Despite the recent movement to promote kids who aren’t perfect (there’s even a book), Lisa and I will sit back and glow with pride after our parenting skills paid off last week. Emily came home Sunday night and received a phone call that she had been selected for

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The Foster/Syme development group recently purchased the Royal Gorge cross-country ski resort along with a ton of other land around Serene Lakes (where our cabin is) including the bottom of the lake. When they revealed their plans which include 950 condominiums and single-family homes, a lot of people at the public meeting drank the Kool-Aid with a “Please, may I have some more.”

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Emily breezed into her school’s honor roll for outstanding grades for the second consecutive trimester. She missed the Principle’s Honor Roll–a distinction for “straight-A” students–by only one grade. It would have been the second consecutive trimester for

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I recently discovered the latest thing in genealogical web sites. Geni.com is a beautifully presented site for creating your family tree. (Click the photo here to see a larger version.) Just enter your name, email address and gender and click “add” and you’ve begun your

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Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:
* Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
* Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
* Share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web: it’s fast, easy and free.

Plus I can create albums directly from iPhoto on my Mac. Sounds great, right? Well I’m not 100% sold. I may have a new method of posting photo albums on the web. Click on the photo on the left to see one of my first Picasa albums. It may not be quite as slick as the ones I’ve been serving up at McClellandfamily.com, but I spent quite a bit of time on those, and this one took me all of about 5 minutes. Using Picasa to create some pretty vanilla albums I should be able to get these babies up a lot more often.

Picasa is a free software download from

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The one year that I wasn’t able to play #1 Elf at my employer’s Christmas breakfast (due to budgetary constraints, I imagine) I discovered this seasonal web site. It’s called Elf Yourself, and unfortunately I’m too late to tell my bosses to do just that.The one year that I wasn’t able to play #1 Elf at my employer’s Christmas breakfast (due to budgetary constraints, I imagine) I discovered this seasonal web site. It’s called Elf Yourself, and unfortunately I’m too late to tell my bosses to

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We opened gifts leasurely and then made our way to Grandma Mary’s grave to pay our respects. From there is was off to church so we wouldn’t have to listen to Les call us heathens, and then we spent the rest of the day at his house. Here’s a small photo album from Christmas morning. (Click the photo to the left.) We were awakened early Christmas morning with the kids’ discovery that Santa had made it down the

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Things can get a bit chaotic with a decent-size crowd in our smallish house on Christmas eve, and we might be forgiven if we don’t manage to take a kazillion pictures. We only took a few, but we did want to share them here. Click the link or the photo on the right to see the album.

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The weather was agreeable with only a smattering of rain, and overall we had a great time in the two parks, and the kids will remember this trip for a long time to come. We’ve posted photos on the McClellandfamily.com/Photo Albums page.There’s a reason there is no 4-day park hopper pass at Disneyland: Three days is enough! Admittedly we didn’t cover everything in the park in our three days there, but nonetheless we were burned out on the crowds, the stress, and mostly the

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Here are a few shot’s from our December vacation to Wickenburg, Arizona and a dude ranch which turned into a chilly vacation filled with food, golf and horseback riding.

We made the most of our trip to Arizona. Disappointing was the initial …

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