Even if the fun & frivolity couldn't totally outshine the work & worry for us in 2006, it was still a good year. As always, we wish we'd taken more pictures. I'm sure folks will feel we took too many by the time they get to the end of this page!

January 1, 2006 found us walking to Mama's Royal Cafe for our traditional New Year's Day breakfast with a group of overnight campers. Thanks for taking a great picture, Graham!

Look at how cute he is! Here's Eric in Half Moon Bay. Three hundred percent more handsome than the next most handsome man and adorable to boot!

The weather was a bit chilly and intermittently cloudy. We walked, walked, walked along the beach, and around the charming downtown area.

The wildflowers were beautiful. It was a good trip, and I hope we go back in 2007.

While on the coast we took the opportunity to go for a hike in this second-growth redwood forest.

I enjoyed the mosaics class I took with Instructor Gina and Pal Janis.

I love this picture of Eric in Yosemite. We took the long (wrong?) way around, and found ourselves in a beautifully isolated location, despite the sunny-day-crowds.

One of the absolute highlights of the year was our trip to the Royal Decameron resort in Mexico. The ocean was just steps away from our room -- this picture was taken from our patio -- and the water was perfect. We spent hours & hours in the warm waves and lying on the beach.

The grounds of the resort were pretty and well-maintained. There were pools everywhere, including this super large adult-only pool, but the ocean was tooo nice to spend time there.

A perfect ocean and beach, a clean, air conditioned, room just steps away from the ocean, excellent water pressure, an engaging novel that made me laugh out loud, and sharing it all with Eric. What could be better?

Somehow, despite the fact that we went to The Atlantis Casino and Resort seven times in 2006, we took nary a picture of the joint. I pulled this one from their website. This is a fair representation of every player's paradise.

The Oregon Country Fair was great fun, as usual. The atmosphere there is pretty darn silly, and we fit right in.

Meet Roy, cousin to Floyd and his nephew Lloyd. Roy's stick has been tattooed with identifying information. Let's hope he sticks around for a while!

This was my hat. It rotating, flashing, lights. 'Nuff said.

Leah and Eric are decorating the tent with shiny, hanging, prom-like, stars. Pretty! (Leah and the stars, too.)

I've wanted to go to Alaska for a long, long, time. It was just as beautiful as I imagined it would be. The seven night cruise that Eric and I took with my sister Jane and Neil started in Seattle, Washington and cruised the inside passage.

There were interesting little towns and tours and walks and wildlife and history in abundance, but naturally I took no pictures of those things. Here's a buncha whale groupies!

This sort of thing springs up behind us fairly frequently.

Here's the view from a botanical garden we visited in Juneau. Isn't it beautiful?

Mendenhall Glacier is a river of ice that's sloooowly, inch by inch, flowing into the ocean.

We woke up super early to go on deck to see Hubbard Glacier.

When we arrived on deck the ship was moving very slowly through a sea of ice.

The glacier was amazing. It's hard to get the scale from a photograph. It's two hundred feet high, and enormous chunks of ice fell off into the ocean with a booming, thunderous, sound.

After the cruise we went to Victoria, BC with my sister Mary. Butchart Gardens were gorgeous!

I could post many, many, pictures of the gardens, but this page is already overly long. Plus, Tom only likes pictures with people in 'em.

There's no point in ignoring the "new look". It was a quick transformation, and took some getting used to, but it feels normal now.

Our Christmas tree was particularly lovely this year, but pictures can never do a Christmas tree justice.

Another year, another Camp Martha. It was a blast!

The craft project this year was this backyard art installation. The circle is made primarily of "found" items, although the beads and flamingo were "found" in my bedroom.

The finished circle was quite a lovely amalgamation of flowers, cedar and pine, cones, seed pods, banana peels, mushrooms, rocks, old bottles, a plastic flag, amethysts and tumbled stones, sea shells, oranges, lemons, and the kitchen sink.

2006 was a challenging year in many, many, ways. In balance, though, it was a still a good year. We had our friends and our travels and our home and each other -- which makes us two of the luckiest people around.