My German friends stayed for 3 weeks again, and we visited several parks, but not the Lassen and Yosemite high country this year (too much snow). I got to play friendly native guide. :) They treated me to Shakespeare at Ashland, and this year we saw Richard III (absolutely great, with the same actor as in last year's Henry VI) and Faustus (moribund and trivial... the stage setting and costumes were nice, but it seemed a waste given the lack of energy in the play itself). I don't like most comedies, but Room Service brought back memories of 8 artists/musicians in convention rooms, and it was very well done. I took lots of reference pictures during the whole trip, but have to go through them. Since I doubled up on the migraine medicine in order to have more days as a human while they were here, I had to balance that with a couple of weeks of lying low. So what did we see? geysers, rollercoasters, waterfalls, cave formations (with boat trip across Lake Shasta), vineyards, and a double handful of plays and movies. Whew! It's going to take a couple of weeks just to read through this forum's posts, but it appears that there are the usual scandals and kerfluffles as well as folks volunteering to help each other and share stuff. So, I wasn't ignoring anybody, I just wasn't here. Carolly