I’ve finally got around to posting a couple of October pictures. Last week I posted a couple of halloween pictures of the boys. This year Alex went as Winnie the Pooh and we dressed Andrew up as Roo. I took both of them tick-or-treating to a couple of blocks in the neighbourhood and then Jen took Alex out after that to got to a couple more houses.

Today I posted just some random pictures from October. It turns out that October was a pretty slow month for pictures so I didn’t have a whole lot to choose from. The big deal for Alex was that when Jen’s parents came into town they got him his first two wheeler so I put a couple of pictures of him riding his bike. I kind of explain it on the web page but we’ve had a couple of bike accidents since we got it so right now he’s not too hot on going for rides. We figure that in a couple of weeks or so he’ll be ready to try again.

Jen’s parents are back in New Orleans now and they are back in their house too. They are busy trying to settle back into some semblance of normal life and in the process we’ve been hearing that Bob is supposed to have been on the NBC Evening News with Brian Williams in a story about New Orleans and City Park. The week that they were supposed to air his story it seemed like something bigger came up in the news that would end up bumping his story. (Or at least that’s the best explanation we could come up.) Then he called us the other day and said that he was going to be interviewed on “American Morning with Soledad O’Brian and Miles O’Brian”
on CNN. Jen was luckily to have the morning off and persistence payed off and he was on. It’s kind of cool to be watching CNN and see your father in law being interviewed by Soledad O’Brian. The premise of the story is that City Park is starting to charge rent to the workers who have been setting up camps in the park for living in while they are working on contracts to clean up the city. It sounds like there was some thought that they should just be allowed to stay for free or that these were city residents that lost everything. I thought the funniest part of the interview was during this exchange:

S. O’BRIEN: As you well know, there are some critics of this plan to charge people who would say, hey, you know what, I’m here cleaning up the city, doing a favor for your city, and now I’m going to be charged money to sleep out on the ground in a tent. Do you have — see any validity to those arguments?

BECKER: No, not really. I don’t. First of all, nobody’s doing us a favor. There’s nobody here who’s volunteering to clean up this city. We have many volunteer groups here providing food and other kinds of assistance to homeowners trying to deal with their property, but these people, they’re here to make money. And they are following the contractors as they go around cleaning up the city. So there’s no volunteer here cleaning up the city. They’re all being paid to do it.

They way he delivers the “No, not really.” is absolutely classic. We video taped it and if I get around to it I’ll try and get a version posted to the web, until then you can read the transcript on the CNN website.

This weekend Alex and I are going to watch FC Dallas in the MLS Cup here in Dallas. I’ll take the camera with us and post some pictures next week.