Photobooth

One of the very best features of this, my Macintosh laptop is a seemingly unimportant feature called "photobooth." It has all these wild special effects and has provided my family and myself with some very good laughs. But I'm not even going there. I'll save the special effects tour for another day.

For some reason, (probably letting children play with my laptop while not watching them) the photobooth feature pops up above everything else each and every time the computer gets turned on. And so, we often click "capture" absentmindedly before we move on to things like e-mail, work and the news. Sometimes I think it just takes a picture when it wants to without warning, all the while recording a sort of photo journal through the eyes of the Mac. Today when I was supposed to be working, I started flipping through the pics and ended up blowing diet pop right through my nose. I hope you enjoy them too.

Confucius says what?

I read this today and liked it.

"If you know what is enough, then you will have enough. But if you wait until you have enough, you will never have enough."

The first thing...

...I'll do when we live in a house with a yard is plant a magnolia tree.

Wheaton

Today we drove out to the western suburb of Wheaton, IL where our little friend Melanie taught Eric how to hold a baby correctly. Fun fact: Wheaton has 63 churches within city limits, and 30 more in surrounding unincorporated areas. According to the Genus Edition of Trivial Pursuit, there are "more churches per capita than any other town in America." There is also a college in Wheaton that I visited years ago. It was actually a trip to their C.S. Lewis Library (full of C.S. Lewis books) (who I was writing a paper on). Anyhow, the library was cool but the campus seemed strange. Maybe it was the time of day or something but everyone walking around seemed sedated. A couple years later I saw a documentary where people from Wheaton College were arguing that there were dinosaurs on Noah's arc. So I've decided that they must do a lot of drugs.

Sweet dreams

This is one slow and lazy Saturday. It began with sleeping in and not long after a walk and sandwiches in front of the television, I felt like good healthy saturday afternoon nap. I'm normally not much of a napper, so Eric wasn't sure of what to do. "Should I sing to you?" he asked. "Like a lullaby?" I asked. "Yeah," he said. "Sure," I said. And so I closed my eyes and Eric broke into his best rendition of Ms. Jackson as I drifted off.

Between the rain showers

Random acts of art in Rogers Park.

May Day

Today I met a tiny grey-haired lady with the sweetest smile. She made me toast and eggs at two o'clock this afternoon. Then tea and muffins at two-thirty. She showed me pictures of her grandchildren. She told me about her sons and daughter, a judge, a filmmaker, a famous fertility doctor. The doctor had won awards for breakthrough research. She told me about her parents and siblings and how the last place she saw them was at Dachau. She was a Holocaust survivor.

Unimaginable.

I stood on this train platform and thought about about how hundreds of children have been born to happy parents because of the doctor. I thought about all that life from one teenage girl escaping death.