I emailed our friend George in Arkansas to ask if he was supporting Mike Huckabee for president since he was a fellow Arkansasyer. I was surprised to get a response that said No, George is supporting Dr. Ron Paul, quite literally, and provided some proof. Ha!
I believe this was Monday, the day Paul raised 4.2 million in 24 hours, breaking most if not all the records. We're currently sitting at 7.7 million.
Most of you will say so what, rich people give money and that means nothing of a candidate's support. Campaign finance law sets the maximum contribution per person at $2300, which means if Bill Gates decides to support a candidate, he can only give the person $2300. The cool thing about Ron Paul's campaign bonanza on Monday was that it was from over 37,000 donors, which means the average donation was just over 100 bucks per person. Wow.
Here are some photos from Halloween. All the kids dressed up (well, I should say we dressed them up) and were adorable of course. Mackenzie was dressed as Snow White.
Lex was dressed as Tigger and had some bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun!
Inara was dressed as a nurse.
We had a lot of fun dressing them up and taking pictures. Though we didn't do the door-to-door thing, but we did head to the mall to see the other kids dressed up and to have some professional photos done.
Jennie and Mac and I are now back to our normal schedules following a week of vacation. We packed up in Richard and Cherrie's Nissan Armada SUV and headed toward the Lone Star State for some much-needed time away.
As many of you know, we had originally planned on driving to Princeton, New Jersey; when those plans fell apart, the much shorter, much less daunting trip to Dallas was invented. I had worried about Mac's ability to sit in a child car seat for long periods of time, so a 4 hour or so trip sounded more doable than a 20-hour one. As it turns out, my worries were unfounded — Mac did great. We had to make a few stops in our traveling to stretch the little legs, but that was expected. I am very proud of her.
We stayed in Denton, just north of Dallas and Fort Worth. In Denton, we stopped into a Circuit City and did something really great for the health of our marriage — we bought a Garmin StreetPilot c550 GPS. This thing suctions to your windshield and tells you turn-by-turn how to get to your destination. It made the rest of our driving time mostly enjoyable!
In Dallas, we visited Dealey Plaza, where president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, nearly 2 decades before Jennie and I were born. On the sixth floor of the nearby Texas School Book Depository building, where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald perched and shot JFK, there is a museum that walks you through the entire set of events and even explains the different conspiracy theories. Jennie and I learned a lot about this very sad day in our nation's history.
Of course, we did some shopping in Dallas and Denton. Jennie had to make her stop at the Container Store. We also ate at the Cheesecake Factory. Yes, we're aware there is now one in Tulsa, but it seems every time we happen by that place, the line is stacked right on out to 71st street; the one in Dallas wasn't nearly that busy for whatever reason.
On our way back home, we stopped in Oklahoma City to visit the Bombing Memorial there. It was very heartwarming and sad at the same time to see the things people have placed on the chain link fence in memory of loved ones.
We took a few photos (though not as many as I should have), like this one:
We also created a little video (mostly of driving) so we could remember Mac's first out of state trip:
All in all, this was one of the best vacations ever — probably because our little family is 50% larger now. Though Mac won't remember any of the trip, the bonding that took place during that week of us together on the road is irreplaceable.
In this picture: me on the left, hunting eggs; dad sitting with legs crossed as he usually was, watching.
While I don't remember this particular Easter hunt, I do remember the stump that sat next to the pool for so long. It served as a convenient seat, a launching point for toy cars, and other purposes I'm sure.
It had a hole in the middle, in which my sister and my cousins and I would drop toys and rocks and such. I think Dad ruined a few chainsaw blades from the numerous rocks inside once he finally decided to rid our yard of the stump's presence.
He joked about that stump on occasion, and the frustration he endured in removing it. Ahhh, memories.
Score another mark for the church 20-something hook-up ministry, er... I mean Bridge ministry. :-) Dale and Lindsay exchanged vows this past weekend, while us geeks were in the sound booth trying frantically to keep up with the bam-bam-bam pace of the media elements Dale & Lindsay chose. It was a lot of fun. And the reception, while Jennie and I wisely chose not to embarrass ourselves by dancing, was loads of fun. The element to remember was the moment the entire wedding party aimed their 20 or so cans of silly string at the bride and groom slow dancing, and over the next 30-45 seconds, covered them in gooey, slimy stuff.
Our new steps are finished, and I'm very happy with them. It was quite a struggle with the concrete people to get exactly what we wanted, but it was worth it.
Though it's really difficult to capture the feeling (or even an accurate color for that matter) with my camera, you'll just have to take my word for it that our new paint is awesome. I'm excited to have walls with color, though many people have already looked at them and said "Hmm..." I'm pretty sure Jennie and I are the only ones that like the color, but oh well.
Flickr has added geotagging, which means photos can now have information about where they were taken. That information is then used to build maps and relate your photos to other people's (in yet another way).
Until cameras have built-in GPS's, this is quite a manual process, but I've already tagged a bunch of my photos. You can see my map here. Click the pink dots to view photos for that location.
