Friday, October 31, 2008

Happy Halloween!

An interesting gardening idea!


This one is especially for Christie - I think you'll know why!! ;)


Each year a house at 748 Beach Street in Kenova, West Virginia is transformed into the Great Pumpkin House. The owner Ric Griffith and hundreds of other volunteers carve thousands of pumpkins to put on display at this home each year during Halloween.
I think this goes in the category of "too much time on your hands."

Thursday, October 23, 2008

My kind of Librarian


October 20, 2008
Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs
By SIMON ROMERO
LA GLORIA, Colombia — In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.

His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.

In doing so, Mr. Soriano has emerged as the best-known resident of La Gloria, a town that feels even farther removed from the rhythms of the wider world than is Aracataca, the inspiration for the setting of the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, another of the region’s native sons.

Unlike Mr. García Márquez, who lives in Mexico City, Mr. Soriano has never traveled outside Colombia — but he remains dedicated to bringing its people a touch of the outside world. His project has won acclaim from the nation’s literacy specialists and is the subject of a new documentary by a Colombian filmmaker, Carlos Rendón Zipaguata.

The idea came to him, he said, after he witnessed as a young teacher the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child.

Read the whole story at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/americas/20burro.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

What happens when I'm at work

My sister Suzanne asked if I had discovered photobooth on my new, beauteous MAC. Well, I guess someone in the family has! Frances works exclusively on Macs at school. At age 10 she knows FAR more than I do. She calls me as soon as she walks in the door from school and asks if she can play on the computer. I get home 20 minutes after she does but she calls me without fail every day!

I have no clue what the weird Lewis photo is all about - Lewis said he looks like "xray boy."


And no, we didn't fetch another child. That's the babysitter's daughter.

Monday, October 20, 2008

The S*** hits the fan

YUP, it's official. Some scary stuff is headed our way this week....... the S*** word
S*N*O*W

Sad but true
It seems like it was just last weekend that we were enjoying the playground, swinging on the monkey bars......


Riding on plastic dinosaurs........


Slurping ketchup off our fingers as we picnicked in the park..............


ok, it was last weekend.........

Now it's time to get on our little jackets and find a furry beast to keep us warm and cozy for the next 6......7 months

I'm in l*o*v*e


As the dude at the Apple store told me, "After years of darkness, welcome back to the light!" I HATE PCs! We went to the Mac store on Saturday and I got a shiny, new MAC. Ahhhhhhhhhh, now to figure out how to keep it safe from Lewis, who is a computer nightmare. He goes online to play games and will click on anything that looks cool. Don't mess with the machine, Boy.

Monday, October 13, 2008

My very special boy


On Saturday night I decided to take the kids out for dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant (the Lawyer is on Long Island, frolicking with her peeps). As I was getting my wallet, the kids ran out to the car. The place isn't too far away - about a 15 minute drive. We pulled into a prime parking spot and I opened the door for the kids. Lewis got to the door and says "Uh-oh, I forgot to wear shoes." HUH???? How does a person FORGET TO WEAR SHOES??? In October??! I stood speechless for a moment and then just surrendered to the fact that my boy is a space cadet. We went home, got some shoes and continued with our dinner plans.
The above photo is from years ago but one of my absolute favorites of Lewis - he used to wear goggles EVERYWHERE, on and off for a couple of years. He also loved the leopard hand-warmer-thingy that one of his aunts made for the girls.
Gotta love the boy.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Three little pigs and the big bad Franny

Last weekend we went to a pumpkin farm to.......you know, pick pumpkins. It was pretty cheesy. They advertised a haunted house that was really a shed with jack-o-lanterns - Woooooooooo! There was supposed to be "apple picking for kids," aka wooden tree shapes with little shelves with an apple on each!
You know it's pitiful when the kids squeal with delight to see a tractor. City-fied sissies.

Little Pigs, Little Pigs, let me come in....... (can you see the 2 little bundles of straw tied to the wood?!)

Not by the hair on our chinny chin chins

Watch it girl or we're going to boil you up in our soup!

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Good Night, Paul Sr, Paulie, & Mikey


Last night as I was finishing up the dinner dishes, I yelled to Lewie, "go pick a bedtime story and I'll read it to you on the couch." He chose "American Chopper: Radical rides." What a lovely, soothing story to calm the beast before bedtime! "Paul Sr had a challenge in creating a carburetor that looked like a hydrant but was functional as well." Lewie sat on my lap, completely immersed!