RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY: We were there.
We saw The Mythbusters and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Ozzy Ozbourne and a lot of Sanity.
Adam Savage and Jaime Hyneman were a surprise, and they had the whole crowd run some experiments. Like "how long does it take the Wave to make it across over 100,000 people?
See it? In the jumbotron the light line across the crowd? It took nearly a minute for the wave to move from the stage to the far back.
Stephen Colbert was the impetus for the "March to Keep Fear Alive" which was combined with the "Rally to Restore Sanity," resulting in the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear." Jon Stewart attempted to ease Colbert's tendencies to draw fear from stereotypes. Colbert's character not only fears Moslems across the board (Stewart invited Karim Abdul Jabbar to the stage), but all robots and bears. Stewart introduced Colbert to the best robot around...
You should have heard the cheers for R2D2 and the references to Star Trek. If anyone doubted the geekiness of the crowd, it became quite clear when the group rightnexttous (no wiggle room whatsoever) chatted about which episode the reference came from.
The signs, ah the signs. Some bold, some silly, many quite clever.
More signs from the Rally are found at 100 Best Signs. And if you really have time, here are 800+ more Rally signs. Rebecca came with Ian and me to the Mall, and stood for the 4 hours with us. She had a hard enough time seeing, standing only 5'2" in the crowd. I'm glad we left the boys with my parents, they wouldn't have seen anything at all. Katherine had the VBODA marching band assessment so missed the whole thing too. We recorded it so everyone could watch in the evening. We had a great time and thanks to one of Ian's co-workers who leant us one of her parking spots we managed to drive in, park, walk the couple blocks to the Mall and completely avoid the over-stressed Metro system. Thanks again, Stephanie!
HALLOWEEN: All dressed up
It's no secret I'm not a huge fan of Halloween, but this year was quite bearable since we crammed it all into a handful of hours on the 31st. The farmer's market had cheap pumpkins, we carved them after lunch, hung the tiny ones from the front tree, the kids wore their costumes from last year, the girls went out with friends, the boys managed about 45 minutes of Trick-or-Treating before they came home, and everything was done by 8 p.m.
Mom's pumpkin.... Katherine's pumpkin... Jonathon's & Rebecca's & Nicholas' pumpkins
In the following week the pumpkins attracted another kind of fan. And some very interested cats.
CONFIRMATION: All dressed up, a little differently.
11/6/10 - Katherine was fully Confirmed into the Catholic Faith. Her brothers served their first Mass as altar servers to the Bishop and "guardians" of the Miter and Crozier. Cameras were strictly forbidden in church so I used my mom's little Canon surreptitiously from the balcony.
In that second photo, Katherine is being Confirmed by the Bishop with her saint name, Katharine Drexel. Behind the Bishop wearing his miter you can see the top of the crozier (the shepherd's staff). Off to the left you can see Nicholas coming down to relieve Jonathon from standing and holding the crozier. I gathered it was heavy.
After Mass with the Bishop and her sponsor, her grandmother. Also with her poster from Retreat last February.
Rebecca earned a ton of volunteer hours towards her own Confirmation next fall by helping at the reception for the earlier Confirmation service (we had two services... one at 10 a.m. for all the 8th grade Confirmandi and one at 2 p.m. for the HS Confirmandi) as well as before and after Katherine's Confirmation. She took her job very seriously. She's a leader and delegator and is happy up to her armpits in the dirty work as well.
What can I say but that this was a good seven days. Even with two very cold football games (last Friday Rebecca and I went to Hylton to watch the Indians get trounced, yesterday Ian and Rebecca went to Gar-Field to watch the Indians get mildly crushed) and some difficulties here and there, the last week definitely weighed more towards the good than the bad. OK, Katherine's report card came home... we won't discuss that... but today my folks came down to celebrate her Confirmation with us especially as my mom is her sponsor, and the day ended at Outback with wonderful food, great conversation and lots of laughter. Rebecca told the tale about her Social Studies assignment that asked what difficulties North Korea and South Korea had with rejoining. The other kids were looking through their newspapers and Rebecca knew right off. Since we'd just talked about Kim Jung Ils sons a couple weeks ago, she already knew an outline of the Koreas' backgrounds.
Yup. Good times.
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