snow day!

Er, should I say "power outage day?" School was cancelled Friday due to a big 'ol tree that fell on some power lines, a transformer (wait is that the right word? Like Optimus Prime?) or some such.

At any rate, Thursday night around 10:30, the house phone rang, at the same time as my cell, while I received an email alert from Yahoo!- all telling me there's no school. Wow. At least I know I'll be informed about these things. I was waiting for a knock on the door from our principal, all out of breath because he had been running house to house to inform people.

Third day in, and they get a day off.

That afternoon The weather WAS really bad. We were chased by this awful storm. Seriously, the sky was bright and beautiful ahead of us, and the rearview mirror reflected he blackest, spookiest sky I've ever seen. By the time we got to my mom's, the tornado warning sirens were blaring and it was dark, dark, dark and reeeealy windy.

E started screaming and crying. It took quite a while to talk her down. Even though, according to Tom Skilling the really dangerous stuff was south of us, E kept crying, "Make it stop! Somebody make it stop!"

Her little brother came to the rescue. J marched up to the window and yelled, "Stop it thunder!!!!! E doesn't like you!!!"

school's in

Day one went quite swimmingly. E and K really enjoyed the first day of fourth and first grade. And even though J looks so old in this picture, he still needs to wait a few years.



No homework on the first day other than to do their 20 min. of reading. K was very disappointed. She desperately wants homework. E said, "You think so now, but just wait!" E's book bag was so heavy though due to the three textbooks she needed to bring home to cover. I was never good at covering books (Laura always did it for me). But now they have snazzy stretchy cloth book covers- perfect for the lazy and book covering impaired like myself.

color them occupied

The kids spent the day painting with water colors.



They cranked out masterpiece after masterpiece. Even J got into it with surprising neatness and skill.

no more monkeys

I know that jumping on the bed is dangerous, but



how much fun are they having???

The photo was taken by E. She's become quite the photographer. The sunset pic from the other day was hers, and she really seems to have quite the knack for capturing moments.

once

I know I haiku-ed about Once. But while waiting (not so) patiently for the soundtrack to be delivered by Amazon, I couldn't seem to get this one song from the movie out of my mind.

I found this live version of it from an LA press conference.

Please to enjoy...

saturday's sunset

haiku review cubed

heavy irish brogues
brilliant songs, sweet love story
i bought the soundtrack



funny, over all
whole alaska part was slow
bart was naked! doh!




sweater clad beagle
clever nods to the cartoon
great fun for the kids

i can stop whenever i want

I suppose if you even take a quiz called "How Addicted to Blogging are You?" that you you found on one of the blogs that you read daily, then it shouldn't come as a surprise that...

62%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

San Jose Singles from Mingle²

haiku review

we learn why he kills
series could be one long flick
kickass bourne fight scenes

regurgitation proclamation

Poor K got very sick on her trip to Springfield with my parents and Laura. She lost her cookies all over the state capital including the Lincoln museum and the Capital Building. My brother pointed out that at least her puke was bipartisan- she zooked on Republicans AND Democrats.



The worst part is the fact that this little bug has since claimed my mom, E, and J. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I'm pretty sure it's hovering directly over my head,

my webphotojournalism career is over

Yesterday marked my last caption for webshots news channel.
(Just in case my throng of readers were curious) So feel free to stop clicking there.
That's no longer my flowery prose.

When they downsized from paragraph posts to two line captions for the same pay, I think they realized that captioning didn't need a team of writers.

It was an interesting side gig for the year.