Congratulations to Mitch & Kim on the birth of their new daughter, Samantha Skye Rily.

Just shy of a month ago, we took a week’s vacation to New York. I’ve been meaning to blog about it, but have been rather busy of late. So here goes…

The significance of the trip was initially to see my parents’ new house in Goshen & to introduce JJ to his great-grandparents. Somehow it blossomed into a lot more. A small family reunion of my immediate family became a house warming which became an extended family reunion. My mom cooked up a storm feeding some 40 odd people. (Odd in the sense of a close approximation to 40 and odd in the sense of my extended family is really really wierd.)

There was some drama. A few typical family moments which I won’t go into detail about occured, but I think they were outweighed by my little brother’s 36 hours of travelling through 4 airports to get to New York. I was worried about my allergies being a problem with Xena, my parents’ black lab, but the gods looked down up us with a smile with hardly a sneeze, wheeze, or sniff.

While seeing the family is always fun, one of the best highlights from the trip was getting to see Spamalot in The City during the weekend up there. We had great seats & got a phenomenal meal before the show thanks to a restaurant recommendation from Mike & Irene. (The pizza was great! Thanks!) For anyone who has not seen this show, it is a MUST SEE.

Last, JJ flew wonderfully. He was quiet & pleasant both ways without screaming or crying. In fact, we were thanked by the people around us at the end of both flights for having such a quiet & wonderful child.

Time to head to work now. More posts to come about many other things soon.

For anyone else who felt this summer’s movie offerings were less than spectacular, I would like to recommend they go see Little Miss Sunshine.

This is not only what I think was the best movie of the summer, but probably the best movie of the year thusfar. I anticipate a lot of Oscar nominations for this one.

For those few remaining 24 fans out there, keep an eye out for Chloe doing here typical angry-but-doing-my-job role.

For no particular reason this morning I got to thinking about the Charlie Brown comic strip & have come to a deep, dark personal revelation. Charlie Brown has the worst parents ever.

I am going to ignore the fact that we cannot understand what his parents say in the cartoons. A friend of ours is dating a guy whose parents are from Russia & she says they often speak their native tongue that she cannot understand. This could very well be the case with CB in which his parents are speaking some strange muffled trumpet language from their native land. To be honest, since all the adults in his cartoon world speak this language, it brings up the issue that we have never really been deliberately told he lives in America. It could be that the children speak in English among themselves because of their nation’s desire to expand its economic & worldly position through the adoption of a more popular international language.

My reasons are really centered around the fact that his parents do not assist him with his recurring problems & low self-esteem.

For god only knows how long, Lucy has taken every chance she can to pick on Charlie Brown. From pulling the football away from his kicks to berating him for humor’s sake at her Psychiatry Stand, this girl has hurt him physically & mentally for years. While many parents try to teach children to handle their own problems with bullies, even the most resolute of parents would have to step in at some point if the bullying continues for too long. His parents, though, just choose to ignore the issue leaving their child to the cruel whims of his best friend’s sister.

In addition to this, the boy went bald at the age of 5. Let me repeat that - FIVE. A guy in my high school went almost as bald as can be at 18. He was less than thrilled about it & it did not really help his self-esteem at all. Now while the 18 year old can attribute this to male pattern baldness, I know of NO five year old bald children. This brings me to the dreaded conclusion that he is suffering from a disease of some sort which his parents choose to ignore. If this is the case, I fear for him getting pneumonia as that is most likely a death sentence to our comic strip hero.

That said, can’t his parents buy him a toupee or a wig or something. It would definitely help his self-esteem to know people are not staring at the sun reflecting off his skull.

Continuing on the parents not buying him things. It is quite obvious that Sally is getting preferential treatment in the family. She always has clean pristene dresses on & her hair is done very very nicely. Given her age, I am apt to suspect that the hair is her mother’s doing on a day to day basis. I am unsure what our young hero has done to lose the good favor of his parents, but they make little to no effort to hide that all their free money is being spent on their daughter. Just look at the Christmas Pagent. Don’t you think his mom or dad could have given him just ten or twenty dollars to buy a somewhat decent Christmas tree. While his friends were very encouraging to help him turn the poor tree that he could afford into something nice, it is obvious he knew he could not turn to his parents for help on this matter.

Although this is my first run at the parenting thing, it is quite obvious to me from the above examples that Charlie Brown’s parents are not living up to the societal expectations for a parent. I for one intend to do better.

Today I was reading about a new animation festival, the “Crested Butte Reel Festival”. Before seeing the name of the festival itself, I saw the url - www.crestedbuttereelfest.com. When I saw the url I read it as “Crested Butter Eel Fest” and could not understand why anyone would name an animation festival after an eel.

The “High Priority” flag is perhaps the most useless, most overly abused and most ignored feature of e-mail to date.

On the way to work today, I saw a billboard advertising something to the effect of “The ONLY direct flights from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv” for El Al Airlines.

Somehow — I suspect that there are a lot of empty seats on those flights right now.