End of Silence

When we were home over Labor Day, The Wife and my sister found a couple of old pictures of my dad that I had gotten from my grandmother several years ago. I thought they had been misplaced in one of my many moves, but they were at my parents house all along. I finally got a chance to scan them in last night over at a friend’s. I’d really like to get at all of the other old photos and do the same thing. Yet another project that I don’t have enough time for. Coincidentally, we got the prints back from The Boy’s school photos yesterday as well so I scanned them too.

My father is about three in the photo on the left and The Boy is about a year older in his picture: two pictures taken nearly 60 years apart. I’m not sure what’s up with that weird smile that The Boy’s sporting.

I also scanned in another photo with (from left to right) my Great Uncle Tim, whom I’m named after, Uncle Ken, my dad’s younger brother, my dad, who’s about 10 in the photo, and my cousin Bob, Tim’s son. It’s very Norman Rockwell, I think. It was taken on Staten Island circa 1953.

Sophia took a few pictures of the kids at Odd Friday. They weren’t there very long as The Wife and I had a miscommunication. We ran a babysitting service over the weekend, watching W. on Saturday and H. on Sunday. The La was fascinated by the boys with platinum blonde hair. She kept patting W. on the head. I suppose she was checking to see if it was real hair.

Tomorrow is The Company’s 5th anniversary, celebrations are planned for the afternoon and evening. Of course, The Boy’s school planned Back to School Night for tomorrow as well. The Wife’s going to shuttle between both events. I’ll stay at the work party. I’m teaching a Freenet class on Saturday and next week will see visits to Austin by Turbonegro and Neal Stephenson.

Oh yeah, this story is absolutely fucking ridiculous and one of the reasons why I don’t relish dealing with other parents at school. There’s always someone who’s got to be offended by something, let the whole world know about it, and then impose their own worldview on everyone else. I’ve only been the parent of a school age child for a month and I’ve already had to deal with this. I kept my mouth shut at the time because the issue really wasn’t worth it, but you can bet if something like this happens at a school my child attends, I’ll be there to talk some sense into them. At least it sounds like the school board in this case is reasonable.

Check it out.

The Boy started Pre-K at UT Elementary School today. He started the morning bright-eyed in his uniform of a white polo and khaki shorts. He was yodeling or something as we were getting ready. I first said “Boy, please.” which he apparently didn’t understand as a request to stop. When I explained to him that I wanted him to stop the singing/yodeling because it was irritating, he commenced to singing the word “irritating”. Somewhere around this time, The Wife started paying attention to what we were talking about and laughed at me.

It sounds like he had a good time, but he was tight-lipped when I talked to him on the phone. He was very excited this morning and moved right into the crowd of kids as we left. His teacher, Mrs. Karasch, has her hands full with 19 kids in the class. She shooed all of the parents out the door pretty quickly this morning. We took a few pictures which I’ll upload tonight if they’re any good. Be on the lookout for stories about the school in local media. KVUE had a story Sunday night and KEYE filmed Henry and I on the way into the school this morning. The Wife says that News8 was there this afternoon (In fact, there’s already a story from this morning. You can watch the video version of the interview from the same page.) and that she spoke briefly with a reporter from the Statesman.

On a totally unrelated note, I managed to lose my sunglasses yesterday. Since I’ve had them for 5 or 6 years and they were $4.99 at Walgreen’s, I’m not going to search for them. The Wife, who hated the old ones, will be happy to find out that I purchased a new, considerably more expensive pair at lunch. Given the cost, I’m sure to lose them before the end of next week.