From Marc...

Marc sent this to me on the 23rd of June. He entitled it "Golfing with Pete." He definitely made his day...actually, he probably made his whole summer...

Last day of swim lessons!

Our boy did so well. He "graduated" and is moving on to level 3!

Happy Birthday Lee!

Happy Birthday Big Guy!

You can wish him a Happy Birthday on Twitter HERE or on Facebook HERE!

They Always Come In Threes....

Maybe they don't really, but I cannot remember the last time 3 names this recognizable died this close to each other...

Also while camping....

We decided to have a fire while camping. The wood was sparking up a storm. My five year old, Logan, asked "Why is the fire sparking?" I said it has to do with the composition of the wood. He replied "So you don't really know, do you?"

Our Father's Day Excursion

We went camping in The Islands this past weekend, about 5 miles from the Canadian border. We went to Isle La Motte and explored part of The Chazy Formation. The pictures are ours but the text comes from Wikipedia.

The Chazy Reef Formation is a mid-Ordovician limestone deposit that consists of some of the oldest reef systems built by a community of organisms. The reef structure was formed largely by bryozoans, but corals made an early appearance, as did the first stromatoporoids.

The formation is named for the small town of Chazy, New York, where the reef was first studied. The reef extends from Tennessee to Quebec, but its most easily studied outcropping is at Goodsell Ridge, Isle La Motte, the northernmost island in Lake Champlain; there, a gentle uplift has tilted the sediments: the bedding planes now dip slightly to the north, revealing sequences of horizons in exposed rock. The black limestone of Isle La Motte takes a polish, revealing the white markings of embedded fossil shells, notably the spirals formed by sliced gastropod shells.

Rock of the Chazy Formation was quarried from the nineteenth century at the Fisk Quarry, Isle La Motte, the oldest quarry in Vermont.

The system formed in warm tropical waters of the Iapetus Ocean, in low latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. The site was in shallow waters of a continental shelf: the continental craton of Laurentia lay to the west, beyond the lagoon system that formed behind the protective reef. The time was some 480-450 million years ago, at a period when global paleoclimate was so warm that the planet was all but ice-free. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was fourteen to sixteen times more plentiful than it is today.

The Chazy Reef Formation, which built up vertically from a muddy base catching fine dark silt as it grew, began as mounds that stabilized a muddy bottom, then built up into the water column to such an extent that the connected mounds modified their surrounding environment. As the reef aged, it began to offer an increasing variety of ecological niches, which fostered the first rich local biodiversity that has characterized all reef systems ever since. One dominant reef-building organism took the place of another, in a slowly evolving faunal succession.

The Green Monster

(click to monster-size it!)

From flipflopflyin.com: "A love of baseball plus a love of infographics equals Flip Flop Fly Ball."

(by way of Joy of Sox)

E-8

From mlb.com:


06/17/09 7:29 PM ET

BOSTON -- It took 233 games, but Red Sox center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury finally knows what it feels like to make an error in a Major League game.


Ellsbury's run of 232 games and 554 chances represented the longest errorless streaks by an outfielder in Red Sox history.


But it came to an end in the top of the first inning on Wednesday night, when Marlins designated hitter Jorge Cantu hit a fly ball to left-center that appeared as if it would be the third out.



Ellsbury, in stride, reached out, and had the ball go off the top of his glove. It was by no means an easy play, but it is one Ellsbury has made countless times in his career.

From The New York Daily News

The New York Daily News asked this about the New York Yankees: Where's the pitching?

Not in the Bronx, apparently. According to the Daily News, 10 weeks into the season the Yankees' starting pitching isn't nearly as good as expected, and you have to wonder when we're going to see the dominance everyone expected.

According to the Daily News, the starters have a 4.93 ERA, which ranks 12th in the American League, and even if that number is inflated by the Chien-Ming Wang(notes) saga, it still reflects a lot of mediocrity that has been covered up to some extent by all the late-inning comebacks.
And so in these last five games, neither A.J. Burnett(notes) nor Wang got out of the third inning, Joba Chamberlain(notes) threw 100 pitches in four innings, and Pettitte went only five innings for the third time in his last four starts.

Is this any way to win the AL East? The wild-card berth continues to look like a nice bailout for the Yankees if they can't beat the Red Sox, considering the lack of legitimate candidates. But nothing is assured if the starting pitching becomes an issue for this team, according to the Daily News. (via Yahoo Sports)

Daughter has trouble with "slide" concept.

Why I love Twitter....

I had drafted this post MONTHS ago and never hit publish!





I love Twitter! Someone I was following was tossing out random numbers in response to someone called drilone. Well, following back their conversation, he was looking to give away a sketch.

(As Michael Scott said on "The Office", "SWAG! ‘Stuff we all get’. I basically decorated my condo for free with all of my SWAG!")

Needless to say I jumped in and guessed correctly and lo and behold this....





...showed up in my mailbox a few days later! So...bottom line...follow drilone on Twitter and check out his blog!

Han Solo, P.I.

Once again, Rich at Comic by Comic finds the comedy gold....

Hatred

"Personally, I am baffled by the concept of racial prejudice. Why hate someone based on the color of their skin when if you take the time to really get to know them as a human being, you can find so many other things to hate them for?"

--Dennis Miller "The Rants" (c) 1996

"I make the weather!"

So we had a special guest at lunch today. Local celebrity and WPTZ NewsChannel 5 Weather Plus Meteorologist Tom Messner (AMS and NWA Seals of Approval) was at school to speak to a few classrooms. He stopped in early for some pizza and some conversation.

Anyone locally knows that Mr. Messner has a very sunny disposition on television. It is even more evident in person. He put up with a few lame jokes about being responsible for the weather but then jumped right into a rather raucous lunch time conversation.

As we all departed to gather our students from the lunch room, I asked if Mr. Messner would mind posing for a quick picture with me. I also asked if he minded if I posted it here. This led to Mr. Messner asking about our use of Twitter and Facebook. Being a Twitter fan, I jumped on the conversation and had a good 10 to 15 minute chat.

So, go ahead and follow him on Twitter here and maybe check out his wife's body of work here.