Be A Friend.......hee hee

We need rain, people!

Southern Illinois has been in a drought for months now. Even the above gif makes me feel cooler. Living here is like living in Vegas without the cha-ching of the slot machines, like living in the Sahara without the cool dunes, like living on Mars....well, you get the picture. It has been insane, the storms have all been around us, lots of clouds roll in and then.........nothing. If anyone would like to come and do a rain dance in my front yard, you are welcome to.

More pictures of Caleb

I got an email from Preston yesterday telling me how miserable he is in Iraq. He is hanging in there though and is supposed to be home around Thanksgiving. Amanda just wrote me today too and said she posted more pictures of Caleb on their blog. So, I had to steal them too. She is doing fine also and says that Caleb is very silly and likes to go around in circles until he is dizzy and chatters alot. Says da da when he is happy and ma ma when he is not....:-)

Happy birthday, Hannah and new Caleb pix

It looks like Hanna got lots of great presents for her birthday.
Caleb likes them too...

He also likes just the paper...:-)
He looks just way too innocent here.....
Hannah is growing up so fast, Happy Birthday, Honey!
Austin looks really cool in his party hat...
Ok, this is more like it.....the little devil, you can tell he is up to no good...:-)
Hannah got new pierced ear rings. They look so pretty, just like you...
Hugs to all of you, sorry I missed the party!
Grandma XXXOO

Red Hat Swim meet ......

Pictures from Swim "Meet"


Above is the link to our new Red Hat blog, if you are interested in what we are doing and in seeing pictures...we always have such a great time...

Good Bye, Gimpster.....

Good bye, Gimpster.......you were a really cool chicken.....We will miss you...

The Pit and the Pendulum at age 12

For lack of anything better to watch on the zillions of channels we have on Directv.....I turned to an old classic, on Turner Classic Movies.....The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allen Poe and starring one of the classics himself...Vincent Price. As I was watching it, I remembered being 12 years old in 1961 and going to the theater on Saturday afternoon to watch it. As I watched it tonight, when the last 5 minutes of the movie has no music, no sound, except the forboding swoosh..............................swoosh...................................swoosh......................................
of the pendulum edging ever closer to Vincent 's victim, I felt the same creepy, nerve-racking emotions that I felt on that day, as the pendulum begins slicing the victim slowly with each "swoosh".....of course...being a horror fan, I had already read Edgar Allen Poe's version and knew that in the end, the victim was saved . Still.....the constant sound of the pendulum slicing heavily through the air was very disturbing then............and now.
Vincent Price made many horror movies in his lifetime,as well as movies of other genres. Several of them were the stories of Poe. When I was watching all of these movies as a kid, I thought Vincent Price was some exotic actor from a foreign country. It was just what he projected to the audience as an actor. Imagine my disappoinment when I discovered he was from St. Louis ,Missouri, just a few miles from me......but I tried not to think about it, :-)

"A man who limits his interests, limits his life." .....Vincent Price

Yes, it's Sheena Easton...who woulda thunk it?

Well, of course, this is not Sheena, this is Bill and Garret!
Garret just had to try on grandpa Bill's Hardhat....well, he is just the cutest little concrete worker I have ever seen.
Ok, THIS is Sheena Easton at the Decatur, IL, Party in the Street celebration.
Shelley and Garret were dancing to " Morning train"
Why is it always raining when I am getting my picture taken.....
Garret is giving grandpa the shifty eye.

This giant ice cream cone is actually a concession stand selling,what else....ice cream .
There was a nice crowd at the festival.

Garret wants a drink of grandpa's beer....

Garret was so good all evening, lots of things to look at, plus we kept him on the move in the stroller..

A Pale BLue Dot

On October 13, 1994, the famous astronomer Carl Sagan was delivering a public lecture at his own university of Cornell. During that lecture, he presented the above photo.

The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles in the distance. Having completed it primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System, on a trajectory of approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the Solar System. Ground Control issued a command for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back, take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager's vast distance, the Earth was captured as a infinitesimal point of light (between the two white tick marks), actually smaller than a single pixel of the photo. The image was taken with a narrow angle camera lens, with the Sun quite close to the field of view. Quite by accident, the Earth was captured in one of the scattered light rays caused by taking the image at an angle so close to the Sun. Dr. Sagan was quite moved by this image of our tiny world. Here is an excerpt from the late Dr. Sagan's talk: A Pale Blue Dot:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."