Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Everyone loves Christmas.. except for maybe Ava when she has to get her picture taken with Santa....

We wanted to use this for our xmas card this year but apparently this is poor taste?

Wishing everyone the best this holiday season, we love you!

Allan, Kathleen & Ava

Macy's Parade

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

This morning we went to Diana's cousin's apartment to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. The apartment is on the 7th floor overlooking Central Park West, and we had a nice view of the bands and floats and balloons.

You'll all be happy to know that Neil Diamond (not shown) is alive and well, at least well enough to stand on one of the floats from 80th down to 34th St.

Snoopy (also not shown below) was looking particularly worn, from our vantage point, perhaps even more weathered than Neil.

A few pictures:


Margaret with her step-cousin Georgia and (floating behind) Ugly Doll.

Lachlan missed Smurf and Spiderman and a few others due to a minor faceplant stepping out onto the balcony. His noggin was not fit for publishing without an NC-17 rating.

The parade just kept going and going and going...

New Orleans was well represented at the parade this year.

These are southern belles dressed up like candy.

Lachlan's Trip to the Barber

Here is Lachlan at the kid barber, watching Elmo on the tv, driving his car, and wondering which toy he should pick out next (answer: bubble stuff).

Just like I remember from my haircuts when I was a boy.

River Road House

Hey, it's the same as last time! Look closer, Holmes. Upper roof has shingles, eaves, soffits and finished dormers. No need to climb up there again. Electric service, water and septic all installed. Isn't missing much now, just windows, plumbing, wiring, insulation, appliances, doors, floor-wall-ceiling coverings, hand rails, driveway, siding and TV screen.

James' Scottish Vacation

In a moment of weakness this summer, James agreed to go on a family vacation to Scotland.

Here's his story...

James allows himself to be chauffeured everywhere...

James explores the

Kintyre peninsula...

James relaxes on the Isle of Mull...

James marvels at the ancient Callenish Stones....

James shops for Harris tweed...

Ava Uh Oh

Allan tried to upload this and had problems so now I'm giving it a try because it's so cute we want everyone to see Ava.

On August 6, 1991 the world changed...

It was 20 years ago today that British physicist Tim Berners-Lee posted a description of a project he called the "World Wide Web" to an online newsgroup, effectively revolutionizing modern life. Working for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Berners-Lee invented his service to allow scientists to easily share and access information via the Internet. Although the infrastructure of the "Net" had been growing for years, it was until then a highly technical system known mostly to academics and scientists like Berners-Lee. The World Wide Web, as Berners-Lee conceived it, would use the Net to connect documents with clickable links — or hypertext — and make them searchable.
Under the encouraging headline "Try it," Berners-Lee's post included information on accessing the first Web server and a Web browser prototype, and gave the address — or "coordinates," as he called it then — of an example website he'd created. This Web page — the world's very first — further explained the project he'd nicknamed "W3," explaining how to search the Web and how to build your own page. Academia began using the service first, then industry. In early 1993, Mosaic was released, the first Web-browsing software for PCs and Apple Macintosh computers. Anyone with an Internet connection could now surf — and help create — the Web.
Berners-Lee had written in that first post: "The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone." Today the word "much" seems quite an understatement, and "academic" almost laughable. But it is astonishing to be reminded that so much of what's on the Web is "freely available" because Berners-Lee created the Web for free. For his donation, he was named by Time magazine as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century, and was awarded a knighthood in 2004.
Berners-Lee said: "The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished."