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By Phil Scoville, June 1, 2008 5:53 pm

Well it is about time that I post something about our trip to California. We loved seeing all of our friends and ward members in Redlands, California. We stayed with some good friends, the LeSueurs. Oscar and Lily loved playing with Claire. We enjoyed our few days there.

We had to switch out our rental van from Enterprise because the air conditioning didn’t work. Although a hassle to do there, we were compensated handsomely. They took care of us and I’d recommend Enterprise to anyone. They have excellent rates and also great customer service, at least the South Provo, Utah office.

Despite that we enjoyed riding in the 2007 Toyota Sienna as opposed 2008 Dodge Caravan. The seats were much more comfortable.

We then spent the next several days at Disneyland. We enjoyed the park very much.

We stayed at the Paradise Pier hotel. We enjoyed breakfast with many Disney Characters at Goofy’s Kitchen.

We enjoyed the pool at both Paradise Pier hotel and the Disneyland hotel.

We loved Disneyland and Downtown Disney. We loved the several Jamba Juices that we got while there.

We also enjoyed the trip thoroughly. And you can best see our experience through the photos we took. Check out flickr photo set here. It is large.

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By Phil Scoville, January 13, 2008 3:31 pm

Marlene and I had a great trip to NYC and Philadelphia for a professional presentation that I gave at the ABCT conference in Philadelphia with some of my colleagues. We presented on “Empirically Supported Marital and Family Therapy Treatments.” We are still finishing the write-up of the material so that we can ship it off to have it reviewed for publication somewhere. However, our goal for that article is to be finished by February. It will actually be two articles when we are finished. Beside the technical aspect relating to that part which was actually a small part of the trip.

We paid for Marlene to come along and we stayed with Lauren and Chris in NYC (Lauren is Marlene’s really good friend from Seventeen Magazine when Marlene interned there just before we got married). We were there for a few days and then we stayed in a hotel for a couple of more days and it was great (Thanks to Marlene’s parents’ timeshare points).

We did alot while there. I love the city. I know Mar does too, but there is something about the sounds of the cars, taxis, etc; the colors of the city, grey, yellow, black; smells, roasted nuts, exhaust, horse manure; and the sights, central park, the many avenues and streets, malls, subway, horses, people. I have to say that I love NYC. It is one of the best places to go. We enjoyed a play (Pygmalion). “My Fair Lady” is based off of this play. It was excellent. It was in the American Airlines Theatre and Claire Danes played the lead character, Eliza Doolittle. She was great. Very entertaining and we got in for something like $29 per ticket. We happened upon some tickets of someone who had purchased a bunch of group tickets and he had extras. Lucky: the show had been sold out and it was during the Broadway strikes so we had already lost our opportunity to see Jennifer Garner and Kevin Kline in Cyrano De Bergerac. We had orchestra seats for that one but because of the strike the theatre was shut down. And they ended the strikes a week later. Bitterly disappointed. Jen Garner is one of Marlene’s favorite actresses (from Alias and 13 Going on 30).

While there we ate a many wonderful cafes and restaurants (both in Philly and in NYC). We enjoyed a wonderful time in NYCs Central Park.

We also went to many great shopping centers and thoroughly enjoyed our time there.

Now to the sad news: We took many, many great pictures. I came home and downloaded them and then the accident happened. It is a long story but I deleted our photos and music file and we haven’t yet been able to recover them. It looks like we’ll have to send it off somewhere to have them recovered professionally, because thus far we haven’t had any luck. We need a mac data recovery software to search the system, but the ones I’ve tested so far haven’t worked. I am so sad. I could cry. It was about 30 GBs of Photos. (I hadn’t backed the last 6 months of them). Also about 45 GBs of music.

So we are photoless of our trip to NYC and Philly right now, hopefully not forever. Thus far I’ve found one service that said they’d only charge us but the estimate was $700 to $1900 to recover the data. This will have to wait until I get a job.

As for the trip, we have much thanks for Marlene’s mom and my parents for watching the kids for the time while we were gone. They switched off and it went well. Thank you!

On to Christmas and the New Year in Oregon.