15 Days and Counting...

You are cordially invited to the festivities celebrating the first birthday of a Certain Someone.

First, we will have
The Turning of the Carseat.

Second, there will be
The Embrace of Cow's Milk.

Third, celebrants join the guest of honor in
The Eating of the Scrambled Egg.

RSVP please
Dress is diaper-casual, with socks
The guest of honor will accept no gifts, unless of course you have a pony to spare.

Oh, and Spring, Part 8001

Sun on my toes, toes, toes.

Spring is Here, Part 8000

You can't foretell spring with the weather. Or plants. Or fashion. Or even a calendar.

But Juno's coat will tell you.

I took this handful of fur out of her coat in ten minutes of brushing with a wire comb. We'll do this again several times before the drifts of doggie fur stop collecting on the stairs.

Safe Travels!

Benjamin and his Mommy are off to Uruguay for a few weeks, traveling 17 hours via all kinds of places (Miami, Santiago...). Looks like the zebra we took him last week made the cut as a travel companion.

Here's hoping all that travel goes smoothly - we'll keep our fingers crossed.

Pop Culture and History Collide

The caption reads:
"Steampunk Lincoln not only frees the slaves, but he does it with a good dollop of awesome"

There have been many commemorations of Lincoln this year. It's the bicentennial of his birth and everybody wants to get in on the action. Even devotees of the literary form Steampunk.

Gotta love it when people go to such lengths to re-imagine Lincoln as a Victorian-era robot superhero. And people say history's boring.

Charles posted his bit about Sita Sings the Blues (which Iain loves, almost as much as I do). So I went over to her website and what did I find?



This one's for Tony, from Iain.

Also, I sent Paley an email thank you note. It seemed only right, since her work kept Iain happy for at least 2 hours of fly-time to and from Seattle.

Video Entertainment

We have now discovered that Iain does like some videos. His first love is video of himself. On our recent flights, he calmed down for minutes at a time watching videos of himself on my BlackBerry. Score one for low-res video.

He also enjoyed a cartoon movie called Sita Sings the Blues. http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/
Sita Sings the Blues was directed, written, produced, designed and animated by Nina Paley. She provides the following synopsis:

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told."

The video is a creative commons work, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. What that meant for us was that it was free to download. I encourage everyone out there to take a look. Downloads can be found: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/wiki/index.php?title=SitaSites