No, Dad, it isn’t what you think…. The girls bought a fish tank and a bunch of tropical fish over the weekend. I’ll let them tell you all about their new pets, but thought I would post a photo of the proud “parents.”

Here is an online interview with our friend, Joanne Shenandoah. Joanne is a Grammy-nominated singer from Oneida Territory in New York and pretty well-known in native music circles. We got a chance to visit with Joanne and her sister Diane during their two recent concert tour stops in the Twin Cities.

Katie won’t find this comic very funny….

From Saturday’s New York Times:

If you followed the rules — windows up, doors locked, absolutely no pets or convertibles — you could motor among packs of the fearsome creatures at Lion Country Safari, a drive-through wildlife preserve whose residents occasionally dislodged bumpers and gnawed on side-view mirrors.
But in November, Lion Country Safari enclosed its 14 African lions in a tall chain-link fence to keep rule-breaking visitors from becoming lunch. Too many were opening their car windows and occasionally even doors, a park official said, making the threat of lawsuits too great for the small attraction.
“People are just ignorant about this size animal,” said Terry Wolf, the park’s wildlife director, who began working there as a teenager shortly after it opened in 1967. “I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, but they watch a lot of Disney movies and think because we feed them every day that they’re tame.”

He might not mean in in a “derogatory” way, but I’ll come right out and say it: “Some people just ain’t right. Know what I mean?”

Today we’ll be saying goodbye to a great family friend. We’re selling our old Dodge minivan, Vincent (“Wow, look at that Vincent van go!”) We were going to trade it in when we bought our new Honda Odyssey van (christened Vincent 2, but also known as Homer, as in Homer’s Odyssey). But the dealer low-balled us on the trade in — after the deal was completed, the dealer lowered his offer for Vincent so we declined. We are selling Vincent to the niece of a friend of ours. She has a young family and travels a lot between the Twin Cities and Northern Minnesota.

Vincent has carried our family across this country, literally from California to the New York Islands (if you count the islands in the Finger Lakes). We took Vincent on one last great trip a year and a half ago to Yellowstone, the Badlands, the Black Hills and Montana (we even drove an hour west of Missoula into Idaho just so we could say we had been there). We’re really gonna miss our old friend.

Jesse will miss Vincent something awful so we decided to take her picture with our old friend one last time. That’s her above, just before she headed out to the bus stop this morning.

Here is a photo from our New Year’s festivities as promised last weekend. My how time flies when you’re working around the house. This is a picture of Katie, Jesse and our neighbor Casey Terzich at the stroke of midnight (and that’s not a pun about Dick Clark’s health).

The Minnesota Swarm. Nothing like indoor lacrosse, the game that makes hockey seem tame…

I was going through a pile of editorial cartoons this afternoon (OK, they come in by computer these days, not by mail anymore) and I came across this one. It gave me a chuckle.

Happy New Year everybody! The beginning of the year is about all of those new year resolutions that you know you probably won’t keep. So you can ALWAYS buy Girl Scout cookies from Jesse or me. They’re so good — just send us an e-mail and we’ll put in your order. I’ll post prices and choices after the cookie rally tomorrow. Once again, Happy New Year!

Heck, Katie and I have been up for hours. We hit the gym at 6:15, before school. Then I have an hour or so to catch up on the news and get ready for work.

The New Years Resolution Crowd was out in full force, but one fellow’s T-shirt showed that he wasn’t quite in the “let’s get physical” spirit.