Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Steve and Erin are some of our closest friends. Rylan hired both of them when she worked at AOL back in the 1990’s. They have an awesome house down on Lake Anna in Virginia and invite all the friends down for a weekend every year.

This year we had a blast swimming and tubing and water skiing and eating and drinking. Kids of all ages had fun and got along really well. And this year they did the downstairs so they now have more bedrooms (no more sleeping in a tent in 90° heat!) and a great game room with ping pong, fuse ball and air hockey.

I took a number of pictures and will put them up later today. But I really liked these of Jake and Anna

My birthday is in March….March 29th, every year. And if you read this blog you likely know I celebrated 40 years this time around by sailing the Caribbean with my family and then taking the kids skiing and hiking in Utah for a week. Pretty nice celebration.

It is now June. My birthday is a good 2+ months ago. But the weekend before last, there was something “up”

Every year on Memorial Day weekend we throw a backyard party complete with 60 people, tons of burgers and dogs, badminton, and maybe a couple of beers. This year was no different….or so I thought.

Uncle Joel (NYC) was standing in Phil and Jenny’s Driveway.

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I think this is the best portrait ever of my wife, Rylan. I love window light.

(click image for larger)

My wife did a great job representing our school to the school board who is considering how to cut budgets due to state-wide budget shortfalls.

Yup :-)

As the father of a nearly seven (teen) year old, I know I am :-)

We had a heavy, wet snow today in DC. Perfect for a guy with a button nose.

My son got some temporary hair color for the holidays. So he let me paint him as a Christmas tree the other day. He loved it!

  

The kids were out of school for fall break so the whole family went off to Seattle to visit my brother, Paul.

We got in around noon and rented our car which took a while as I was cheap and went with an off-site rental location which I always swear I won’t do again but do anyway :-) Once we got into town, we decided to grab some lunch in Ballard which is a neighborhood just north of downtown. We ate a a great mexican place. Then we went over to Archie McPhee’s and scouted the random stuff they have which is always fun to look through - odds and ends of toys and motors and magic 8 balls, and nun chuckers with real flying nuns. You get the idea.

While we were looking around, my brother emailed my mom back in Baltimore telling her he had no phone as he had just moved to a new place. So I would have no way to call him. But he did say he was a coffee house in Ballard (great, that narrows it down). My mom called me and gave me the address. I told her to look up the directions on the web and she did and provided some reasonable instructions. She emailed Paul back and conveyed that we would be there in 15 minutes. I think there is a need for an Email to Phone to Web to Phone to Email gateway. Someone should create something :-)

Anyway, we drove over to “Q Cafe” on 15th Street and after missing the exit and driving backwards up the on-ramp, we arrived. Paul was inside finishing up a café olé. We talked for a while and caught up. He had not seen the kids in a year or so.

First Sighting: Paul drives a Bio Diesel VW GTI.

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Down in Charlottesville today visiting my good friends Bill and Wendy and young Solomon. We had fun catching up last night and working on Bill’s website a bit. Went for an 8 mile run this morning and it felt good.  Not much else going on.

Took a cool picture of young Solomon. Enjoy.