It’s late.  You’re outside, alone save a stray wind rustling the trees and tall weeds.  The new moon hides invisibly while it looks down upon your situation, ambivalent to your needs, desires, and wishes.  You wonder for a second if the moon could grant wishes if it cared enough to understand us inconsequential humans, but then a remote sound grabs your attention.

Your ears feel alive, catching what it can, imperceptably stretching wide to enable additional sounds to come in for processing.  That sound, right there!  Was it a cautious footstep taken by a silent attacker?  Or was it just a few leaves being scattered by a vagrant breeze…?  Closing your eyes, your senses awaken more than ever before as you integrate with nature, feeling Earth’s heartbeat around you, melding with the energy and vitality of your surroundings.  You can almost detect each of the organisms in the soil under your feet, from beetles and earthworms to the spiders and scorpions who prey upon them.  The thought of this natural predator role quickly shifts your mind back into focus, and you redouble your attempts to perceive the source of the aural anomaly.

What could all this mean?

The family decided it’s high time we made ourselves a fire pit.

You may have seen it in a few of my DITL’s.  And now that it’s getting colder in Texas (finally!), I predict we’ll be using it a lot.

Anyone wanna come over for some ’smores?

… so good.

One of my bestest blog and IRL buddies, Jennefer, pointed this little site my way. Have you heard of Animoto? It’s called “the end of slideshows” because you upload photos (or point it to a collection like Picasa or Flikr), pick some music, and then it renders a VERY cool video for you.  It’s like making your very own music video.  For Realz, yall.

You can create 30 second videos for free, pay $3 per full-length video, or get a yearly pass for $30.  You can get $5 off that pass if you sign up through my referral code.  Be careful though - once you create a 30 second video, you will likely want to purchase a full-length one.  I just did.  And judge for yourself how good the quality is.

So here’s “my” first creation, featuring the dogs that we’ve owned for the last 20 years. The music is provided unwittingly by the great and masterful Jonathan Coulton with a song I can’t get enough of called “So Far, So Good”.

 

And below, you can see the little honorific (or is that horrific?) video Jennefer made for me. I suppose it’s a tribute, but… hmmm, you can judge for yourself :). Um… Thanx, Jen. I think.

We have the most risque VLOG from Wayne yet.   Don’t believe me?  Just watch.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you though.

(more…)

Twenty weeks of stuff you don’t want to MISC.  Been a busy week.  How have you been?

---

We three dogs

I thought I’d share a pic of our three dogs - Jupiter, Zina and the newest member of the Hall family - Bebe (shown in order). Actually, Bebe belongs to the in-laws but since we share a back yard and a kennel run, he’s over at our house a lot. He survived the Distemper false alarm and is just finishing up tackling an eye infection on his right eye (you can kind of tell in the picture). He’s cute, young, playful and gives Jupiter a lot of attention, for which we are eternally grateful.

---

Props

She’s not a bragging kind of person, so you wouldn’t hear it from her.  But *I* am a doting parent and not afraid to brag on my kids.

Caitlin got a ranking of 4th in the District at her most recent Flute District Tryouts.  This is out of more than 60 flutes!  It also means she qualifies to go try out for Region next weekend, and if she makes that, she gets to play in a Region concert made up of the best band members around.  At the middle school level, they don’t have a “state” competition; that’s not until High School.

We couldn’t be more proud!  Here’s a snap of me and Caitlin at this last UT Band Camp, where Caitlin earned 1st chair of the top band.

---

Global Warming Alarmism

I don’t know much about Global Warming or the lack of it.  I don’t know if man is causing it, or if it’s just part of our normal cycles.  How could we possibly know?  The world is what, 6 billion years old or something and we’ve been crawling on it for a blink of an eye.  Plus, man is inherently flawed.  Practically ALL science we ever thought was true turned out to either be wrong or drastically different than we expected, and boy will our descendents 200 years down the line really scoff at us in the 20th century.

Unfortunately, Hollywood and alarmists like to spread fear.  And too many people just buy into the fear.  It is for that reason I’m thankful for a recent speech given by Senator James Inhofe.  It seems a lot more straightforward, honest and unconcealing than most of what you’d see on TV or in the papers.

It’s long (2hr speech) but well thought out and well delivered.  It should be linked to as a counter-point to all global warming articles out there that use little to no science to push forward their scare and fear.

---

Best of LOLcats

 

We got a new dog.

Everyone, meet Zina.

I haven’t blogged about this next part yet, but as some of you know, our 15yr old dog Nitro passed away last month.  It’s not something totally unexpected; I mean, he was 15 years old, and was showing the signs of failing eyes, failed hearing, etc, but still, it’s difficult to deal with that kind of loss of a big part of your family.

Needless to say, Nitro left a pretty big void, even though we had Jupiter around.  We knew we would likely get another dog after some time, but we were thinking at the end of summer, after Caitlin had volunteered at an animal shelter for a while and got to know, you know, just the right dog for us, with personality, charm, etc.

Well, the family couldn’t wait.  We rescued Zina through PawMatch, and she’s a Border Collie with some unique qualities that work well within the family. 

 She seems to be about 6 years old, and we’ve done the vet visit and the grooming and she’s starting to get accustomed to all of us.

Jupiter is showing a little bit of jealousy, though.

But he knows deep down we love him more than ever.