Current view of Lake Sammamish, near Bellevue, Washington*

Welcome to Mike and Kate's Home Page!

We live in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle.

Max, the youngest member of the family is heavily into Lego Bionicles, geocaching, hermit crabs, Toontown and fourth grade. Some movies he and his sister created can be found here: Funky Chicken #1, Funky Chicken #2, Funky Chicken #3, Funky Chicken #4 and the latest: Funky Chicken #5.

The second youngest member of the family, Aria, enjoys Girl Scouts and bicycling, and is enjoying middle school. Here is a large picture of her latest comic, and here is a small picture.

The first addition to the Lampi family was Christopher. On his 10th birthday he greatly enjoyed the Pokemon theme with the Psyduck ball toss, pinning the tail on Pikachu, Togepi egg toss, and the Electrode pinata - all things that his mom came up with. Indoors they formed teams and had fun doing the Pokemon Word Search his father made. It is also available in text format. In 2000 Christopher's birthday theme was about space aliens, and he has since moved on to Magic the Gathering, entering in several tournaments at WOTC - and even winning several of the smaller prizes.
He had a Pokemon-related web site for several years, but has since deleted it. Here is a movie he recently made with the help of his family.

We have experienced first hand the problems that GM and Texaco have created with the use of Dex-Cool coolant in GM vehicles. We highly recommend that if you have a GM vehicle that you do some research into this problem. Our vehicle was regularly maintained by both GM dealers and reputable independent repair shops prior to the problem occurring. This expensive problem was not detected by any of them - until the intake gaskets on our Astro van were destroyed and the engine began sucking coolant like crazy and money from our wallets for the repairs. GM has refused to consider this a recall-worthy issue and has refused to assist with paying for the repairs required for this problem.

Links to relevant sites on the web can be found at
Texaco talk at a coolant conference (They claim it isn't their fault!)
News story about relevant lawsuits in over 8 states
Another unhappy GM customer web site.

We ended up replacing the gaskets and water pump, flushing the cooling system (twice!) and replacing the Death-Cool, er, Dex-Cool with the green stuff. Replacing the green coolant every other year is far cheaper than replacing intake and head gaskets even once!

Needless to say we are not very likely to buy another GM vehicle again.

Note: One year later and the only repairs needed so far have been to replace the alternator and battery. They died in the middle of a cross country trip in 100+ degree weather while towing a big tent trailer. The cooling system held itself together with the green stuff, even through weather as hot as 108!

The image at the top of the page is a webcam picture of the view from a house near the southwestern shore of Lake Sammamish. Due to the angle and position of the sun it looks to the east towards Lake Sammamish and the Cascades in the winter, and southeast towards Tiger Mountain in the summer. It is updated every 5 minutes, using MDL Corporation's scsiCam video capture product and a Howard Enterprises CCD camera with a wide angle to telephoto zoom lens.
CCD cameras have a tendency to flood vertical sections of the image if any portion of that section is relatively bright, or when sunlight is impinging from the side. C'est la vie.

Images from the past day can be selected from this page. Some favorite images can be found here.