Three years ago, our family suffered tragedy when a drunk driver crossed a highway median and ran head-on into my cousin Brian and his wife Heidi’s car. In Brian’s words:

The reality is that the accident is just the beginning of the story. The drunk driver who hit us not only killed our daughter, Holly, but he changed my wife and I as people forever.

Brian and Heidi have been working tirelessly to keep drunk drivers from causing others such horrible pain and loss. Today they participated in a press conference of law enforcement officials urging people to be careful and thoughtful about driving this Labor Day weekend.

WCVB ran this piece on the 5:30 news tonight, and the Boston Globe posted this article and video online today. NECN and The Boston Herald also have news items up about the event.

Kudos to Brian and Heidi for bravely speaking out. I’m certain I can’t imagine how painful it is to revisit it all again. Hopefully their experience can save others from intoxicated drivers.

Please folks, don’t drink and drive. Not this weekend or any other. Please, just don’t do it.

Vacation is wrapping up.

We packed up the Über-Slëd on Thursday night the 17th and motored off on Friday morning to the great state of Maine.

We spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday engaged in much reverie celebrating a dear friend’s wedding in Portland, South Portland, Scarborough, Cape Elizabeth, and beyond. The kids had a blast. We had a blast. The bride and groom had a blast. Although the weather wasn’t always cooperative, the crew barely noticed.

We ran around Mid-Coast Maine for four days, entertaining the monsters and ourselves. A few stops of interest included:

• A few years ago, our friend Lisa visited Boston from San Diego and in a single visit to the MFA with the kids, instilled in them a wonderful curiosity of art. We decided to try to extend that interest by hitting the Bowdoin Art Museum. The Renaissance exhibit was fascinating for all, and I was particularly impressed with Michael Mazur‘s huge triptych; though I did not grok Lewis deSoto‘s installation (methinks it might be soup).
• We all dug the Maine Maritime Museum. I was concerned the kids might be bored with it, but my fears were unfounded, as the place is huge (many acres) and has lots of cool stuff to see and touch and play with. There are a zillion different exhibits, so even the most attention-impaired child always has something new to explore.
• Our friend Nord was kind enough to have us by for dinner in Freeport and whipped up a wildly tasty Zucchini and Blueberry Crisp for dessert – way to go, dude!
• Of course, no visit to Maine would be complete without some time at the beach! We highly recommend Popham Beach State Park. Center beach has some really fun surf when the tide is coming in, and West beach has some stupendous tidal pools, sand bars, coves, and more when the tide is low. We’ll definitely get back there someday!

We got home Wednesday, and on Thursday we took the T to visit the Museum of Science. While the kids have been on the train (commuter rail) before, they wanted to experience the subway underground. At the MoS, I was completely blown away by the butterfly exhibit and can’t recommend it highly enough. I could have spent hours and hours sitting in there enjoying the little beasties. Unfortunately, the boss dragged me away after about 45 minutes. I’m thinking of going back before it closes.

So this beautiful, sunny, lovely Saturday morning I got to the Charles River Coffee House early to spend a few quiet hours caffeinating while getting my emails, twitters, to-dos, and whatnot sorted out.

It’s fun to go away, but it’s always nice to get back home.

Friday was an auspicious day for the monsters. Alexis ‘graduated’ from pre-K and Stephen wrapped up first grade. In ten short weeks, Al is off to kindergarten and Stephen starts second grade. Egads, but time, she do fly.

I have many fond memories of both kindergarten (Apollo 14 captured my imagination in a big way) and second grade (when I realized that “math is cool!”).

First, this piece by Keith Olbermann from MSNBC last night is just hilarious. Check it out. Tip-of-the-hat to Ray.

Second, I had a lot of fun playing with CNN’s Delegate Calculator while I ate lunch today. There’s just no rational math that gets HRC the nomination. HRC would have to trounce BO by on the order of 20 points (60% vs 40%) in every remaining primary contest and the undeclared superdelegates would have to vote for HRC at a 2:1 ratio (66% vs 33%) for HRC to clinch the nomination.

Obviously, neither of those two things are statistically probable – unless HRC has video of BO shooting up heroin with 8 year olds while playing with himself. I think that’d have been leaked by now though.

Third, and finally, Dick Morris did a great job nailing the “HRC as Spoiler” theme a couple weeks ago. HRC isn’t running today to win in 2008. She’s running today to make sure BO doesn’t get elected so that she can run in 2012 as the Democratic nominee. Plain and simple. There is no other rational explanation, IMO.

What a tool.

I’m a happy uncle for the fourth time! My sister Samantha and brother-in-law Michael are proud to welcome their newest family member Shane into the world! Please start your oohs and aahs engine:

This evening, my darling children decided that it would be entertaining to take about ten of my laundered, boxed shirts and ‘unpack’ them and lay them all out on the bedroom floor. Oh dear…

I’ve never been much of a Nirvana or Foo Fighters fan, but I dig the way Dave Grohl thinks about life.

Props to Lee for thinking of me!

This is a sad post to write. On October 21st, we adopted two cats from a local shelter. One of the cats was Kitty (who we were renaming Magenta). I originally met Kitty two weeks prior to us adopting her, and she was a serious sweetheart. It wasn’t much of a stretch to want to take her home! When we adopted the cats two weeks later, Kitty wasn’t entirely herself, but we wrote it off as a bad day. Unfortunately, hindsight being what it is, she was actually in the middling stages of serious liver problems. We took her to the vet within 24 hours of her coming home with us, and a few days later she was back with the dedicated shelter staff and vets being hand-fed and cared-for nearly around the clock. After not quite a week of such loving attention, she shed this mortal coil.

The good news is that Scarlett is doing stellarly in her new home. She’s a love to have around, is patient beyond belief, and loves her new daddy. We all still miss Kitty though.

The boss and I have apparently gone off the deep end, as we re-felined the house this weekend. We each had cats (three between us) when we got married and we adopted another a few years later. The four cats grew old (some gracefully, some less so) and passed on in the early 2000s when the kids were still tiny. Now that the kids are a bit older, we thought it would be great to revisit the issue of pets.

While we both very much wanted to get a dog, it’s wholly unclear that we have the bandwidth to properly take care of a dog, so we punted. We started visiting cat shelters and decided to adopt a pair of kitties this weekend. Although it’s painfully easy to fall in love with kittens, we wanted older cats, who statistically have a tougher time getting adopted.

We adopted Scarlett, a three year old black and white short-hair and Kitty (who we are calling ‘Magenta’ now), a five year old mostly-white tortoise medium-hair. They lived together previously before they ended up at the shelter. They are both sweet as can be, and seem to be quite happy to be out of the shelter after two months.

Obligatory proud parent pictures below.

I was digging through my digital photos to find a snap of an old car for a friend when I stumbled across this cute shot. It’s one of my favorite kid photos – with four furry monsters added to the mix. The shot was taken on Thanksgiving Day 2000 – about 24 hours after we brought our son home from his six week stay in the NICU after deciding to pop considerably early. It was great to finally have him home, and it was extra-great that the kitties welcomed him into their fold and their space.

Counter-clockwise from the bottom left that’s Claudette, Callahan, Petie, and Daddy’s-little-girl, Cleo, who was probably least sure of the bunch what to make of this not-as-furry-as-the-others mewling creature.