quote of the day

I was held back by mere trifles, the most paltry inanities, all my old attachments.

– Saint Augustine

tara turns twenty one

Tara wanted egg rolls for her birthday dinner. We also had teriyake meat balls and corn dip.

The candles are lit.

The girls blow out the candles, but I'm afraid Hunter doesn't feel well enough to try.


Marley and Jenna lick the frosting from the candles while Kelly checks Hunter for a fever.

Aftger dinner the kids had fun with the Rockband and Singstar game.

Marley helps Tara on the vocals while Sam plays the guitar

Hunter gives the drums a try.

You play Rockband by watching what's happening on the screen and simultaneously playing the instrument.

Sam and Kelly sing a duet with Singstar.

Lizzie will be glad when all the racket stops

short fall

I took this picture November 4. The view is looking out our dining room sliding door toward the west. The picture in the above title banner was taken just this morning, twelve days later. I've never seen the leaves fall from the trees so quickly.

quote of the day

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

--Sarah Palin

Huh?

what i'm reading now

One of the reviews printed on the cover of Blood Meridian describes the book as Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. I liked All The Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men better. This is the story of a 14 year old kid who falls in with a band of renegades who murder whole Indian tribes for the bounty of their scalps. The violence is graphic and horrific, yet told with poetic prose. The elaborate prose is sometime near opaque. For example, here is a description of the band riding across the desert: "Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all." Not the language usually found in the Western genre is it?