Famille Du Pentium

This last week, Aaron had his 5th Grade class 3-day trip to White Pines Ranch in Oregon, Illinois.  This is sort of a semi-working farm / ranch / outdoor education center that includes dorms, horseback riding, hiking, games, food, and other activities.

Aaron had a blast of course, and he took pictures… which have been uploaded here.

Enjoy! 

It was a great year. 

We had a rough start, to be sure.  The first 12 minutes of the season opener were enough to put most Cubs fans in the intensive care unit.  

But it was the year of TheRiot, Alfanso Soriano, Derek Lee, and Carlos Zambrano.  It was the year we forgot about  Sammy Sosa.  Life was good at the Friendly Confines.

And so it ends with another year of "wait ’till next year".   

Ah, the dog days of summer.  Now summer is over, and it’s time to think about school and soccer and ice skating and going to curriculum nights, parent-teacher conferences, etc etc.

All our pictures from this summer are HERE.  You can see everything from Disney in June to the last pictures I just posted, from the first day of AYSO Soccer for Ethan and Aaron. 

Speaking of those AYSO pictures, I’m having a little server-side trouble uploading, and was only able to upload a few.  More will come later this week, so if you want to see them keep an eye open HERE.

The next big picture & blog event will be Hannukah 2007, although I’ll post here (and at the family Picture Gallery) whenever something interesting comes up. 

First of, before we get to business… what’s with all the Llamas around here?  🙂

OK I knew someday this day would come.  My son, Aaron, is now in fifth grade and must be able to recite the Preamble of the US Constitution in order to move on to sixth grade.  When I was a kid, this was a requirement of 8th grade.  But in my day, we weren’t learning algebra in fourth grade.  Whatever.

Anyway, so I knew this day would come.  My son wants to know how *I* memorized the constitution, or at least the preamble.  And what is the response of everyone who passed through Junior High School in the 1970’s?  School House Rock, of course! To this day, I can recite the Preamble from memory, thanks to that famous video.  I’m sure thousands of people my age are the same boat. 

But what to do? the problem is, School House Rock is no longer on T.V. every Saturday morning between every cartoon, anymore.  So what’s an over forty victim of fate to do?   Sing the song to my kids?  HAH!  Fat chance.  Now, it’s YOUTUBE to the rescue!

In the next post, (one article up from this) you will find the actual youtube video of the School House Rock video that teaches the preamble.  I can’t post it inline here because of a quirk with moveable type weblogs.  Those of you who remember, can sing along.  It brought a tear to my eye.