I took this picture of the South Yuba River in northern California (and then photoshopped the hell out of it) back in June of 2006, when we got to visit my uncle and aunt one day while spending the week around Tahoe.

My aunt, Odette, is a talented painter who has just started a site to showcase some of her work: Brush Works by Odette. There are a lot of really nice northern California scenes in the gallery, so go pay her a visit and enjoy her art.

A bit of lazy birthday blogging via wikipedia: 

1041 - Empress Zoe of Byzantium elevates her adoptive son to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire as Michael V.
1508 - The League of Cambrai is formed by Pope Julius II, Louis XII of France, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Ferdinand II of Aragon as an alliance against Venice.
1520 - Martin Luther burns his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine outside Wittenberg’s Elster Gate.
1541 - Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham are executed for having affairs with Catherine Howard, Queen of England and wife of Henry VIII.
1684 - Isaac Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.
1817 - Mississippi becomes the 20th U.S. state.
1836 - Emory College (now Emory University) is chartered in Oxford, Georgia.
1861 - American Civil War: the Confederate States of America accept a rival state government’s pronouncement that declares Kentucky to be the 13th state of the Confederacy.
1864 - American Civil War: Sherman’s March to the Sea - Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army troops reach Savannah, Georgia.
1868 - The first traffic lights are installed outside the Palace of Westminster in London. Resembling railway signals, they use semaphore arms and are illuminated at night by red and green gas lamps.
1869 - Wyoming grants women the right to vote.
1869 - The first American chapter of Kappa Sigma is founded at the University of Virginia.
1898 - Spanish-American War: The Treaty of Paris is signed, officially ending the conflict.
1899 - The Delta Sigma Phi fraternity is founded at the City College of New York.
1901 - The first Nobel Prizes are awarded.
1902 - Women are given the right to vote in Tasmania.
1904 - The Pi Kappa Phi fraternity is founded at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.
1906 - U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize.
1907 - The worst night of the Brown Dog riots in London, when 1,000 medical students clash with 400 police officers over the existence of a memorial for animals who have been vivisected.
1932 - Thailand adopts a Constitution and becomes a constitutional monarchy.
1935 - The Downtown Athletic Club Trophy, later renamed the Heisman Trophy, was given to halfback Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago. This award was given to the best college football player east the Mississippi River.
1936 - Abdication Crisis: Edward VIII signs the Instrument of Abdication.
1941 - World War II: The Royal Navy capital ships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse are sunk by Imperial Japanese Navy torpedo bombers near Malaya.
1941 - World War II: Battle of the Philippines - Imperial Japanese forces under the command of General Masaharu Homma land on the Philippine mainland.
1948 - The UN General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today is also International Human Rights Day.
1949 - Chinese Civil War: The People’s Liberation Army begins its siege of Chengdu, the last Kuomintang-held city in mainland China, forcing President of the Republic of China Chiang Kai-shek and his government to retreat to Taiwan.
1963 - The United States Air Force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar spaceplane program is cancelled by Robert McNamara.
1968 - Japan’s biggest heist, the still-unsolved “300 million yen robbery”, occurs in Tokyo.
1970 - I was born
1972 - Jim Hart throws a football for a record 98 yards, the longest recorded throw.
1978 - Arab-Israeli conflict: Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin and President of Egypt Anwar Sadat are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1981 - The United Nations General Assembly approves Pakistan’s proposal for establishing nuclear free-zone in South Asia.
1983 - Democracy is restored in Argentina with the assumption of President Raúl Alfonsín.
1989 - Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj announces the establishment of Mongolia’s democratic movement that peacefully changed the second oldest communist country into a democratic society.
1996 - Rwandan Genocide: Military advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General and head of the Military Division of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations of the United Nations Maurice Baril recommends that the UN multi-national forces in Zaire stand down.
2006 - One million Lebanese opposition supporters gather in downtown Beirut, calling for the government to resign.

Oh, and happy Human Rights Day too.

It takes a regularly scheduled workday to fully notice the end of daylight savings time.

Each day the shadows have lengthened, often without notice, but with the changing of just one hour, falling back and giving us - for a few days - more time, those shadows seem to lengthen faster. Perhaps it’s in the way they cut across the highway like great zebra stripes ticking off the miles on my way home. They weren’t there last week, though.

The dogs, of course, can’t understand why they’re having to wait an extra hour to be fed. You’d think they were starving.

That dot is the Space Shutte Discovery and the International Space Station. They flew over my house this evening, a bright star in a starless sky racing from Northwest to Southeast. I think they waved at me as I raised high a pint of Guinness.

It’s hard to imagine anything cooler.

Here’s a link to NASA’s satellite sighting info site, which gives sighting info for almost anywhere in the world.

I’ve been swimming laps at the pool down the street now that it’s finally sunny and hot everyday.I went three times this week and found myself observing the habits of the other pool people.

One day, the only others there were a mother and very young child. When I walked in, the mother pointed to me and whispered, “That man is going to swim.” I guess the lack of anything other than goggles and a towel was the giveaway.

Next came a running commentary on all of my actions:

“Look, he’s setting his things down.”

“He’s putting on his goggles.”

“He’s swimming laps.”

“He’s taking a break.”

“He’s stretching.”

“He seems to be drowning.”

I know little kids need that and they have questions about everything, so I consider my ability to serve a teaching tool a public service.

The next day two pairs of teens shared the pool. Two girls talking and laughing just loud enough for the two boys on the opposite side to hear just how much fun they were having. The boys, of course, were wrestling and throwing a ball at each other with just enough vigor to impress the girls. Since the two pairs were on opposite sides, I had to swim my laps up and down the middle. That was me, the human fence.

The next time I went, three women sat around one of the tables under the canopy of the pool house. There were many empty beer cans, and from the bits of conversation, I knew that these were all teachers about to go back to school the next day, gathered to toast the end of the season.

One turned and yelled at her kid, “I heard that!”

The kid yelled back from somewhere in the middle of the pool, “How?”

“Because I’m a teacher. I can hear everything you say.”

The kid paused and looked back at his mom, looked at his siblings and friends and then yelled back nervously, “Can you hear what we’re thinking?”

As a teacher myself, I already knew the answer to that one.

Yes. Yes, she could.

Last week I enjoyed my 18th year at Camp Periwinkle, a camp for childhood cancer patients and their siblings.

Here are links to two very good news stories about camp:

Camp Periwinkle Changes the Lives of Kids Battling Cancer 0n Bryan/College Station’s KBTX.com

Camp Helps Young Cancer Patients Forget Worries on MyFOX Houston

Tomorrow we head out to Burton, TX for Camp Periwinkle. This will be my 18th year at camp, and as always, I’m looking forward to another great week.

Since I have a lot of packing to do, and not just because I’m still stuck in the throws of the Coyote Mercury Summer of Not Blogging So Much, I’ll just repost what I wrote last year when I got back:

We got back from Camp Periwinkle (a camp for childhood cancer patients and their siblings) on Saturday afternoon and have spent most of the time since recovering. I’ve been going to Camp every summer since 1990, which is possible since it’s only a week long.

The underlying philosophy of camp is selflessness. All the counselors and staff are volunteers, the kids go for free, everything there is donated. For one week, and sometimes for the last time, the kids at camp get to feel normal, and they get to have fun, and they have the time of their lives.

The smiles and the laughter at Camp Periwinkle are things that keep those of us who’ve been doing it for so long coming back year after year.

It’s typically one of the high points of any given year. It’s a chance to spend a week living in a perfect world, a world of patience, selflessness, love, compassion, understanding. It’s a chance to see kids and adults truly be their best selves. Where else can you see kids in a relay race cheering on the kid in a wheelchair who will cost them the race, yet no one cares about who wins or loses? Where else can you see adults put aside every aspect of their own comfort and convenience so that kids will feel special?

I’ve never been anywhere or done anything else that focuses what life should be about and how we should interact with one another more clearly than Camp Periwinkle. It’s a place where no expense is spared, no opportunity missed, to make kids whose lives are a daily struggle feel special, feel normal. It teaches kids that they can do what no one thinks they can. It helps them survive.

In the past seventeen years, I’ve seen kids laugh, smile, dance, and play who might never otherwise have found a place to do those things. I’ve watched kids crawl out of wheelchairs to climb a wall on the ropes course. I’ve seen kids fresh from brain surgery lean on their crutches and dance.

It’s a powerful place and it changes a person’s way of thinking. It reminds me of how special life is, how lucky I am, how important it is to work everday to make the world a better place for everyone.

It’s a chance to see what life could be like in a world ruled by love, where nobody ever wanted for anything.

Did I say it is a perfect world?

* * *

Note: This post was republished as a guest editorial in the Nov/Dec 2006 Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing. 

You can read more about Camp Periwinkle on Burst Blog: BlogBurst Bloggers Help Send Children to Camp

If you use your thumb to break your fall, your fall may break your thumb.

(That’s what I get for ignoring the lesson about running up stairs two at a time in flip flops.)

My wife has updated her blog and even has some pictures of our new floors.

Blogging about blogging is close to the lowest form of blogging, but blogging about the behind the scenes aspects of a blog is like watching someone else’s cat spit up hairballs on the carpet, so as of this post, that kind of blogging will occur on my other blog, aptly named Coyote Mercury Test Blog, mainly because I’m using it to see if I can actually execute the upgrade to 2.1 and to find out if my theme and plugins will work.

If you’re using WordPress and considering the upgrade, you may find it useful or interesting. If not, you won’t.

In the future, I’ll probably use it for testing plugins, theme modifications, and any future upgrades. I doubt I’ll post there regularly.