After this blog post, I have three book reviews to do.  If you don’t hear from me for a year, it’s because I have vowed to not blog again until they are done.

I want to post some pictures form my camera before I never get them up.

This one is of Fritz and my brother, Glenn.  They had been doing that guy-thing of exchanging smacks and punches and obnoxious insults which men-folk consider signs of affection.  When I brought out the camera to catch them in the act, they decided to pose with smiles and hugs.

This is birthday baklava.  Yummy.

My sister and her family (except for the deployed husband).  You can see (if you look closely) the tinsel in my sister’s and my niece’s hair.

Not a great shot, but shows the tinsel in my hair.  We have the same parents.  Why does she get the easy-to-tan complexion?  Compared to her, I look like a ghost, but I’m tan, I swear.

Barb and Mary.

Katie’s birthday cake, before the meltdown.  TEN candles.  {sigh}

 Peter threatens to help her with the candles.

 But she gets them all in one shot. 

We’re supposed to be moving away in about 6 months.  Fritz’s Scout shirt, which he got as a Webelos II (age 10), was getting a bit small.  I forbade him to grow until we moved, but he did not listen to me.  So, new shirt and lots of patch sewing for me: council patch, troop patch, Arrow of Light, purple world crest patch (why do they not put this on there already??).  All of these were done on the sewing machine.  But two more to go were his rank and his position, both of which go on pockets.

“Do you want to use the pockets?” I asked him.  Of course he did, and he knows the rule: hand-sewn patches are done by the Scout, not the Mom.

I couldn’t get a good (non-blurry) photo (he wasn’t being very patient), but he did the sewing.  Trust me, it’s obvious.

I’m proud of him, even if it looks like a 13 year old boy did it.  I’ll do his Eagle rank, if/when he gets there.

We are a bit disappointed that Hurricane Irene chose to bypass Georgia…by hundreds of miles.  Last night, though, we got to see some of the outer bands zooming by, north to south.  We didn’t get a single drop of rain, but it was neat to see.

Even more neat was that ten minutes later, the sky was clear.

And now it’s just hot and humid.