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The funeral--more of a memorial service, I guess--for my uncle Saturday wasn't too bad. I sorta hate it when the person doing most of the talking about the deceased is someone who never met them--just a preacher tossing out vague homilies and tossing out characteristics that we probably all want applied to us in life and in death. He was a great guy, he had a great sense of humor, he was there for his kids, etc. But anyway, after she was done his children, my cousins, got up and spoke about him, and my grandmother shared some details about his life that we may not have known, and a couple of his coworkers spoke about him. That part was very nice. Afterwards, we went to his house for some family time, and that was pretty good. Not too maudlin, thankfully. It was very strange to have both my Mom and my Dad there--they split up when I was pretty young, and really haven't been in the same place for that long in probably 25 years, at least. My Mom's other brother and his wife were there as well, having flown in from Texas. We visited them there on our Texas trip a couple years ago, and now they're planning to move back to Florida, which will be nice. My aunt and my wife get along famously, since they're both big into sewing. They're still looking around for a place and haven't even settled on which part of the state they want to move to, but hopefully it won't be too far.

Before the service we went to Morningside Nature Center, which is a nice Gainesville city park that includes an old-style Florida farm, with some farm animals to pet. They had a pair of lambs that weren't even 24 hours old, so that was an unexpected treat! After that we went to the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, and we did the Butterfly Rainforest before I had to head over to the funeral home. We figured the girls wouldn't particularly enjoy or understand the service, so I left them and Heather at the museum to roam around while I went to the service. It all worked out pretty well, even though traffic around the campus was terrible thanks to the Orange & Blue Debut, which I gather is an intramural game the UF football team puts on after spring training. Go Gators, I guess. Apparently Hermione would like to go to college there (currently she wants to study geology and paleontology, and I do believe it's a good school for that), so maybe I'll become more of a fan later on. :)

Sunday we stayed pretty close to home--the girls have wanted to go to a particular park for a while, so we went there before lunch. I spent some time working on the pool and we ran the heater for a bit, so after we got back from lunch and relaxed for a bit the girls took their first dip for the year. It only got up to about 76F so it was still rather chilly for me and Heather, but the girls didn't seem to mind. We'll run the heater again next weekend, probably, and hopefully that will get it to a good temperature for everybody. I think we're pretty much past any cold snaps--we have a cold front moving in this week, but this time of year that really just means a little rain and not much of a temperature change.

After dinner Heather took the older girls ice skating, and I came along with Amy. Heather was disappointed that I'll be out of town for their next 3 lessons, which is the rest of the session--she'd been wanting me to go get some photos of her and Hallie skating. So this made up for that, and I think even better because I got Hermione too, and she's not doing the lessons.

And that was the weekend! So have some photos:
Saturday:

How do the fence lizards know they're supposed to hang out on fences?

Meeting the bovine resident.

Wookit the widdle baby newborn lambs!

There were these two lambs too, but they looked to be a few weeks old, at least.

Old-timey Florida farmhouse.

The girls love this wall of frogs at the Natural History Museum--they each like to pick a favorite.

I and my macro lens like the Butterfly Rainforest!

Sunday:

Amy was a veritable terror when we were leaving the house and driving to the park, but once we got there she settled down. She had fun collecting flowers.