Alex loves to play hide and seek. He doesn’t really understand how to play it, mind you, but he loves it.
He asks us to find him all the time. Then he tells us where he’s hiding. It usually goes something like this:
Alex (yelling): I’m hiding. Find me! Me: Where is Alex? Alex (giggling): I’m under the blanket!
And so on. It’s adorable, but it gets even better.
When we find him — after dragging out the search as long as we can — he squeals, jumps, flails and pretty much freaks out. Sometimes he is so excited that he can’t even stay in hiding.
Alex (squealing): Find me again. Me: OK. Go hide again.
Alex then puts the blanket back over his head and starts giggling again.
Again, it’s pretty darn adorable. But tonight he outdid himself.
Alex and Stefanie were “hiding” under a blanket on a chair in the living room. Both were giggling — Alex because he can’t help it, and Stefanie because Alex’s giggling is contagious — and I was searching for them all around the house.
When I got to their chair, they were both giggling uncontrollably.
Me: Where is Alex? Alex (from under the blanket, during a break in the giggling): He’s not here.
The three of us laughed for quite a while. How did that little guy get so clever?
I have uploaded months of new photos to Picasa. Click here to see them.
Here’s a taste. It’s a shot of Alex and his cousin before we left to trick-or-treat in our neighborhood. Alex, of course, was a train engineer because he is obsessed — obsessed, I tells ya — with trains.
I just finished posting photos from June and specifically from our Kansas trip last week. We had a blast seeing friends and family and hope to make a longer trip in 2010.
My 16-year-old stepson, Andrew, has been accepted into a year-long Japanese exchange program and leaves in August.
We are trying to raise the $8,500 needed to send him. We are about halfway there, and you can help. Visit our fund-raising Web site and make a cash donation, order one of Andrew’s music CDs or donate items for our next fund-raising garage sale.
Help us send Andrew to Japan for the experience of a lifetime.
That quote was pulled from an incredible essay called Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, about the future of newspapers. You should most definitely read Clay Shirky’s entire essay, but here is another brilliant point:
“The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
Clay Shirky gets it. When will newspaper owners (*cough* Gannett *cough*) realize that the old models won’t work no matter how much “innovation” they throw at them. For newspapers — true, print newspapers, not online-only ones a la the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — to survive, they need new models. That means expiramentation and likely many failures. They won’t like that reality, but they should look at it this way: The current path they are on is one of eventual total failure. Only new models will save them.
I say all of this because I love newspapers. I grew up with them. I wanted to be a journalist from a young age and graduated college with a journalism degree. I spent several years working with some of the most talented and most dedicated people I have ever met. I want newspapers to survive, but I fear for their future — and for the future of all of my journalist friends.
“Cute Alex update: We were at the pool, and there was an elderly gentleman with rather large man boobs. Alex pointed and said, ‘Oh, boobs.’ I had to stop myself from laughing. No one noticed.”
That made my day.
So did this photo, from our visit to Bush Park last Saturday:
For those you haven’t noticed, photos (taken with my iPhone, hence the blurry shots) that I took at my brother’s wedding in Kansas City a few weeks ago can be found on Picasa.
The first set are from the rehearsal dinner at the Japanese steak house in the Marriott where Paul and Desiree married the next day. The food was good, the sake was amazing and the chefs threw food at our mouths. About 50 percent made it into our mouths. The rest littered the floor and our clothes. It was a lot of fun.
The second set are from before and after the wedding. No shots from during the wedding because I was the best man. I figured it would be bad form to whip out the iPhone during the ceremony. Heh.
@Jugbo i got a text message spam, er, message yesterday. weird, and creepy. 16 hours ago
@Steve_Adler def. make the extra payments if you can afford it. we did, and it made us feel like financial titans. saved a lot in interest. 16 hours ago
