First up: now posted on the Adventures page... new pictures of our beloved pets, Tasia and Dax, on their own pages! (For now you'll have to scrolll through their 2006 and 2007 pages to get to 2008...)

Memorial Day weekend... for most Americans, this is a three-day weekend spent at the beach or grilling outside for friends and family. Tomorrow is also a day of remembrance for those who gave their lives to preserve and protect our country. My mother rests alongside generations of those who made the supreme sacrifice, or were willing to and survived only to succumb to nature, in a beautiful National Cemetery which is one of the most serene locations in our county. When we wish them to "rest in peace", here at least they all definitely have that opportunity... it is a very peaceful location, and no matter when I go to visit my mother I cannot help but look across the great expanse of this old cemetery and note without thought all those other great Americans... every one of whom was a much greater an American than I. So, yes, I will enjoy my long weekend with my Bride, do some grilling outside tomorrow like so many others... but I will also REMEMBER...

Our favored broadcast-TV shows have ended their seasons, or have reached the ends of their runs for whatever reason, and we are moving into major movie-viewing season. We have movies we bought to add to our library because we will watch them more than once; we rent movies from Netflix that we will watch likely only once, we have TV series on DVD that we have watched more than once already and are ready to watch again. Speaking of...

We watched Speed Racer last weekend at the theatre and really enjoyed ourselves. For those of us who remember the cartoon from the mid-1960s, this is a true cartoon come to life. It had a plot from start to finish, was a great family-friendly outing, and I felt like I was right back in 1966 as a youngster watching the Mach 5 zooming by on those impossible racing paths on an incredibly enormous screen. Definitely this is a movie that will be added to our library when it comes out on DVD...

Yesterday we watched Prince Caspian on the big screen... so much of the imagery and the scenes were practically as I had visualized them in my mind's eye when I had read the book. Again, this is a great family movie despite all the sword-fighting and battles... but it is definitely a great good-versus-evil story and the gore is super-minimal (scratches and small wounds on people, no spurting stuff...)... another movie for our library.

We've been enjoying the Million Dollar Price Is Right each week. What's not to love about people who win a million bucks??? I could play any of those games... but the odds of going to California and getting in the studio and being one of 9 people called to "come on down" and then being one of the six to get on stage to play a game... mathematically dismal at best. Considering also that Congress won't let our oil companies start drilling in new oil fields, the price of gas at present prevents us from making any long road trips or even flying (I won't fly without a lot of prescribed tranquilizers!). But, that makes me wonder... will the players on Contestants' Row start bidding on the retail price of a tank of gasoline???