Watson Family News

I heard a great song called “The President’s Dead” by Okkervil River on the All Songs Considered podcast last week. Take a listen here.

The songs less than three minutes but it manages to pack in about twice as many interesting lyrics as most songs and the end packs a nice emotional punch.

I thought about titling this post “The President’s Dead”, but I’m plenty busy enough without the Department of Homeland Security knocking on my door.

In the latest email I saw that my alma mater started a Planet Carleton site for aggregating posts from the websites of alumni, students and faculty. Seems like a cool idea, so I signed up to include this site. I guess I’ll have to throw in a few more “intelligent” posts and less fantasy football.

Evan and Davis and I made these with this cool website.

We came across this picture of Sheryl. She always says that she doesn’t think our kids look like her, but I think this picture looks just like Davis.

What happens when a two-year old skips his nap and then you give him a lollipop for dessert?  Watch and find out.

I’ve “read” a few good books lately that I recommend. By read, of course, I mean listened to — via the magic of audio-books — as I drive to and from work.

• Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order - dead, white, male militarists.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything - dead, white, male scientists.
• The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century - about one of our worst presidents.
• 1776 - about one of our best presidents.
  

Next up are:

• The Areas of My Expertise - by the Windows guy from the Apple ads.
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Food and natural history…awesome!

During last week’s commute I listened to Paul Krugman’s book called The Great Unraveling — one of many books detailing the incompetence and deceit of the Bush administration. It was hard to start the day listening to sometime that made me so made. I must say that last nights elections did a lot to ease the pain. The thing that amazes me the most is that with all the voting going on, there was not a single Republican gain in either the House, Senate or Governorships.

After the AP called VA for Webb, and the Dems had the 51 seats they needed for Senate control, I honored my working-class, Wisconsin roots by enjoying a nice cold beer. Today it is good to be a democrat!

I’m a little late in posting this, but I just wanted to congratulate my sister Becca and her husband Tono on getting married. We had a really fun time at their wedding and it was great to get to know Tono a little better and find out what a great guy he is.
Sheryl captured a lot of great pictures of the event here.

Both Evan and Davis started school in the last few weeks.  Evan at grade school and Davis one day a week at preschool.  Evan really likes his new teacher and has a great group of kids in his class, including his best friend.  Although Davis has only been to one class, we can already tell he loves it.  I think the guitar-playing teacher helped.  He has been really into guitars lately.  Between, back-to-school, the start of football and the return of rainy weather, summer definitely feels behind us.

We got back from our summer road-trip vacation to San Diego last week. We had a great time and the kids did great despite all the time stuck in the car. Sheryl just posted all our pictures. Check them out here.

Before we left we made a big list of random things to take a picture of. The results of our photo scavenger are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/sgedwatson/ScavengerHunt.