The fires in L.A.

I wrote a post about how the fires in Los Angeles affected my family. I don’t really want to rehash it here, but in a nutshell, my brother and his family are safe, but they lost their home in Altadena.

Jenny and I set up a GoFundMe for them.

They were on the news on Saturday.

I do want to post about my birthday celebrations that happened the weekend before, because they were excellent, but I’m not quite in the mood yet.

2025 can suck it.

Bench #7

My brother and niece were in town and we took the 7th bench picture. Or sixth, if you choose not to count last year’s curb pic. I’m not sure if I do or not.

2022:

If you look at the previous pictures, you might ask yourself if that’s the same bench as in previous years. LSU apparently rearranged the furniture a little, because they seemed to have moved the bench over about six feet to the right and removed the tree that was on the right side in all the pics (that’s now the shrubbery behind Linus and Ellie.)

We determined that this is the old location of the bench, you can see that the concrete is a bit lighter where it was:

Irritatingly, the children would not help us move the solid concrete bench so we could more accurately recreate the old photos. Jerks.

Here are the previous bench pics. Watch everyone get smaller!

Bench pic 6

Except this time it’s a step.

The last time we took a bench pic was 2019. You can see the previous five pics here.

Bench picture #5

When Uncle Evan and Ellie are in town, I take a picture of them on a certain bench in the LSU quad. This is number 5.

2012:

April 2015:

2017:

2018:

And today!

It’s always Linus, Ellie, Evan, Oliver, and Miles.

Then and then and now

August 2012

7867845480_9e86ce6d20_k — Boys: 4; Ellie: 7; Evan: 42

In April 2015, we recreated it:

And today, September 2017:

Then and now

My brother and niece came to visit in August 2012, when Ellie was 7 years old (plus a few months.) We took a walk around the LSU campus (where my brother and I both went to school) and I took a picture of my brother with his daughter and nephews.

Today, Ellie is almost 10, and the boys are 7 (plus a few months) and we went back to LSU, visited Mike the Tiger again, and found the same bench in the quad for a reprise of that old photo.

Looking at the boys’ legs dangling above the ground in the first picture compared to today’s kind of kills me.

Uncle Evan comes to town!

Uncle Evan came to town this weekend (well, to Baton Rouge), so I took the boys to see him and spend the night at Grandees. It was mostly fun.

Friday night we went out to eat, and Saturday we went to the mall. I bought some lipstick that has since disappeared. I suspect it’s in my car somewhere, which means it will have melted into a puddle by now, which means I may has well flushed $12 down the toilet. Or burned it. Or shredded it. Etc, etc. Sigh. I hope I find it.

Saturday night, some people came over for dinner. Later, Evan made me drive across town so he could film some nighttime footage for the movie he’s currently working on. I’d better get mentioned in the credits.

Here is Uncle Evan and his three nephews (out of order…here is Linus, Miles, Oliver.)