The Kyoto Prize dinner was last week and, as usual, it was quite a nice time. We've attended this the last 3 years. Long evening but great food and entertainment, including an 11!-yr old girl who played Chopin’s Fantasy in C# Minor. She’s already debuted with the Shanghai Symphony and other notable groups. And she had a delightful personality, too! A group with those big Oriental drums played, also, and we had a singer and dancing couple. Fun!

I missed talking to Ryan before he left on this trip because I got too engrossed in a medical show on hypothermic cardiac arrest, where drs cool your blood so low that your heart stops, so they can repair, for example, brain aneurysms. You are clinically dead for 15-20 minutes, then they warm your blood and your heart usually starts beating spontaneously (or they shock it). One of the young women who underwent this procedure had a near-death experience where she "popped out" of her body and could tell the doctor, later, what was going on elsewhere in the room; then she saw a light which grew brighter and brighter and her grandmother came to her and told her that she would be going back, which she soon did. Pretty interesting! The doctor said that with the brain that cold and metabolic activity so slow, he couldn't imagine that the brain could generate those images. Pretty amazing, huh!

I'm alone for a few days while Dad is in Los Angeles at a conference, which means I can play the piano as much as I want and play hookey from my other household tasks. We're going to visit Ryan and Rebecca the end of May, Memorial Day weekend, and taking Mom with us. I hope she'll fly out a few days before and stay a few days after.
At work we're celebrating the release of a new enhanced credit report and are blowing up balloons Wed, Thur, and Fri, putting them in bouquets and distributing them around the company. There's a crew of 6 of us doing this, so each morning we fill 300 balloons with helium. It's a fun project and a real change from sitting in a cubicle. Afterwards, we're treated to juice and bagels or muffins or croissants.
One of the new things I'm learning about at work is how to use XML (extensible markup language)files in SAS. XML is related to HTML, which you all know and love. I read XML For Dummies as a start. It's really hard to keep up on technology! Grandma says she's giving up and is not getting an iPod even though she knows it's cool.

Big night last night - I bought a scanner! Now Dad and I can scan in all the slides and photos, put them on CDs and add them to the current family history. Will Dad really be able to get rid of the slides after we scan them? Will we keep the slide projector? Oh, the questions posed by modern technology! What do you think we should do?

Unexpected guests!
Every day when I come home from work, the first thing I do is check the pool. After a couple of bad experiences where little animals fell in and drowned, my mind became subject to the fear that there might be a dead body in the pool. So you can imagine how amazing it was to part the curtains, half-expecting the worst, and find that Mr. and Mrs. Mallard Duck had flown in for a short stay in our luxurious spa and pool. At the time I saw them, they were resting on the spa edge where the water flows into the pool. Make Way for Ducklings is being re-enacted right here! No doubt it's nesting time, but with no fish or peanut-tossing passengers in boats, our pool wasn't very alluring. They flew off in a few minutes, leaving behind, on the pool bottom, evidence that they had swum around for a while. (The pool vacuum took care of it in short order.) What beautiful ducks they are!
Then this morning on the way to work on the 15, Dad saw, in Lake Hodges trees, a huge flock of cranes, numbering in the hundreds he thought. Also, some pelicans were interspersed. It made such an impression on him that he immediately and enthusiastically phoned to tell me about it.
Question: what do I do with the photos I've taken with my cell phone camera? Do I email them to myself?? I'm out of memory and can't take more pictures until I figure this out.

This weekend went way too fast. Friday night was a great night at the temple while poor Dad worked on the tax documents. Saturday, watching conference was wonderful and inspiring; then Dad took the tax stuff to work to fax to Austin (Don Flaten). Whew! What a relief to get that transferred to someone with the mind for it. So Dad didn't see the afternoon session, but for those who did, you may remember David F. Evans speaking. He's the husband of Dad's cousin - Aunt Edith's daughter. (It's just a coincidence that she married someone with her mother's maiden name. They're the ones who returned this year from serving as mission president in Japan. Also, our former bishop from Pasadena days, Keith Hilbig, was called to serve in the First Quorum of the Seventy. That was exciting to see.
Tonight we watched a Christopher Lowell show I'd taped and we got more enthused about finishing the house decorating. Dad's a natural artist.
Also, this weekend I'm monitoring a job at work whereby I'm processing credit reports for Long Beach Mortgage Company, a part of WAMU, or Washington Mutual, - all 230,210 for 2005 b/c they want to see the FICO scores. I get 35 per minute so it's going to take a good 4.5 - 5 days before I can even start pulling them into SAS for analysis. My boss at work is Peng Leong, who's from Australia but born and raised mostly in Malaysia. He's a real athlete and loves cricket and golf. Most of the other guys I work with are excellent cricket players: Prabakaran, Vinod, Ranga, Bhupadi, Sam Raj, Srinivas, Amit. Well, if you get the idea that we are run by foreigners, you're pretty accurate. They are all smart guys and very, very nice. But Peng's boss is John and he loves country music and playing basketball, so it's all good.
Jared volunteered to help me do some other things on the blog, but so far I'm pretty limited.
Next week we're performing our Easter cantata; I wish you all could hear it, it's so nice.