Today would have been Becky’s grandfather’s ninety-first birthday. Julian Baldree was a very fine man, perhaps the finest I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Becky and I and the rest of the family miss Julian dearly. Becky and I wish we could still have Julian here with us when our first child, Max, is born in late August or early September.

Today would have been my grandmother’s ninety-first birthday. We all miss the heck out of Big Mama.

Tomorrow will be my cousin Scott’s thirty-eighth birthday. I wish him a happy one, and I can’t help but marvel over how quickly the years have passed since we were kids.

My father accomplished a lot in his lifetime. I have to say that I have accomplished not as much as my father. Daddy was one hell of an hombre.

Becky roped me into seeing Charlotte’s Web last night. The movie was pretty cute.

My father-in-law fixed my computer today. He spliced and soldered some wires of a new exhaust fan because the old fan was cracked. I thought I was the computer fix-it guy.

Happy birthday, Daddy.

My wife’s cousin, Chase Flowers, appears in a Got Milk? commercial that’s airing in the Los Angeles television market. Here’s the video:

Here’s a screenshot of Chase from the video:

Today is my wife’s and my fourteenth wedding anniversary. I’m a pretty lucky fellow.

A concept that’s been on my mind just about all week: youthful idealism. I had it when I was younger, but the wisdom I’ve gained from experience has eviscerated it.

Today would have been my late grandmother’s ninetieth birthday. Big Mama was a wonderful woman. I miss her.

Tomorrow is my cousin Scott’s thirty-sixth birthday. Happy birthday, Scott!

I’m listening to some old Guns N’ Roses tunes as I work on photos from a recent shoot, and if there’s one thing that’s resoundingly clear to me, it’s that the world of rock and roll needs the voice of Axl Rose. Axl’s angry vocals are especially resonant in “Civil War.”

Becky and I saw Meet the Fockers with her parents tonight. The movie was better than I expected after reading its reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. I think Becky’s parents enjoyed the movie even more than we did. If I’m not mistaken, we saw the original Meet the Parents with Becky’s parents back in 2000.

The year is off to a rough start. I’ve been eating around the clock since Thanksgiving. My wife is a teacher and, like always, was inundated with all kinds of tasty treats at work during the holiday season that she brought home. And then we took my mother and Becky’s grandmother on a little cruise to the Bahamas in early December. Cruising is as much about enjoying food as it is about sailing. Then there was Christmas. I single-handedly ate everyone’s leftovers after Christmas.

Then there was today. Today’s the day I put my food intake back on track. No sweets and no gratuitous eating. I expect tomorrow to be more difficult because I wasn’t even hungry today, but I know it’ll get easier in a few days.

Damn time! I just can’t get a hold of it.

In looking at the early election returns, I feel sorry for homosexuals. I voted against the constitutional amendment that seeks to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. Voters are overwhelmingly supporting this inherently discriminatory amendment.

Come on, people! How’s a homosexual marriage going to adversely affect your heterosexual marriage? Did you choose to be heterosexual?

Let’s keep religion out of the law. Completely.

President Bush just isn’t Kerry’s equal as a debater. I believe Kerry is a lot smoother and expresses himself much better than Bush. And I agree with Kerry more than Bush when it comes to social issues like keeping religion out of the laws we all must follow.

But social issues and being a master debater don’t mean squat if you’re subject to terror. Bush is the better commander in chief for fighting terror, and that’s why my in-laws, wife, mother, and I support him.

October 3, 2004, would have been my father’s seventy-third birthday. Daddy died on January 13, 1998, from cancer that settled in his liver.

Tomorrow is Ann Baldree’s fiftieth birthday, and Becky and I certainly wish Ann a very happy one. Ann is Becky’s father’s sister. In addition to keeping herself beautiful and fit, Ann is hard-working executive for Chaparral Boats in Nashville, Georgia.

I had a hugely successful photoshoot today with a model from Gainesville, Georgia, and am looking forward to creating a Web gallery for her in the next few weeks. My wife, Becky, was a big help with ideas for props and posing. Honestly, as I look as the images in Photoshop, I can’t believe I actually captured these images.

Today I attended the funeral of Jimmy and Carol House. Jimmy and Carol were killed last weekend in a motorcycle accident. They were both just fifty-three years old, and it was obvious from the family’s remarks that they had a lot of life ahead of them. Jimmy and Carol owned and operated Tapp Funeral Home here in Buford, Georgia. I will always be appreciative of the Houses for taking such good care of our beloved canine children, Candy and Geraldine.

A British medical journal reports that dogs can smell cancer.

Our Panama Canal vacation pages are up.

Our Panama Canal vacation pages should be up by Saturday, September 4, and our Canada/New York pages should be up by late September.

Since the last batch of movies mentioned below, Becky and I have seen The Notebook and Becky’s parents and I saw The Bourne Supremacy. The Notebook was an outstanding movie, but The Bourne Supremacy reminded me of Rambo. I would have dug Bourne if I’d been twelve years old when I saw it.

Becky and I saw Anchorman a few days ago. It was crap. We saw Dodgeball a couple of weeks ago. It was crap, too. The last good movie Becky and I saw was Something’s Gotta Give. My mother recently saw Something’s Gotta Give on video and she loved it.

Today is my father-in-law’s fifty-seventh birthday. I think Donald’s had a pretty decent day, at least for him. He did some woodworking this morning and mowed our grass this afternoon. Tonight we had our neighborhood homeowners meeting and had a dessert party afterward for Donald. My mother-in-law made her famous frosted brownies, there was traditional yellow birthday cake with buttercream icing, and my father-in-law baked some oatmeal cookies with walnuts. Come to think of it, I had a pretty good day, too.

Becky, her parents, and I went to Boortzapalooza last night at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. It was pretty neat to see Neal Boortz with his family. The audio inside the theatre wasn’t very good. There was a constant reverberation where we were sitting that made it impossible to hear everything that was said. I do recall hearing Boortz say that he did a pretty good job of running off listeners, and that Clark Howard did a pretty good job of running off advertisers.

Zell Miller, Oliver North, Sean Hannity, Scott Slade, Royal Marshall, Chuck Dowdle, Herb Emory, Steve Holman, and others were on hand to honor Boortz’s thirty-five years of broadcasting.

Becky and I went to Mac Design Conference in Chicago, Illinois, a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t learn a whole lot, but I’d still say the conference was pretty good. I came down with an awful cold while we were in the Windy City, so maybe that’s why I didn’t learn as much as I thought I would.

Of the handful of American big metropolices Becky and I have visited, we believe Chicago is the most beautiful. The architecture was just gorgeous and the people were very, very friendly. We enjoyed a stuffed pizza at Giordano’s in Rosemont, a Chicago suburb, that was about two inches thick.

In watching Fox News’s Farewell to President Reagan, I miss my dad. Daddy made doubly sure I was at President Reagan’s inauguration on January 20, 1981.

My wife and I enjoyed a wonderful ten-day cruise vacation to the Panama Canal back in April, though it didn’t end on a good note. The vacation ended with our discovering that our last remaining pooch, Georgia Dachs Tessellation, died from heart failure while we were gone. We thought she was in good health when we left for our trip. My uncle Larry laid Tess to rest while we were gone, and we’re certainly thankful that he did that for us. Tess would have been ten years old on June 9.

I’m getting close to finishing our Alaska cruise pages. There are twenty-six pages in total. With over 8000 words, 117 photos, 3 mini-movies, and so many pages, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of typos and missed ALT tags. The site will be posted by or on March 31. Please if you see any spelling or grammatical errors.

Today would have been my late grandmother’s eighty-ninth birthday. Everyone in the family misses her.

Tomorrow is my second cousin Scott’s birthday. He’ll be thirty-five. Where has time gone?

I am so angry with our cat, George, that I could just send him packing. Tonight I had to order the second replacement AC adapter for our PowerBook. George seems to fancy the thin cord that goes directly into the PowerBook as some sort of delicacy. He did the same thing to a client’s PowerBook AC cord, and I replaced the client’s AC cord with my good one. My client’s cord still worked, so I used it—until George ate it and forced me to let go of US$80 for a new one. Then George ate the replacement. So, after feasting on his third PowerBook AC adapter and burning our furniture, I committed US$90 more to the cause (this time I had to have overnight shipping). I guess we’re lucky George’s antics didn’t burn down our house.

I don’t feel lucky right now, though. I feel like throwing George out of an upstairs window.

Former president and Georgia resident Jimmy Carter issued a statement yesterday related to Georgia’s potential removal of the word evolution from middle and high school science textbooks: “As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox’s attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia’s students.”

Amen to that.

Cox defends her position that the word evolution should be stricken from Georgia’s middle and high school science textbooks. Cox claims that evolution is “a negative buzzword.”

So, just what is a buzzword? Merriam-Webster defines buzzword thusly:

1 : an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen
2 : a voguish word or phrase—called also buzz phrase

I don’t believe evolution fits these criteria. Maybe Cox should have consulted a dictionary before she denigrated evolution as a mere buzzword.

As if the state of Georgia weren’t already a blight on America’s educational efforts, our state school superintendent, Kathy Cox, proposes that we strike the word evolution from our middle and high school biology texts and replace that word with “biological changes over time.”

Well, that’s exactly what evolution is, but we must use the proper language.

The people behind this move support having creationism included in our biology textbooks as a competing theory for the origin of life.

Biology is a science, not a faith. Creationism is a faith-based theory. We really should keep matters of faith out of our science classrooms. After all, science is what our science classes are supposed to teach. Duh.

Congratulations to my wife’s first cousin, Curry, and his fiancée, Brianna. Curry popped the question to Brianna on December 22, 2003. They’ve set a tentative wedding date for June 2005. Both Curry and Brianna work for Chaparral Boats in Nashville, Georgia.

Chase, Curry’s younger brother, is headed to Los Angeles, California, at the end of this month. He’s enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Chase worked as a model for Chaparral Boats this past summer and appears in Chaparral’s 2004 product brochures.

Quoth George W. Bush: “The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got.”

I’ll always remember that quote, though I don’t agree with everything the President said in his fourth State of the Union address. For one thing, I don’t believe it’s our government’s prerogative to define marriage as something that exists between a man and a woman. Marriage exists between and among individuals. It’s for the individual members of their own marriages to decide how their marriages are defined.