Jonathan's blog

Tonight I watched Charlie Wilson's War (2007,R) (ScreenIt! Review).  From ScreenIt!:

A party-going congressman, a bitter and sardonic CIA case officer, and a wealthy Texas socialite set out to help Afghan rebels fight off invading Russian forces, all in the hope of stemming the spread of communism in 1980.

It was enjoyable enough and the subject of Afghanistan definitely had more resonance after reading Khaled Hosseini's books - but not too much else.  I give it 3 out of 5.

Last night I tried the new "name tags" functionality in Google's free photo management software (Picasa).  Here is a link to a description: link.  It goes through your photo collection and finds all the faces.  It groups the faces it thinks belong to the same person and and allows you to relatively easily assign a name to each face.  In the past I manually tagged photos in Picasa but gave up because it was so time consuming.  This is a nice way to do it quickly and semi-automatically.  It only works on photos you've uploaded to your web album, not the photos that are just on your local computer.  It's cool regardless.

For the benefit of all of the ladies, here is a link to a slideshow featuring photos of yours truly: link

I think I'm going to try to start documenting the occasions when I get choked up because those are special moments...

This afternoon I teared up as I listened to Frank Schaeffer do the same during his interview on Fresh Air as he related stories of his father's (Francis Schaeffer) struggle with depression including once when his father gave him a hug and told him that he felt like killing himself but was going to struggle on...in part because he loved Frank so much.

link

We've had about a foot of snow over the last few days.  The boys had a couple days off from school, and here are some photos from one of them.

Last Saturday night we had dinner at Pizza Sams and then made our annual visit to the Santa House.  We usually go on a weekday afternoon to avoid the long lines, but for whatever reason the lines were short on Saturday.  Here are some photos: