The Halloween duds, at least for little ones (also saw stuff for toddlers) are already out.  Over TWO MONTHS until Halloween!

What do they think Halloween is? 

Christmas? 

No pressure, of course, Beth!  

I would have said "Waiting for Faith and Bridgette", only now it'd be best if the latter would delay her appearance until next week, soonest.  Could have come last week, no problem, but did she?  No-o-o-o-oooo.  Naturally not.  And now Jason is having surgery on his knee tomorrow morning, which will keep him chained to a sofa and bed - barring occasionally putting some light pressure on it - for a week.

Guess who'll doubtless decide "Lemme OUT!" tomorrow evening?

We'll hope not. 

However, so far's I'm aware, there's not a thing in the world hindering Faith from showing up so we can all get a look at her.  I've got a brand spanking new "It's a Girl!" flag to hang off the front porch, just waiting for a baby girl to GET BORN ALREADY.

No pressure, though. 

It's actually tomorrow, but Mom arranged for the dinner to be this evening.  I forgot my "real" camera, but had my cell phone with me, so that's what I took these photos with:

Here he's inspecting one of the bottles of wine Louis and Mary gave him; below he's examining the personalized box with chocolate, presented by Jeanne:

BTW, both Jeanne and Mom brought digital cameras, but both of them wound up with dying batteries.  Until that happened, however, this was a common sight:

Dad reading one of his cards:

Okay, the photos are all sort of the same, because of where I was seated.  Sorry about that! I actually took a lot of pictures, but quite a few were blurry, darn it.  Dumb cell phone camera.  Here's Jeanne and Elaine, to finish up:

Happy birthday, Dad! 

I've got one staring at me in my Yahoo! mail account which reads "Re: clean the frostbound scrunch", ostensibly sent by someone named Lana.

Clean the frostbound scrunch?  Clean the frostbound scrunch.  Yo, Larry, go fetch that filthy, frostbound scrunch and clean it! 

What the deuce is a scrunch, anyway?  Were it a scrunchy I'd know it's one of those stretchy hair-things that was quite popular a few years ago, but a scrunch?  No idea.  It's a verb, as in "Scrunch down so it doesn't see you!", but as a noun....?

Hmmm.... 

And it's August.  How'd it get frostbound?

I really rather hate to click on it, as it'll doubtless be revealed as some dorky junk stock email or something like that.

Why on earth do people hold gossipy phone calls when in public?

There I was at Target, sifting and sorting through the birthday cards while looking for one for Dad, when here came a young woman on her cell phone, carrying on with some indignation about another person who had the nerve to call her and ask what she meant by whatever it was she'd said, proceeding to give a blow-by-blow account to whoever she was talking to. 

Totally inappropriate it was.

I'm hardly against any and all cell phone calls made in stores, particularly when it's the plaintive type as I also heard on this visit, where a man was calling his wife to try and ascertain the location of an item he wasn't able to find.  That's reasonable.  Dmitry will call to ask me to pick him up something or other.  That's reasonable, too.

But nattering on about obviously private stuff, especially when it is someone else's private stuff, well, that's just tacky. 

I'd given Dmitry a disposable camera, and got the film developed this afternoon:

Dmitry was fascinated by his first exposure to hermit crabs:

Carolyn's mother said they're giving serious thought to them all returning next month for a weekend. 

If I'd been there when they collected them I'd have protested, to be honest, as the photos are not sharp and distinct.  However, you want excellent quality, a mall Fashion Foto shop probably isn't the best place to go.  The kids are pleased, so that's what counts.

I'm doubtless a smidge on the biased side, but I think they're cute. 

This morning we went to collect the girls so the kids could go poke around Ridgmar mall then see Rush Hour 3.  I was snooping around for a few things myself and eventually ran into them outside one of those instant-photo kiosks:

Here's one of the pix the machine spit out:

This is one of the more sedate....tongues prominently displayed was a feature of almost all the others. 

I offered to stand them a photo session at the Fashion Photo place outside Penney's, which offer they quickly accepted.  Dmitry wasn't happy with the shirt he was wearing, however, so we stopped in the men's department to buy him another one.  Oh my!  The girls had him firmly in their grip when it came to shopping.  Poor guy didn't stand a chance.

Gosh, doesn't he look just excited to be there?  

Here's a picture of the determined duo, taken while Dmitry was in the dressing room:

They were full of plans to take him out for a full-scale shopping event (though I do wonder who's going to pay for that), and I even overheard mention of repainting his room.  Dmitry was looking a trifle alarmed, and who can blame him?

He's putty in their hands, and they know it. 

I'm looking forward to seeing the Fashion Photo pictures.  It was going to take 45 minutes, so I left them there and came on home.  Will post it later.  ;^)

Read this mother-of-six's description on eBay of a set of Pokemon cards her brood managed to sneak into her grocery cart.  

BTW, does anyone have any idea what the symbol € is for?  My finger accidently hit that key, thus bringing it to my attention, and now I'm curious as to its purpose. 

School's been canceled due to heat?

No, not here.....Cincinnati.  The Cincinnati Public School system canceled classes both yesterday and today due to temperatures "flirting" (as CNN put it) with 100°.

Mercy Maud!  If Fort Worth started canceling classes every time it approached the century mark, we'd have a remarkably short school year.

Let's not hear any more comments about us canceling school for what northern areas consider common amounts of snow and ice, that's all.  Apparently it's all relative, isn't it?