A Historic Day

Forty-five years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a man stood and spoke...

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed--we hold these truths to be self-evident that all mean are created equal...

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character..

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!" And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true...
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

Brother Martin, if you had lived to see this day, I think you would agree your dream has become a reality. How can we thank you?

SD pics

This little A's fan is thinking, how can I get down to the beach so my uncle can teach me how to body surf?


Someday I will be this close to a leopard shark in the actual ocean, rather than simply looking at it thru glass.


The little A's fan is thinking, "How can I slip away from my mom and go crank that machine?"


Perfect days always end at the beach.

Tagging

So apparently there is some sort of blog sport called "tagging". Younger persons might think that if you tagged someone's blog, that would mean that you sprayed paint something on someone's blog site, as that is about the only use of tagging nowadays. But it turns out that in the ancient past there was a schoolyard game, now officially banned in some schools, where a child would be "it" and then all the other kids would run away and this child would chase them and would try to touch one of the other kids. This touch was referred to as a "tag" and the game itself was often referred to as "Tag".
So apparently blog tagging works by the slowest blogger trying to catch the interest of several other nearly as slow blogger and convincing them to perform some sort of amusing task that relates to the number of people tagged. As pyramid schemes go, it seems pretty benign and gives rise to a wry smile or two.

So in response to HT's "tag" I am posting the fourth picture in the fourth folder of our picture album:


Can you guess if this is JP, JA, or ME?
I had to look at the date of the photograph, it turns out to be ME, only a few weeks old.

To perpetuate this particular tag 4 social experiment, I nominate the Alabama beekeepers (got to get something new on your blog anyway!), the Aggie engineers, Team Coke, and SJN.

I will let AMD respond for herself to EH's tag , but for fun will post some of what I might imagine her answers to be:

8 TV shows I love to watch:

Being a soccer mom, who has time for TV?

8 Favorite Restaurants:

We've only gone to 8 restaurants in our entire marriage because SD is such a cheapskate!

8 Things that happened yesterday:

Wow, that is really, really a long time ago, I can't remember exactly except that it involved driving kids around.

8 Things that I look forward to:

8 hours of sleep. Someday I'm sure it will happen.

A New Ward

For several years there has been a sense that our ward would likely be divided. But having survived one set of ward divisions with only a name change and then the stake division, we seem to keep dodging bullets. Until today...

The lines were as expected: with Beautiful view becoming its own ward and Verdant Hills keeping the central areas and students.

We are losing a lot of good friends during the division and will especially miss the vitality that comes from having the singles in the ward. Plus most of the scientist ended up in the other half. The upside is that the ward had become far too big to know everybody and our nursery was already in three classrooms and was looking to expand to a forth. Not sure if we will be much smaller, but at least a little.

For those of you interested... The old bishop of Verdant Hills became the new bishop of Beautiful View, the old bishop of the Andrew Jackson ward (Sonic Triathlete) became the new bishop of the Verdant Hills ward, and Lift the Earth became the bishop of the Andrew Jackson ward. BVB, the cycling Chinese expert, became the second counselor in the Verdant Hills ward and Music Man Adams became the second counselor in the Beautiful View ward.

Sun Beams

To continue the theme of reunions with old friends, another set that had moved to Logan came back to TN for a visit. We had a dinner at our house for some of their closest friends here. It was great to have them back. We had several lively discussions on the topic de jure, which is what I miss most since so many of our friends have moved away.

For reasons that I'm not sure of, we have never been able to spend the energy to rebuilt the "circle of ten" (to use MTN's phrase) that was the bedrock of our friendships for so many years here in TN. What had been for a period of five years or so that it takes to finish graduate school, etc... this strong and intimate group, rapidly got smaller as people finished and moved away. Meanwhile, we just haven't really made very many new ones to take their place. Maybe living in student wards for some many years have caught up with us and we just don't have the mental energy that it takes to form deep attachments anymore, I don't know. But I miss those times and having the Sun Beams back (a bit of play on their sunny disposition) if only for an evening.

Memphis

Next stop on AM's magical mystery tour was Memphis, to visit some more of our friends who moved there somewhat recently.


AM was especially impressed by the size of their house. She made a feature length movie extolling its virtues, but it is too large to load here.

I would tell you more details about what they did, etc..., but since I wasn't there, I will post this with the hope that AM or JPD will take some time to fill it in.

AM's version of the trip to Alabama and Memphis. The travel time to Alabama is a few hours (SD's warned me not to reveal the exact travel time, exact location and names of our friends that we are visiting, because we are in the FBI witness protection program) so this is for your eyes only. We went to Alabama for a baby blessing for our friend the "BEE KEEPER". While the kids have a day off from school, I thought it would be great to visit our other friends who live near Memphis. As SD mentioned I videotaped the inside of their mansion and I was in awed of how big the house and how beautiful it is to have a big house. We had a great visit with them and the next day we drove to the Memphis Zoo to see some animals. We had fun visiting with our friends and the kids had fun playing and seeing each other again. It is very nice to be able to visit friends.

Blessings in Alabama

While I was in San Diego, AM took the rest of the family road tripping. The first stop was to Alabama to see some of our old TN friends bless their baby a few weeks ago, so I thought we should post a few pictures for y'all to see. We used to have more kids than most of our TN friends, by the end of this year, pretty much all of our old TN friends will have at least as many as we do.


Here are some of the kids from these families.

Proud Mamas