The kids and I recently took advantage of an empty day on the calendar to make a day-trip to Yosemite. The trip was almost a non-starter though when I realized we were half way to Yosemite, almost out of gas, and I had forgotten my wallet at home. An emergency credit card I had hidden in my car got us the needed petrol, and after driving home and back again we decided to make the most of the remainder of our day head back toward the park. Among other reasons, we wanted to try out our new camera and some new-to-us photo techniques. Off to Yosemite we went, and am I ever glad we did.

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We’ve been hard at work creating our largest, longest, and scariest haunted house since we started in 2003. We are asking for a donation of canned food this year to benefit the Elk Grove Food Bank. Bring multiple food-stuffs to enter multiple times. We’ll be scaring guests, young and old, on 4 nights from Friday, October 28 through Halloween night from 6-10 pm. We can’t wait to see every body… and every head… and every limb…

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[caption id="attachment_1078" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="And it wasn\'t even raining"][/caption]

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It’s not that we don’t want to ever forget the once-in-a-lifetime trip that we took to Turks and Caicos last year. (But we don’t.) It’s not that I had already almost forgotten how to spell the name of the destination island in the West Indies and simply needed the practice. (But I had.)

It’s just that today came across a

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After skipping the California State Fair at the Cal Expo for two years running, we managed to drag our tired feet through the scalding heat and hit up the event this year. Overall we concluded that we hadn’t missed much in the years that we skipped, but we did get a few good family pic’s for the photo albums.

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With fires burning all over California, the smoke in the Sacramento valley is as thick as something that is really thick.  I refuse to name any time of soup. But even at 7000-foot elevation the smoke in the air made for gray skies over the Independence Day week, a dismal sight.

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And now for something completely different: At a time of national pride and patriotism, the McClelland family brings you a special message from one of the great forefathers of our nation and a true friend of ours…Abe.

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What an incredible day we had today! Two last-minute dives were an unexpected treat. Last night at dinner I realized that our flight was more than 24 hours away and I could dive again today. As for Lisa, she was dived out. Too bad: she missed a doozy.

As Lisa and the kids slept, Jojo the dolphin, a local regular, paid a surprise visit to

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We were off to the dive shop early once again so we could get a two-tank dive in again today. This was Lisa’s first duo-tanker, and I was glad to have her along. There’s just something comforting about having your…

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Lisa and I took our first Scuba dive today in Grace Bay on the leeward coast of Provinciales. The location was called cathedral due to the shape the box canyon that drops to about 100 feet. The plan was to dive just over the edge of the shelf and hit a depth of about 60 feet, but we ended up doing a 40 minute dive to about

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