There’s a really interesting piece on Washington Monthly’s website by Wes Clark. It’s a bit long and nuanced, but really good reading for anybody interested in Iraq and our strategy there. If that’s you, then make the 20 minutes to read and digest it sometime.
More than anything else, we should keep in mind the primary lesson of the fall of the Soviet Union: Democracy can come to a place only when its people rise up and demand it.
via Kung Fu Monkey
Tuesday marked the first day of school for the kids, and the first day in 13 years when Kathy has been at home during the day without responsibility for children. She drove Liam and Maggie up to school, both to help Maggie make the adustment and to keep us from having to get up at 6:00am so that they could catch the bus. (The great elementary school our house is right next to is being knocked down and rebuilt over the next year and a half, so the smaller kids are getting bussed all the way across the highway to the old Bowie Elementary building.) The jury’s still out on whether she’ll be driving as a matter of habit, but for the time being it seems to be working out well.
Maggie’s been having a bit of a tough time with the transition, as she’s not been away from home this much before. Fortunately, I think having Liam at the same school has helped some, as she told us the other day that Liam had seen her crying in the hallway at some point during the day and came over to give her a hug and make her feel better. The bus system is also taking time to sort out: the older girls were an hour and a half late the first day, and a fair fraction of that the second day. Hopefully all of this will get sorted out quickly, but in the meantime it certainly makes things challenging for all of us!
The question of how Kathy will be spending her time is an interesting one. For this semester she has committed to watching the baby of a friend from church who is finishing up her degree. Yesterday and today she changed out the brake pads on our Escort, an accomplishment that impressed me mightily. She’s considering college again in the Spring, either to finish out the Physical/Recreation Therapy stuff she had started a decade ago or to get a nursing degree. Stay tuned — I’ll post more details as they become clear.
Hey, neat! Several of my photos from Flickr were chosen for inclusion in Schmap’s travel guide for San Antonio. Nice to see other people getting something out of my time with the camera.
My friend Scott Wade, who drums with The Patio Boys from time to time and is a big part of the annual Sand Sculpture contests we attend, has recently achieved some measure of fame with one of his hobbies: creating some amazing artwork on the filthy rear windows of automobiles. In addition to his website, the Austin American Statesman published an article on his work which was quickly picked up by a variety of newspapers around the country, the Austin CBS affiliate had a segment on his work Saturday night, and he even got to roll around on Kinky Friedman’s election bus for a few days.
Congratulations on the notoriety, Scott, and keep up the great work!
I finally got around to editing down the video from our Potato Cannon building adventures. Here it is!
A quick shout-out to my old cronies at Origin as they announce some of the work that had started while I was still there: Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn. The new client shot looks pretty nice, and it’s great to see that EA continues to invest in the most venerable of online Role Playing Games. Keep up the good work, lads and ladies!
After running around Schlitterbahn for the day yesterday, I decided to treat the kids to a new ritual that I called “Grocery Store Feast”. The way it works: we all go to the grocery together. Each family member selects one non-junk-food item to be a part of dinner. We then take the whole pile home, cook it all up, and enjoy!
Thus we found ourselves enjoying a balanced meal of whole wheat pizza, eggrolls, fried chicken and basil & garlic polenta last night. Now that’s good eating! (And a lot of fun to boot.)
Wednesday: In anticipation of Saturday’s wedding, Kathy hosted and attended Christina’s bachelorette party. I picked up Daniel, who was coming in for the wedding, from the airport at 11:00pm. Christina’s air conditioning failed, so some of her entourage relocated to our house for the evening.
Thursday: Hit the outlet mall with Daniel to pick up another baguette pan so he could exercise his baking skills to supply the wedding with lots of fresh bread. Went to work. Played with The Grant Mazak Band at Veramendi Park here in San Marcos for the city’s “Summer in the Park” concert series. We’d been looking forward to and preparing for this for a couple months and were a bit nervous about it. Things went beautifully, however, with an article in the paper beforehand, about 400 people in the audience who, and lots of nice comments afterward.
Friday: Work. Wedding rehearsal. The rehearsal dinner, which was going to be at the happy couple’s home, was moved to the church because of the A/C failure. While cooking on the grill, it began to rain torrentially. We enjoyed soggy hot dogs, soggy children, and soggy dogs together. Lots of bread baking later that evening.
Saturday: More bread baking. The kids and I went down to San Antonio for a couple hours in the morning for Becky’s Year-in-Texas Tea, which was very nice indeed. We regrouped at the house and headed off for the wedding, where Kathy was matron of honor and I played pennywhistle for the recessional. We then ate, drank, and were merry for several hours until I finally toted the young ones back home for bed. Kathy showed later with a refrigerator’s worth of leftovers. (Where are those tamales?)
Sunday: Church and another concert at Cheatham Street Warehouse where we announced the band was changing the name to The Patio Boys. Celebrated Abigail’s birthday there with friends, family, and cake. Came home and collapsed.
I don’t think I’ve gotten around to mentioning it here before, but we adopted two kittens, brothers from the same litter, about a month ago. They’ve been settling in nicely, and have quickly become much-loved parts of the family.
So last night, while Kathy and Will and I were watching Jack Bauer’s latest adentures on 24, I pulled out the trashcan to clip my nails into. I had been happily grooming away for about 4 minutes when suddenly a mouse jumped out of the trash can and ran under the couch I was sitting on.
“Holy cow! Did you see that? A mouse just jumped out of the trash and run under my couch!” Kathy and Will were wrapped up in the program, they had missed the rodent’s mad dash for freedom. Now alerted, we quickly teamed up and made a plan: pull out the couch and catch the mouse.
“How are we going to get it?”, Kathy wondered. This was a good question, as we had 5 mice trapped in the closet once, and all but one managed to get past our clumsy attempts to catch them.
Will: “Get the cat!” Anubis, the black kitten, had been sleeping on his lap, so he picked it up and played with it a second to rouse it. We then turned over the couch. The mouse made a terrified run along the baseboard. It took Anubis about a second to figure out what was up, and then a second more to catch the mouse in his mouth.
“Good boy!” We put him and his prey outside, as we didn’t particularly want to have to watch the process or clean up after it, and went back to 24.
Final score:
Human Success Rate: 20%
Feline Success Rate: 100%
Dad McMains and Lana have been married 25 years today. In recognition of the occasion, Chris, Meara and I decided to put together a celebration for them where they could be feted by family and friends. Our friends the McNeels have a lovely ranch house, and offered to make it available and lure the couple to their place for the party. We schemers put together the guest list and coordinated the planning, a task made considerable more challenging by the fact that Chris was in England and Meara in Laos for a large portion of the lead-up time. Thanks to the joys of covert email, however, we were able to pull it off.
I arrived with my family and the rest of the Grant Mazak Band about an hour before the honorees were scheduled to show. We quickly set up, got everybody positioned, welcomed the other arriving guests, and then waited.
And waited.
And waited.
It turned out that while we had told everybody that the honorees would be there at 6:30, they had been informed that their ostensible dinner with friends was starting around 7:00, and they were running late even for that. We struck up some music to keep the guests entertained until they arrived, which of course they finally did.
Now, Dad is notorious for finding out about surprise parties in advance. Previous to this, we have only been able to pull the wool over his eyes once, when we celebrated his 60th birthday. Thus, we were delighted when they finally showed up to see the astonished looks on their faces. “That’s twice!” he told Chris.
They made their rounds, greeting friends from in town and family that had come from as far away as Fort Worth. We all dug into huge piles of delicious Rudy’s BBQ, passed around champagne, toasted the couple, cut into a large and delicious chocolate cake, and whiled away the rest of the evening with music, dancing, good conversation and the company of friends. We even launched into an unrehearsed rendition of The Chicken Dance at one point, recognizing that the crowd was receptive.
The night was a thorough delight, and everything we’d hoped that it would be. Many thanks to the McNeels for hosting and to everyone else who was involved in making it a special time for some very special people.