Photo Slideshow

Video of gift opening time:

Video of cake time:

Abigail turns 9 years old tomorrow! Happy Bday! We love you!

Friends (The Winters) called us Tuesday night and offered us their friends (The Crowders) tickets to Disneyland because they made other plans at the last minute and were leaving town, so we picked up the tickets and surprised Abigail for her bday and went on Wednesday night. We got there around 6pm and found out the park was closing at 9pm for grad night, and since I (Todd) was a little bummed we were using the tickets for only three hours, I just casually mumbled to Kim, “I wish we could get passes”, (we had passes years ago and it was nice to be able to go for short visits like this) and so Kim picked up on my comment and went and asked about it, and sure enough we were able to apply the tickets that were given to us and get annual park passes that ended up ‘only’ costing $250 for the whole family! We hadn’t obviously hadn’t budgeted for this, but it was too good an offer to turn down… We got the passes for $50 per person when they are normally $169 per person, and now we will have 215 more opportunities over the next year to hit the park that is only about 15mins from where we live… Hope really loved it at Disneyland. She hit overload after a couple hours, but she especially loved the Tea Cup ride..

Here are some photos from the excursion:

June 11th - Disneyland

And here is the customary link to the slideshow.

Below are some fun videos that I took while we were on rides, like the Tea Cup, Alice in Wonderland, and the Matterhorn:

Teacups:

The Matterhorn:

Alice in Wonderland:

Autopia:

Rocketships:

Bonus: Stunt Doll

Hannah’s bday party on Saturday was a hit… Here is the photo album (107 photos), or view it as a slideshow.

And here is a photo album (41 photos) from our family trip to the park yesterday where Hope played in the sand for the first time ever. It was neat because we took her to the beach one time before and even when we got to the park, we couldn’t get her to engage the sand. She wouldn’t even let her feet touch it. But then after a while Abigail stepped in and after some time playing with her, just plopped her down in the sand and then she was good to go… After that of course she was mad if we took her out of the sand! Click here to view this photo album as a slideshow instead.

I already posted these photos in our gallery, but they were hastily edited using Picasa while we were still in China. These edits below are hosted at flickr.com, and were a little more carefully edited using Ufraw and Gimp, and in most cases I prefer the results I get with gimp over picasa.

These photos were taken during our tour of Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Emperor’s Garden.

We love you and hope you feel better! (She has a cold)

We arrived in Beijing, China this morning (Beijing time) to pick up our daughter, and this transport notice was one of the many things in the huge and impressive Beijing airport that caught our attention.

Jonathan turned 11 years old today! wow. According to the tradition of recent years, he went to Legoland for his b-day last week with Kimberly, Abigail, Hannah and his friends from his Lego Club. He had a great time there and of course came home with piles of fresh legos. Then last night we went to Downtown Disney outside of Disneyland, and Jonathan provisionally set aside his protest of Disney Corp. for their imperialist squash-the-little-man tactics and we went to the Lego Store where he quickly spent the rest of his b-day money on things to add to his lego stockpile. Can you tell this young man enjoys a good lego? Then we enjoyed a nice dinner at the Rainforest Cafe that culminated in a large (in many ways) Volcano! sundae… It was a fun evening and I even had a special ‘lost parking ticket’ adventure at the end too!

Here is some time lapse video phootage from dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. One of the main topics of discussion at the table was all the things that we love about Jonathan, which are of course too many to list.

Click the picture below for a photo slideshow from our evening (25 photos):

I am a sucker for flickr toys and sites. I was just looking through my bookmarks last night for something else and serendipity took me to flogr. It was another dull moment in my life so I went ahead and flogr’d myself and ended up with a phillips-flogr, or a phlogr.

Here is another creative flickr api toy I stumbled across at roughly the same dull moment in my life last night: tag viewer.

And since I know you are wondering… My most often personally revisited flickr stops are located here and here. I can in recent times be found going down flickr rivers of some of the places in China that we will be visiting in May.