Daddy and Elyse Go to the Zoo

Today Elyse didn't have school, and neither did I, so we went to the zoo! It was fun, even though it was still a bit chilly when we got there. (It did warm up.) We were there for about three hours, including a good (but expensive) lunch at the Rainforest Cafe.

Elyse loves the meerkats:

Everyone else loves the panda cubs:

Though frankly Elyse wasn't all that impressed:

Here she is just outside the panda area, pretending to be a statue:

(I think she believes statues must have their eyes closed.)

We rode the train and the carousel, neither of which I got good pictures of, and played on the playground for a while. Elyse was really into climbing today:

Tomorrow, while Mommy and Jessica are at the zoo with the Girl Scouts, we're going to Stone Mountain to ride the train for the first time this year!

Working in the Backyard

I took this picture of the girls working in the backyard this afternoon. Jessica said they were creating a gravestone for Seuss and Luna. "But there's nothing under it," she said. "Well, except a ladybug we accidentally squished."

Self-Portrait in Sepia (Blog post 300!)

I had some time to myself this afternoon, so I made some self portraits. Here's me in sepia:

(This is the 300th post of the Planet Burdett blog!)

Elyse and Jessica

We're currently in the midst of another winter storm--lots of sleet, half an inch of ice, an official state of emergency, power outages (but not at our house, thank goodness), round-the-clock weather coverage on all the local TV stations.

To provide at least a few minutes of entertainment, I took some pictures. Jessica set up some still lifes for my to photograph, but the best pictures were the ones I took of the girls:

Goodbye, Seuss

Seuss left us last night.

He was old--fifteen and a half--and he had been growing gradually weaker and tireder for the last several months. He lost a lot of weight, probably more than half of his body weight, and for the past few days he could barely walk. Still, he seemed happy on nights when, after the girls were asleep, Anna and I would watch a show together and put him on the sofa between us. He liked to lay on Annie's nightie. We know he felt loved during these times.

He was a great kitty, and we will miss him. He was born in October of 1998, and Anna got him a few weeks after that, so she knew him longer than she has known me.

These pictures are from nine years ago, January of 2005, when Seuss was a youthful six. We lived in Madison then, and didn't yet have any kids to take our attention away from the cats, and Seuss and the others ruled the house.

Goodbye, Seuss.

Stone Mountain

As I've written here before, we go to Stone Mountain a lot. It's one of our favorite places. But this year we didn't make it to their Stone Mountain Christmas; in fact, we didn't go there for about three months, I think.

But today was a beautiful day--despite being very foggy this morning--so we went back to Stone Mountain to walk around and enjoy the 67-degree day (only a few days after the snow storm shut down the city for a couple of days). And here are some pictures:

(This is a miniature replica of a farm in the museum in Memorial Hall. It's not a view from a helicopter.)

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Tonight we had a movie night, with pizza from Papa Johns. Our movie was Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the 1972 Disney adaptation of a couple of Mary Norton books. The girls loved it! We had to delay bedtime to allow them to fly around the house on their brooms, waving their magic wands, imitating the apprentice witch in the movie. (She was a good witch, of course.)

This doesn't signify anything, really, but Angela Lansbury, the star of the movie, was, when the movie came out in '72, forty-seven years old--the age I'll be after my birthday in a couple of months. She was great in this film, and went on to have quite a career afterwards, including twelve years of "Murder, She Wrote" in the '80s and '90s. It gives me hope that I still have time left to do things too.