Van Hoosen News 2001

December 25, 2001
Merry Christmas!

November 13, 2001
Happy 10th Birthday Corey! We celebrated Corey's special day at the Oregon City swimming pool, with friends and family

October 3 - October 8, 2001
We all took a six-day trip to California, to visit Disneyland, Disney's California Adventure, Sea World, Knott's Berry Farm, Medieval Times, and Universal Studios. We had a wonderful time! The weather was very nice and the crowds were light, thanks to October being slow, as well as many people afraid to travel because of the recent World Trade Center disaster. We stayed at The Castle hotel and hung out in the hot tub in the evenings, trying to revive our feet from all the walking. Some of the highlights from out trip:

• Petting dolphins at Sea World
• Blake and I LOVED the California Screamin' roller coaster
• Soaring over California ride at California Adventure
• Medieval Times! Wonderful time, good dinner, exciting for all of us, plus *our* knight won!
• Space Mountain broke down while we were at the top, the lights came on, and we climbed down
• Knott's Berry Farm's Ghost Rider coaster: SCARY! We didn't ride it a second time...
• Jurassic Park water ride at Univeral Studios
• Big Foot water ride at Knotts Berry Farm

September 22, 2001
Awesome scuba dives at Day Island with Janna, Claude and Mark: Saw a total of 14 wolf eels and eight octopi, six of which were HUGE, and I got to feed an urchin to a wolf eel! Janna took tons of great pictures of it all, posted in my dive log, so take a look!

September 13, 2001
Today I received Comptia's A+ Certification for Computer Hardware and Operating Systems. Now I'm a certified geek! :^)

September 11, 2001
We were in shock today, as terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York.

September 8, 2001
Our family joined my company, Vernier Software & Technology, celebrate its 20th anniversary at The Resort at The Mountain, near Mount Hood. At right is a picture of Becky and I at the celebration dinner.

September 4, 2001
The boys started back to school today, Corey in 4th grade, Blake in 2nd. They both like their teachers, and are glad to be back, for the most part anyway. :^)

August 20, 2001
We just returned from camping at Cultus Lake, and what a wonderful time it was! The weather was perfect, mid 80's all week and sunny almost all the time. We did have one afternoon of clouds, with a short but intense thouderstorm with the loudest thunder I had ever heard. I did some scuba diving, including a dive with Corey, a dive with Blake (his first open-water dive), and a crawdad hunt bagging 49 critters, which we cooked minutes later. Mmm! Corey tried his hand at water skiing, getting up his first try, but falling about 20 seconds later. Becky went in the water a little, thanks to the hot weather, and caught lots of rays on the beach. Our first night there entertained us with a meteor shower, while other nights the kids caught frogs on the beach. We also saw some deer, and Jonathan caught a small snake. Top it off with great camping meals, pleasant family and friends, and no serious injuries, it was about as good as it gets! Camping pictures are below:

July 23, 2001
I just completed Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced HTML classes

July 22, 2001
Diving at KVI Tower again with Clyde and Dan

June 24, 2001
Diving at Tramp Harbor and KVI Tower with Clyde and Dan N: excellent dive sites, and Clyde and I saw a rare fish called a Red Brotula

May 31, 2001
Happy 7th birthday, Blake!

May 10, 2001
Blake's got the unicycle thing down, riding all over the place, and Corey and I are improving on our juggling.

April 14, 2001
Blake unicycled around our block for the first time today, without falling. In fact he did it three times in a row! I've posted some pictures of him on the Juggling page if you are interested.

April 6, 2001
I just created my first animated GIF file, the juggling octopus.

April 4, 2001
Blake has been practicing riding the unicycle, and has been doing really well. I think just a couple more days of practice and he'll be riding around the block. Corey can juggle 3 balls quite well, both in the air and bounce juggling. Way to go boys!

March 19, 2001
I started my new job at Vernier Software

March 18, 2001
Happy 12th Anniversary to Becky and me!

March 16, 2001
I just put up my new Juggling Page. Check it out!

March 3, 2001
Diving in Tacoma with Todd, Clyde and Dan N

February 3, 2001
Diving with Dan N at Day Island and Arsenic Wall. Possibly my favorite dive ever, I held hands with a large octopus for several minutes. If you want to read the details, it is in my divelog as dive 135.

January 26, 2001
Becky is learning to juggle, and she's doing quite well. I've been juggling off and on since high school, and had just picked up some new juggling bean bags. Well, Becky liked them so much, she decided to learn to juggle too, and I "had" to buy her her own set! ;^)