Luke, I am your Uncle

Catherine's baby arrived this morning. Lucas Orlando Milliken. Anna is jumping up and down excited. She wants to visit now.

In a previous post I referred to Catherine's unborn baby as Voldemort her son-who-shall-not-be-named-yet. I want to emphasize that for the purposes of this allusion I am Darth Vader. Also, I will try not to overdo the Star Wars references, but I had to say it at least once. ;-)

PS - Yes, I know that Darth Vader never actually said "Luke, I am your father." Part of being an adult fan of Star Wars is that you get to remember things the way you want to remember them - which is not necessarily the way they actually happened.

The Tree People are Here

We've been having crazy storms for a few weeks. One night we had more than a foot of rain, based on measurement using an uncovered garbage can (I can't find any weather records that verify this - it must be extremely localized). Anyway, on July 13, Tina and I were lying in bed listening to the lighting, waiting for our house to explode, when we heard an awful splitting sound. This wasn't followed by the expected sound of something heavy hitting the ground, but the next day Tina noticed this:

That is a very large branch of a white pine in our front yard. It's higher than the roof of our house, so obviously we needed someone to take care of this. The thing is, once these tree people start looking, they start noticing all kinds of dead branches that are waiting to fall on someone's house - or their head!

So, for less than the price of one thousand cups of really good coffee, we're getting all the trees trimmed.

Illuminated Fish

Last night I watched Big Fish. A tall-tale spinning father is nearing the end of his life, and his estranged son wants to learn what parts of the story are true. Not the kind of movie I would expect to like (no spaceships! no explosions!), but now that I think about it, I like a lot of movies that are not really "my kind of movie."

One image that I particularly liked was of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the girl he is destined to marry lying in a field of daffodils.


This is the second movie I've seen recently that featured a spectacular field of yellow flowers.

A few weeks ago I watched Everything is Illuminated. This movie stars Frodo on a journey in the Ukraine to find out about his grandfather (again, not "my kind of movie"). A key scene occurs at a house set in the middle of a huge field of sunflowers.



The story behind this shot amazes me. I would have expected the house to be filmed against a green screen with the flowers added in post-production. No. The filmakers grew their own field of sunflowers. The thing you have to know about sunflowers is that their peak bloom time is only about a week, and they track the position of the sun throughout the day. So they only had a few hours to get this shot.

I love yellow flowers.

Introducing "A Bunch of Random Stuff"

Here's my new blog. Cate insisted that I should start one. ("They're really fun!") She also thought that Tina and I should have another baby so her son-who-shall-not-be-named-yet would have a cousin close to his age. Sophie (?) is due November 26.

Where did the name come from? A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I had a blog subtitled "A bunch of random stuff..." I think that phrase best describes the contents of my brain.

Oh, you mean where did the name Sophie come from? Well, obviously, that is the name of Captain Jack Aubrey's first command! (I explained my reasoning to Tina, and she still likes the name.)