Major Tom Made the News Again...

Canadian illustrator Andrew Kolb decided to illustrate a children's book with the story told in David Bowie's hit song "Space Oddity".

Now, you should know why this is interesting to me....

Mr. Kolb had put a link to the PDF of this book on his homepage earlier this week, but then he received a cease and desist request from the song's copyright owner and he's since had to remove it. According to the news article linked here, he's working out the legality of this, and he'd like to illustrate more ballads of classic songs.  Here is a You Tube video with the pages of the book set to the song that might or might not be available for very long.

I noticed the lack of capitalization of the words "Major" and "God", that the spaceship looks like the Death Star, and that the spaceship is ENORMOUS, but the illustrations are very cute and my sons would enjoy this very much.

Road Trip III 2011: One More Thing

When my boys were doing the Turner Field Running of the Bases earlier this month, there was a photographer sitting just past 2nd base taking pictures of the boys.  Some dude handed us parents a flyer with a website and asked us to note the time because the pictures of the kids are displayed by time..

Being the sucker I am, I went to the website...and saw the pictures of my boys...and bought a pair of 5x7s.  I need to get frames for the boys' rooms, but in the meantime, I've scanned them in to share with you.

I'm usually better than succumbing to this.  I'm very good at saying "No, thank you" to these photo offers.  I resist most easily when I'm in the picture looking stupid (which is quite often).  Or if my camera accidentally goes off in front of the computer terminal at the sales counter for such pictures.  Or if the salesman lets you walk around the gift shop with a copy of the picture to take our time deciding whether to buy the picture...and my darned camera went off accidentally AGAIN.  And AGAIN.  (Disclaimer: I may or may not have purchased these hard copies and just took pictures with my iPhone to share them digitally while on vacation).

But this time I did pay for the pictures for sure, since we were back home in FL by the time I could see the proofs.  Enjoy!  And yes, next time we ever do this we will make sure our sons are in real athletic shoes...

My Cub Scouts -- All Three of Them!

Last weekend Timmy was finally able to don a Cub Scout uniform like his big brother.  They sold popcorn at our local Lowe's store for about an hour.  They both did really well and they don't think fundraisers suck.  We'll see how long that lasts....

I remember when Jacob used to be Mr. Smiley.  Now it's a struggle to get him to smile without (a) being reluctant or (b) being ultra-silly.

I'll probably be the 4th scout in this picture within the month.  Tonight I tossed my name in the ring to be Timmy's den leader...I did a lot of the legwork helping out Jacob's Tiger den in 2008-2009.  

We couldn't hand down as much of the uniform as we'd hoped.  The hat and scarf slide, that's it.

We won't talk about how many "takes" we had for this genuine smile.

Wordless Wednesday -- EWWWW!

You usually see these things curled up about 1/2" down in your lawn.  Not crawling across your street in 90F temperatures!  Kudos to my iPhone camera for getting some nice (or not so nice?) closeups!

Florida Discoveries 18: Chinese Hibiscus

Over the course of the day, the stamen will produce their bright yellow pollen, such as what's seen here.  It's all very fast...this flower was wilted by sunset.

As promised two posts ago, here's a nice pretty post for you.  This is our Chinese hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis) plant that grows in front of Jacob's bedroom window in the front of our house.  I was pleased to see these flowers this summer, since the week we moved into the house in late November 2010, we had a hard freeze that essentially killed off the 5' tall plant for the season.  But in April it came back!

Unfortunately, when the hibiscus plant has to start from scratch, it's tough to get the profuse flowers that I was accustomed to in Hawaii (where my Dad was stationed then when I was ages 3-6) and Melbourne, FL (when we were stationed at Patrick AFB).  These flower bring back so many memories of living in Hawaii where our house (we lived in military housing) had a tall hedge-like row of hibiscus along one of the outside walls.

I've been seeing the occasional flower this summer...hibiscus flowers only last one day so it's been tricky getting outside at the right time to photograph it.  It needed to be before lunchtime, and most of this summer I simply wasn't thinking about heading out to photograph the front yard until it was too late in the day.

Once school started, and the kids were playing in the front yard while waiting for their respective buses, I had a chance on the first day of school to get these shots of a fresh bloom!

The flowers are about 5-6" across.