View of Yosemite Valley and Half Dome Mountain

This is a picture we took leaving Yosemite. This is taken at the top of the road after leaving the valley and driving up a windy mountain road. It was shortly after this photo that Zachary decided to get car sick and threw up all over the back seat of the car. He kept telling us his throat hurt. We didn't know that meant he was getting car sick. Lesson learned.

Yosemite

My family and I just got back from a week in Yosemite National Park. This was our first time there and we had a great experience. I have to say that it is probably the most beautiful place I have camped. The mountains are amazing there. We saw lots of wildlife and the kids had a great time exploring the sequoia forests. We all had bikes and spent a lot of time biking through the valley.

My highlight for the week was climbing to the top of "Half Dome". The hike took me 10 hours to complete. 17 miles consisting of 5000 vertical feet of elevation gain. The last 1000 feet was a 50% grade of slope on slick granite. There was a metal cable that you had to pull yourself up with to make it to the top. During the hike, I passed 2 waterfalls. One of them I had to climb granite steps up almost 1000 feet alongside of the waterfall. After climbing those steps my legs felt like rubber! Even today they are a little sore.

I highly recommend Yosemite for a great camping experience. its a 7-8 hour drive from San Diego but its well worth it.

I will post pictures as soon as I download them off my camera.

My Business

Family,
This semester I am creating a business with a team of my classmates. Mind you that we only have six weeks to operate, and we only start with a few hundred dollars. But here's our idea. In Hawaii, there's only one Krispy Kreme store, and it's on Maui. Now, their donuts are a big hit on the Mainland, but Polynesians are probably twice as fanatic about them. On my flight out here a few weeks ago, I had a layover in Maui and on the flight to Oahu, half of the people had bags of boxes of donuts. Anyway, my team has found a businessman who ships out to the other islands every day and comes back to Honolulu with an empty plane. We met with him yesterday and he agreed to work with us by having his truck pick up anywhere from 100-300 dozen donuts a day at the bakery, flying them to Oahu, and then distributing them wherever we need them. A huge bonus for us is that he will do it all for FREE, so that he can get a tax write-off for donating to a charitable cause (all of our profits go to scholarships). In the history of this business competition, the record profit was $7,000. We plan to blow that away with something more like $12,000. We hope to sell the donuts to hotels, gas stations, grocery stores, Starbucks?, etc.

Living off the Fat of the Sea

My roomates and I live on Oahu's premier spearfishing beach. Yesterday, we went out and caught a couple medium sized goat fish, but my friend caught an octopus! We brought him in still on the spear and every time we tried to get him off he would spray thick black ink. I looked up some recipes on the internet and so we immediately boiled him. After he cooked for about twenty minutes, the skin, eyeballs, and viscera came right out. We cut it up, coated it in an egg mixture, and fried it along with some peppers. The taste...well, let's just say that I'm glad I did it once, but don't ever want to eat octopus again. Incredibly chewy, tastes kinda like chicken, but the texture of the tentacles was too much.

How to Post a new Blog

I have received several emails from people wondering how to post a new blog. Here's how:

There are 3 ways to post.

Option 1:
You can go to http://www.blogger.com

I usually go there by clicking on the blogger icon on the left side of the header while looking at the YorkFamily Blog. Once there, there is a "Plus" button that will open the new post page.

Option 2:
you can send an email to yorkchris.post@blogger.com . The subject in the email becomes the title of the blog post, and the body of the email becomes the body of the blog post.

Option 3:
If you use the google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/), there is an option to install the "Blog This" button on the toolbar. After this is installed, you can click this button on any web page and it automatically opens up a new post window with the link to the web page in it. You can continue to post on a specific web page or you can delete the html link and write your own text.

Phishing

Warning: For those of you not aware of the latest security threats in cyberspace, there is a new threat going around called "Phishing".

Basically Phishing is a fake email that looks like it comes from your bank. They trick you into putting in your bank information on a website then use the information to electronically take all your money. It's a major problem right now.

I received my 1st Phishing email today. Here is a copy of it in case you wanted to see what it looks like. It looks very real. I have forwarded it onto the fraud division at citibank to investigate.

To read more about Phishing, click here: http://www.antiphishing.org/

here is the email I got:

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Phishing