I’ve been putting off this entry a long time now, but I don’t think I can avoid it much longer.  I either have to write it.. Or change the format of my site from a blog about events in my life to something else.

Last month my mother in law Carole died.

This was not unexpected by any of us, but it still hurts.  I miss her, and it catches me off guard at the strangest times.  The world is a darker place without her light in it.

We (the Cactus, Carole, and myself) went to the Virginia Safari Park on the weekend. We’ve been there before, but it’s been over a year and we wanted to go again and see what’s new. We loaded up the Behemoth, and off we went.

The bestest part: They had a TON of little baby rheas running around. OMG. Looky here:

Baby Rheas!
More Baby Rheas!
TONS of Baby Rheas!

There were also ostriches, llamas, yaks, wildebeasts, bison, emus, deer, other deer, and watusi.

You can see the rest of the photos from this trip at http://www.birdbrained.org/wordpress/albums/safari2006

“In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”  — Theodore Roosevelt, from a letter to the President of the American Defense Society, January 3, 1919.

Damned right.

This site is now hosted on my very own machine, and I’m a lot happier.  The other machine was in an office I didn’t have keys to, the machine was poorly maintained (needs new fans) and kept going down.  Now that we’re on our own shiny new machine (and on a MUCH faster connection, I might add) things should be much better.

Woo!

Today I became a citizen of the United States of America, no longer a Canadian.
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