Florescent lighting is scary

Halloween II
Florescent lighting is always a little scaaarryyyy.

Halloween

(From left to right and top to bottom: Tinkerbell, Dorothy, 8ball, Alfalfa)












I've seen your blogs. You all posted your Halloween pictures by Nov. 1. I haven't even uploaded the photos from our camera, but my dear, punctual, friend emailed some to me from the ward party.

Opinion Poll

1. How many Halloween events are required to consider the holiday sufficiently observed?

At the operaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

No, we didn't take our younglings to Macbeth. It was actually a fanciful production of The Magic Flute. The highlights were eating pretzels with Dad and seeing our

friendly, neighborhood, opera star painted blue. When you have the time, Star and Angelfish will happily breakdown the love-triangle plot and show you sketches of their favorite costumes. They said the show got really interesting once they moved to seats with translation screens. Next time, don't be late!

Stand back! I know origami!

Paper folding?

This is a place holder photo of the girls making origami cats, hearts and pumpkins at the Kiku exhibit. Kiku is the Japanese art of growing chrysanthemums, but included an extensive tour of Japanese botanical design from the famous bonsai to gardens of gigantic bamboo sculpture and, of course, paper folding. Wait. You'll see.

Fall Guy

Torpedo takes a break from farmer's market shopping. Besides, that stuff's for girls anyway!

Farmer's Market

A crisp October morning at the local farmer's market epitomizes all that is good about fall. We sampled organic broccoli, carrots and leeks sauteed in olive oil. We tasted honey on toothpicks and shared blueberry scones and cheese Danish with our friends. But let's face it, we didn't bounce home with any organic broccoli or leeks. No, the O's shuffled home with a jug of tangy apple cider and the cider donuts to match. Fabulous! We'll be back for more of that. Topping off the morning, the girls picked up ceramic knick-knacks from the adjoining flea market, (winner: a tiny glass elephant with a pink glass rose saudered to it's butt, glued on a 1"x2" mirror base), while Torpedo roamed the adjacent boulders hunting for crunchy leaves and big sticks. Ahhhhhhhhh.....

Money Minors

This is the story of Angelfish and Star's Pet Care business.
This is GorgonZOLA, the dog they love and care for. This is Star and Angelfish opening a checking account...Oh, wait, you have to be 18??! This is Star and Angelfish opening a stinky, lame-O savings account that only yields 0.25%. No temporary checkbook. No debit card. See Angelfish dreaming of where she will put her new piggy bank. See Star devising a way around the bureaucracy and into a brokerage account before she turns 12.

On the road again!

Chicken Hawk

I am going to tell you about a wild living creature. It is a Red Tailed Hawk. A hawk ‘s nickname is Chickenhawk. It lives from Alaska to the West Indies. Red tailed hawks eat mammals like birds and reptiles. They catch their food with their feet. Today at a play-ground I saw an injured hawk. It could fly pretty well. But it was hurt on the foot. It would not let us take him down. Red tailed hawks live in high trees were they can spy food faster and to keep safe from Eagles. A hawk can weigh from 690 to 1300 grams (that means up to 4.4lbs.)--Angelfish

Exclusive

Hi Everyone,

I was never really comfortable with the voyeristic nature of blogs. Does anyone else find it odd that we share so much personal information without actually keeping in touch? I like to say, "Before blogs we had Grandmas." I hope all of you as family and friends will feel welcome to visit our blog anytime and feel free to send an email or call.

I wanted something 'exclusive' for this post, but I haven't loaded up the crazy pictures of the van being broken into last Thursday. Now, why woud somebody want the bug guard, headlights, grill and front bumper?! There is a mini-storage ad campaign here that cautions: Bad things happen when you leave the city. The billboards always show atrocious aspects of suburban living but bad things happen everywhere so we just have to keep our chins up and celebrate all the good around us.

Be well!

September

We're back in school. Hooray! We're all happy to be on a schedule again. Too much Summer liberty was making us agitated. We kicked off the year with a series of field trips. First, we headed south for two days at Mt. Vernon. We worked the pioneer plantation planting cabbage, grinding parched corn and touring the 16-sided indoor threshing treadmill that G.W. invented. I think Star's favorite part was the cotton. They had ripe cotton which they had recently picked so we got to remove the seeds. Nasty boogers! Then we carded the cotton (very short fibers). Finally, Star became adept at spinning it into thread. Working out there in the heat and humidity gave us an insight into the daily lives of slaves, servants and the master of the house. The second day we started at the gristmill and distillery. We played on gigantic millstones while we watched the power providing water stream into the mill. In the mil, we were shown how the mill stones cut against each other to grind the grains. There was one for wheat and one for all other grains. The wheat came in 3 grades. The most expensive grade was refined white wheat which had to go through a separate cooling process so that it wouldn't clump together. That would have been bad for business. We watched the second mill in action. In seconds, it ground many times the amount of corn we had ground with mortar and pestle the day before. We were amazed. So many gears, pulleys, hydropower, lifts, etc. This was definitely the cutting edge technology of the day.

In the distillery, the rye was boiled in great vats to break out the starches and make Fire Water or Whiskey. The sugar to make rum was in the grip of the British, so it was more economical and patriotic to make whiskey. After the starches were boiled into the water it was distilled 2,3 or 4 times to raise the alchololic content and the price. At first G.W. didn't want to attract the clientel that followed whiskey, but the profits were huge and he became (by far) the most productive distillery in America at that time. We did learn about heating liquid to vapor and cooling it back into liquid form through copper coil pipes immersed in water, etc. There was plenty of science going on. I think our favorite part about the distillery was the pig pen. It's not actually on site, but we were told that most farmers let their pigs run wild until slaughtering day. Once G.W. had this distillery hopping, he didn't want to waste the boiled rye mash leftover. So, he penned all of his pigs near the distillery and fed it to them. They were said to be the fattest around and Martha was famous for her Christmas hams.

We finally retreated to the air conditioning of the education center. I can't begin to explain how three-dimensional and thorough this center is. We didn't get to cover everything and we'll be using our annual membership again and again. We've visited Mt. Vernon 5 times and aren't nearly through it yet. I digress. The highlights of the Ed. Center for us were 3 lifesize replicas of the great man prepared by multiple scientist, historians, artists, etc... to be the closest to his likeness ever. One shows him at 19 surveying. One shows him in his prime, fully uniformed astride a full-sized white horse. Lastly, he is recreated at his presidential swearing in. We also enjoyed a movie on Revolutionary War spy tactics and a 14 minute interactive film of the Revolutionary War from 1776-1781 which included 3 screens, shaking seats (canon fire), smoke, fog and even snow. We watched it twice. We also spent an hour or so dressing up in Colonial clothes and playing Colonial games of the day (9 pin, alphabet cards, paper dolls, play house with Colonial dishes). K and A spent a good deal of time piecing together Colonial crockery supposedly from an archaeological dig. Lastly, we saw a set of G.W.'s dentures and watched a film about Colonial dentistry. He was a dedicated brusher long before many of his countrymen adopted the practice, but still lost all of his teeth. Too bad.

Our next fieldtrip was set up by aunt Julie. We met up with all our D.C. family and toured the White House. No pictures allowd so you'll have to take a virtual tour on-line or set up your own through your congressperson. It was fairly snappy and self-guided. There were no hands-on activities for children, etc. Nevertheless, the kids put their hands on everything they could. Ali mostly remembers the sparkling chandeliers. That fieldtrip may be most meaningful in the future as we watch the news, elections, etc. We'll recognize the rooms. I most noted one of the presidential paintings was made by Samuel Morse (inventor of morse code). I'm not a ranter, but I did note that there doesn't seem to have been any generation in my personal awareness that is more pigeonholed than ours. G.W. was a "Farmer," but he was also and inventor, general, statesman, diplomat, president, botanist, etc. Today it seems we have to pick one label and never deviate: Academic, Financier, Artist, Dentist. I'll just leave it at that.

We had a fun family birthday party after the field trip and then headed to Georgia the next morning. 10 hours in the car with my kids was a pleasant surprise. They took turns selecting music, counting down miles or exits. It was amazing to watch the topography change. I never put Georgia and Palm Trees together, but as we approached our first set of Jesus billboards we also hit the palm trees. The humidity was intense and we imagined our Virginia plantation experience in Georgia. Forget it. Working in the cotton fields of Georgia would have been so much worse.

Our favorite part (and real motivation) was seeing our friends, the Days! It was wonderful to see how the children had grown and to put them all in their new context. They took us to an amazing wild beach where we were able to eyewitness the effects of erosion. The upended, sunbaked trees made an ethereal playground and a perfect campsite for our hours of oceanic exploration. This beach was the perfect combination of lake and ocean. The waves weren't much more than ripples and the water was incredibly warm. Even Torpedo came in up to his neck! We found crabs, hermit crabs, sea sponge and collected 19 sand dollars!! That was mostly Julie, who recently discovered that talent, but everybody found something. You might try googling sand dollars. We did because we wanted to know why they were turning our hands iodine yellow. What do they eat? What eats them? How do they reproduce? Why do they have those holes? You'll have to look it up yourself because my post is already getting too long, even for a self-proclaimed bombast. Moving on...

The next day, after some book work, we went to a gorgeous private island to swim at a completely over the top luxurious resort. Everything was unnaturally perfect, green and manicured. There were multiple pools, bridges, hot tubs, lions squirting out water, bridges, sprinkling fountains, etc. I think my favorite part was that towels were provided. Now THATS a luxury I can really appreciate. We enjoyed the game room where I picked up a ping-pong paddle after mmsdkfjklsm-years. We also played on the shuffle board (spinning rather than shuffling the pucks) and an ultra-modern playground. Julie and I reminisced about our many years of playgrounding together and declared this to be the cleanest one. ;)

The next day was all driving and we made good time. Then we had a day off to clean the van, repack and meet some Finnish relatives that actually speak English. Hooray! Also, we learned that Edy's has a limited edition Girlscout ThinMint cookie ice-cream. You should definitely check it out. Let me know if you find the Samoas version anywhere (Stew Leonards is rumored to have it). Finally, finally, finally we all came home. It was such a happy reunion and we've spent the rest of the month trying to log all of our learning in our daily writing. We've followed up on our Colonial studies by actually reading the entire Declaratation of Independence and putting the complaints in our own words. It includes "perfidy" and we know that word because of the Newberry winner we just finished in family read-aloud time. (Check out: The Tale of Despereaux).

We've had lots of other highlights and good times, but we can't keep looking back and I'm already a month behind so I'm saying farewell to September and looking forward to October.

Big Day!

It was a BIG day for the us in the Big Apple. I'll dispense with the time, trouble and teammates involved for this post. My Hero played all sides of the theatre (artistic, business, bongo drums?!) Those lucky few in the audience got to see this fantastic cast perform a 30 minute cutting from Berlin (berlinthemusical.com) and an ovation-worthy splicing of Stephen Schwartz' Children of Eden. Highlights included Stephen accompanying himself as he sang "The Hardest Part of Love." For those who don't know, "...it's the letting go."

Family Portrait

Virginia homestead photo
We had one more weekend of wedding parties on the East coast, followed by a H.S. reunion. We forgot to take the camera for that, but since I actually got the time wrong causing My Hero to miss the reunion it wasn't much of a photo-op after all. We always knew My Hero was in a class by himself, but...this was completely my fault. Sorry. We did, however, get in some sweet row boating on the lake and we all progressed towards our various definitions of "tan" after multiple trips to the pool.

Reunion

Families gather for weddings and funerals. Happily this was a wedding and we got to see Grandpa's sisters, Aunt Gale (left) and Aunt Roberta after ....many years. Maybe we'll all be inspired to pick up our personal journals and pedigree charts again. My favorite stories were grandpa being sent to his room and taking apart a sewing machine or typewriter. The other, he was hiding under the stove and unscrewed the legs. Fortunately, somebody noticed before it smashed him and he still slings a mean drill today.

JCPenny

The ever adorable Sparkle
and Torpedo chanelling a JC Penny model (replacing the watch glancing w/fruit snacks)

Married to the mob

We spent some wedding day down time mugging for the camera. Don't report us. We were probably supposed to be doing something useful.

Limo Kiss

Here's one actual photo without any of us in it. It was a lovely wedding AND my first peak inside a limo. (I didn't notice any seatbelts.) Congratulations Jared & Crystal!!

...something blue?

Something old
Something new
Something borrowed
Something blue...
It was freaky wedding clairvoyance that we all wore blue t-shirts the day before this tall gorgeous redhead made my little brother-in-law one lucky devil. Left to right: mother of the groom, me (4mo. prego), bride, bride's BF.

The Denver Center

It's August and the whole family is happily in Denver. One of the highlights was a private tour of the absolutely incredible Denver Center where My Hero hopes to partner on future projects. You theatre people may appreciate the multiple venues and on-site design, construction, lighting, costumes, wigs, props, education camps, etc. It put the magic back into theatre for me. Thanks to their amazing technical directer, Dan, for the 2 hour behind-the-scenes tour. When can we move to Denver?

Beach Bishop

This month, My Hero was made bishop of our favorite single's ward. His parents gave him shirts and ties. I gave him a set of beach chairs. We need both kind of people in our lives, right? P.S. Torpedo doesn't make much of an assistant, but he's a sporty side-kick.

#7

No, not the eminent Baby. This is our nod to Harry Potter 7, Deathly Hallows. Star recieved the book on July 19th at 4 p.m. EST (THANK YOU Herricks) and adhered to our rules that she not read while walking, eating, or using the bathroom. She tried to keep all three to a minimum and finished the book at 2 a.m. Now, we just have to keep her from spoiling any plot points until the rest of us can finish. In the meantime, maybe she could write J.K. and propose a Harry Potter on ice tour. ;)

Decade

10 is a BIG DEAL! So for our birthday girl, My Hero made it winter in July and took Star to engage in her "passion," figure skating. Please note that Star made the gorgeous snowflakes and the sumptuous ice-cream roll cake drizzled in nutella (hungry?) Even for a 10 year old, she's got skills. We love you, Ice Princess!!!

Independence Day

So, of course we went to the beach for a BBQ with friends. It was a cold, rainy, no-traffic day. We made it to the beach in record time and had the whole place to ourselves. However, the wind made the water choppy and too unstable for the firework ferry so all the incendiaries were cancelled. Unable to admit complete defeat, we merely retreated to our place for a home-style picnic and fire-works on the tube. Special thanks to our friends, the D'Agostini family, for sticking it out and making it fun.

Extra Brains for Charity

This Summer Sparkle and Torpedo have each elected to grow an extra brain to donate to charity. Goodness knows there are some people out there who could use some brains. =)

Accident

Two days after somebody dinged our van on Broadway, there was a fatal accident in the same spot. A drunk driver came barreling north on Broadway and crossed into oncoming traffic just as it past our building. He slammed into a motorcyclist who then landed on the roof of the livery cab driving behind him. All we heard were two horrible crashes. We watched from the fire escape for a long time as over 20 emergency vehicles arrived. We never saw a motorcycle, but we did see a stretcher covered in a yellow blanket and not going anywhere. The motorcyclist was declared dead on the scene. He was an off-duty police officer who lived a few streets north of our Chapel. His wife is expecting their first child this month. We laid in bed watching the lights flash on our ceiling and counting our blessings for some time before we gratefully drifted off to sleep knowing we would all wake up together Monday morning.

Monday I talked with the children about choice and consequences. We believe in agency and that means other people get to make choices that can hurt us. At the same time, our Savior has already atoned for the sins of the drunken driver and hopefully the both families will find peace and comfort in his love. Hopefully, we can make choices that will bring something unexpected, but good into other people's lives.

I emailed this photo of the accident to the reporters from El Diario and they ran it on the front page of their July 2, 2007 issue. There was also a paragraph about me stating my age and that I started taking pictures when the crash woke me up. Not exactly true as My Hero took the pictures well after the police arrived. They also took some pictures of me, but thankfully, they were not printed in the paper.

That was my iPhone

June 29th. We have been salivating over the iPhone for the past 6 months. We've previewed every commercial and even sat up late at night watching a podcast of Steve Jobs explaining the glories of the iPhone to all the apple employees. But we woke up on that revolutionary morning to find someone had hit our car (no note) and spent the rest of the morning on the regular phone with insurance coming to the awful realization that THAT was our iPhone. Oh well, at least we got a dramatic shot of it.