On the last day of our Hawaii trip last month, the boys headed back up to the North Shore (town of Haleiwa) for a shark dive with Hawaii Shark Encounters. It was even cooler than expected. We pumped ourselves up for it by watching Discovery Channel shark attacks earlier in the week.

This spider lives on the rosebush near our front porch. Every night around 9pm, it comes out to spin a large web -- about 2-1/2 feet across -- to catch bugs attracted to our porch light. I first met it last week when I almost stuck my head through the web to make sure the front yard faucet was off (which is a nightly ritual to make sure Alexander didn't sneak out to break the water ban).

The youngest last week playing in the decomposing leaves -

The Eiffel Tower had a bit of a makeover to celebrate France's six-month presidency of the European Union (starting June 30). I tried to get some slow-shutter photos to catch all the lights, but I didn't have a tripod so there's a bit of a blur. This one is from atop the Arc de Triomphe:

And another from Trocadero with a slower shutter:

It's coolest if you imagine some street performers off to your right dancing to the Jackson Five. I'll have to post some video later.

One of the most visited pages on hillfamily.net is this fairly crummy photo from 15 years ago of Eugène Burnand's Les disciples Pierre et Jean courant au sépulcre le matin de la Résurrection (Apostles Peter and John running to the tomb the morning of the Resurrection). It comes up pretty high on a Google search and gets a lot of comments. I always felt bad that the photo was so poor, so when I was in the Orsay Museum in Paris last month I stopped by to get some better shots. Here's one (larger version here):

And here it is from further back -

It's not a very famous painting and doesn't do well with art critics, but it's one of my favorites -- you can really sense the anxiety of the moment.

Napping in New Delhi

This was on the way down from Diamond Head, an extinct volcano near Waikiki. It's not a long hike, but it's a dry hot climate, there's very little shade, there are 173 steps (it's paved all the way), and we had to get to the airport so we did a speed tour. A girl in front of us stopped her friends near these plants and said, "Hey, those are those poky things!", a statement of the obvious which for some reason struck me as pretty funny.

Anyone know what the plant is really called?

I used to have a plaster model of this gargoyle from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, but it fell down the stairs and shattered when I was clearing out my desk at the end of my Delta Air Lines career. Seems like that might have been an omen, but I haven't been able to make sense of it. I finally got to see the thing up close last month after waiting in a 2-hour line to climb the cathedral tower. (While in line, I was approached by half a dozen gypsy girls whose gimmick was to ask, "Speak English?" and if you nodded, they'd show you a note written in English asking for money.)

I hadn't noticed before that the gargoyle was female. In the plaster model, you can see the the little hands of whatever is being eaten - they're wrapped around the side of the larger creature's mouth in futile resistance to being consumed.

This is our entry in the ward talent show tonight.

This is our first attempt at video cloning. It's tricky to get the kids to pause for the right amount of time to make space for their clone's response. Elisabeth couldn't remember what she asked her clone, so she just had it repeat "sounds good to me!" over and over again. I have newfound respect for the producers of Parent Trap. After the credits, there are some outtakes from Alexander, which ended up being my favorite part.