Doctor Doctor, Bikes, and Picasa

Doctor Doctor, Bikes, and Picasa…

As we prepare for Anna’s 6^th birthday this Saturday, I thought that I’d write about a few different things.

If some of you think back, you might remember playing doctor as a kid or wanting to be a doctor when you grew up. Christine was telling me about Sarah wearing a doctor’s outfit that belonged to Lena. The glasses are an old pair belonging to one of Lean’s brothers. We took a few pictures of Sara in the doctor’s outfit.

You might remember that we recently bought a bike for Anna on eBay, well we went out for our first family bike trip this past weekend. We rode a trail near our home to one of the nearby villages. All together I think that it was about 6 kilometers, so Anna did a good job in riding that distance. Back when Christine was pregnant with Sarah, we bought a bike attachment. For lack of a better word, we have always referred to it as “the tent”. We bought a Cheetah 2 person child carrier made by Chariot Carriers at a local bike shop. The original intention was that we could attach it to either of our bikes and the girls could ride along with us. While we did use it this way a few times, we used it as a stroller quite a bit. The whole time that we stayed in Belgium, we used it as our primary stroller. Since Sarah seems to ride like a turtle at the moment, it might be a while before we can all ride our bikes, but with the Cheetah we have the possibility of riding together (allbeit Sarah in it). We're looking forward to when she can ride a little faster and we think that it probably won't be too long till she is without training wheels as well.

In some sadder news. the father of my friend Kurt passed away last week. Mr. Hillebrand had a stroke and was in the hospital for a few days before it happened. Kurt and I became friends back in 1985, when we were in student government together. So I’ve know Kurt and his father for around 22 years. I was the best man at Kurt’s wedding and he flew to Germany to take part in mine as a groomsman. It really meant a lot to me that he was at my wedding. From Detroit to Frankfurt is a eight hour plus flight each way (something that limits the number of visitors we see in a year!). Before I moved to Germany, Kurt and I went to the Detroit auto show on a yearly basis (about 4 times I believe). I'm wishing Kurt and his family well as they deal with their loss.

In Other News…

Picasa

If you have a digital camera, there is a good chance that you have thought about organizing your digital photos. There are certainly a lot of programs that can help you do this, with varying degrees of complexity. I have used Picasa for a couple of years now. It is a program from Google. Like many things from Google it is integrated with many of the services that they offer. If you have a Blogger account, if you press the “BlogThis” button, you can post pictures to your blog. You can select “Order Prints’ to have your prints developed at a local store. Depending upon the price and service offered by the store, you’ll probably find this is cheaper than printing them out on your computer’s printer. On the organizational front, you can star some of your memorable photos so that you can find them easier. You also have the possibility of assigning keywords to your photos. Picasa even has some basic editing functions like red eye removal and photo rotation. From Picasa, you can upload pictures to the Picasa Web Album. This is a service from Google that will allow you to store your pictures online. I haven't used this that much, but I have found out that pictures posted on Blogger are stored here.

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