Barcelona Spain, a beautiful city! I would definitely put this on my top 3 places to visit in Europe. I plan on taking Heather there some day and spending a week. Right off the coast of the Mediterranean, gorgeous beaches, beautiful buildings, restaurants are great, shopping is nice and pretty cheap for Europe, clean and friendly atmosphere and very safe.

One of many famous works of Antoni gaudi, my pictures do not do it justice. If you hear the expression "that is very gaudy looking!" this is where it came from. See here for a detailed look at his works that I got to see: http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Antonio_Gaudi.html

Very cool Gaudi Building in downtown Barcelona.

All Gaudi.

Another shot from a different angle.

From the street level.

I have no idea what this is, but most buildings in Barcelona have great architecture.

Man of mystery, man of travel, man my feet ache!

Typical street, very clean and nice, full of shops and resturants.

Some famous church, under some heavy construction, pity.

A Cathedral from the street.

Loads of cool statues, this guy is pointing at the building, I have no clue why, but it looks cool.

One side of the Sagrada Familia.

Famous park entrance, very nice structure.

Close up view of the arch entryway to the park, built in the 1800's for an international event.

A Collusium

The Sagrada Familia, this thing is absolutely huge! The history behind it is very cool: http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Sagrada_Familia.html. Expected to be finished in the year 2025 I think. Another Antoni Gaudi work, his crowning masterpiece.

Sagrada Familia, the crane to the left is massive, so you can see the structure is very tall.

Sagrada Familia front entrance. It literally has the entire bible and new testament carved into the structure telling a story.

View from a distance.

This thing is massive and only partially finished. It is entirely paid for by local donation and alms.

Typical street roundabout with statues in Barcelona.

Starting my journey from the Hotel.

Typical Barcelona fare for dinner, all seafood.

Meetings...

Ah, beautiful Barcelona! The weather is nice (upper 50's) here. I would love to get out and see the city but I am stuck in meetings all day. I may have some time on Wednesday to get some pic's of the area.

Meeting room in down town Barcelona

On my way to Barcelona, Spain

Another build a bear!

Family Night with the Missionaries

Tonight for family night we invited over the Missionaries to feed and watch a bootleg copy of The Testament which I have never seen before. It was a good movie and we really enjoyed it.

Elders and Lasagna, what could be better!

Snow Day... No Church today!

We woke up to winter this morning, high winds and frozen ice. The roads were terrible. I arrived for 7am Bishopric meetings and we decided to cancel church meetings today. So I got to call members all morning and give them the good (oops, bad) news. The Stake also cancelled our Priesthood meetings at the Stake center tonight so I am off the hook.

Heather making Hawaiian Burgers....mmmmm

The Girls doing Homework

I bathed the dog tonight, doesn't she look fabulous. She is due for another hair cut.

Pretty Doggy

New-er PC in the house

So we have quite a few PC's laying around the office that are significantly better than my home PC and I made an executive decision to upgrade myself. I am going from a P4 1.2 Ghz with 256Meg Ram to a new P4 2.4 Ghz with 1Gig Ram. I am keeping my nice new video card and sound card from this last year. While it is not a huge difference here, it should help a bit. My only problem is I'm lazy and don't want to transfer my programs to a new drive so I decided to try and boot the old drive on the new PC.... nope, no likey. So I am back to my tinkering and troubleshooting days that I pay staff to take care of now in the office. I decided to uninstall all my drivers in the old PC and do a windows XP repair on my existing software on the new PC, hopefully this allows me to boot and fix things. So far so good, it says I have 30 min until I smile at my brilliance, or cry in shame at my failure.... Gotta go, the blue screen of death is calling me.

The dreaded XP windows Repair

Table Manners

Aubree has graduated to using a high chair when we go out to eat (instead of a car carrier). She has become very fond of eating the table wherever we go (ala lemony snickets baby). We went out to Chili's for lunch today and visited lenscrafters where I ordered new glasses (new year means new flex account pool of money to spend). I decided to get transition lenses this year, so we will see how it works out, I'll get them in a week or two. Isabelle returns to school tomorrow and I return to work.... Heather and Aubree return to their endless vacation at home (oops, did I type that? Just kidding of course!).

Aubree eats tables for lunch