DMN Weekly Favorite

I saw this Sunday a week ago and have been meaning to comment on it since. This is an amazing phenomenon in a society. It is still boggling my mind that it wasn't a hidden transition, and it was so accepted (at least how this article presents it).
Enjoy!
Dallas Morning News_As Albanian women have gained liberties, the need for female heirs to live as males has dwindled...

Finally

We DID buy a camera, but have been lax with sharing our shots from our past few months. We have been pretty busy and have had company and projects going on at our house.

In March, my sister-n-law, her mom and our niece came to visit. We went to the Ft. Worth Botanical Gardens. In the second pictures, you might be missing the 7th monkey hiding behind Michele.

We went out to Colorado over Spring Break. Ryan's family always amazes me at their cohesiveness. Here is a part of the clan in our family outing to the 'zeum. We also got to meet our newest nephew and watch him learn to limbo...

We started a small tiling project in our laundry room. Notice the new tile, ceiling (no more popcorn!), baseboards, and color! We also redid our downstairs bathroom. We like it.

Summer

But only for one day and only for me. I had the perfect summer day, sleeping in, going to lunch with friends, napping and reading through an afternoon thunderstorm.
Staff development for summer school is tomorrow, so my rest is short-lived.
What is your perfect summer day?

Spelling is Important

One of my kids, while working on a story, wrote that his mom didn't like his teacher because the teacher was "funny."
I pulled out the bilingual dictionary, looked up what I thought he meant, and asked if that was the word he was looking for. Yes, he was looking for funny. "But Miss, that is what I wrote."
I had him look carefully at the spelling of his "funny" and he realized he had inadvertantly replaced the u in funny with a nice a.
Our bilingual dictionary stopped just short of that slang word, so I had to show him the word instead.
And yes, fannies are funny, but fanny teachers are the best kind.

A Thought

O Magazine has a feature of "A Million Ways to Save the World." This comment was in this month's issue:

"Our culture has vastly overvalued the lives of the rich and famous. Our children no longer hunger to be good citizens, but merely well-known ones. In our misguided quest for heros, we've made fame the most coveted virtue. But when our heroes cease to do heroic things, and we still venerate them, where does that leave our culture? It is time to restore balance. Let's boycott celebrity and celebrate instead all the unnamed warriors trying to make a positive impact on our daily lives."

--Lynn Nottage

Call your neighbors and rejoice...

Ryan and I have posted NO pictures for quite a while for a simple reason: our camera has been missing. We have called all houses where we visited for the past few months, searched through bags, pockets, drawers, cars, desks, dark corners and even under the bed. Repeatedly. This weekend we were heading up to Colorado to see Alyssa and the boys and decided that we would HAVE to have one, so off to Best Buy we trotted. Twenty minutes later, I reached into the bag I went through at least 3 times...and pulled out...the missing camera. That same day we found our theater guest passes that we had also been frantically looking for.
Colordado was nice, seeing Alyssa, Barry and the boys, meeting up with the cousins so we could go to the 'zeum and look at dinosaurs and dying easter eggs fun colors. Now that we have a camera, we can post pics again. Soon.

The Right Tool for the Job

Ryan found his about 2:30 Tuesday night when trying to get partially dried grout out of "natural stone markings" in our new tile.
Thankfully we have a well-stocked 24-hour Wal-Mart close by. (Emily cover your eyes).