December 2009
 
Boy! There's already been a flury of activity this month, and it's only the 11th! Let's see ... first of all, Olivia turned 8 on the 4th. She had been looking forward to it for months. She also learned how to use her new Wish List that we set up for her at Amazon.com (it makes life easier for Grandma!). Unfortunately she was a bit sick with a cold, but she still had a special day. And as you can see from the photo to the left, Catherine and I were having a pretty special time too!

Then, as usual each year, two days later we celebrated St. Nicholas day. As we have mentioned before, that's the day we have chosen as a family to do our annual gift-giving, instead of on Christmas day. Which makes sense, because gift-giving has been associated with St. Nicholas (also known as "Santa Claus") for many centuries. That way we can enjoy a quiet and peaceful Christmas without all of the distractions of gift shopping and opening. Each year I realize what a great way it is to celebrate the holidays ... you should really give it a try sometime!

On the day in between Olivia's birthday and St. Nicholas day, Catherine and Joanne had a treat. They attended a Victorian Christmas concert given by John Doan, at the Vineyard church right here in Albany. Among the many instruments he played was the rare twenty-string harp guitar. You can watch him playing it by clicking on the video.

This week the weather has been VERY cold! Here are the lows for the week: Monday 20° F (-6.5° C), Tuesday 16° F (-9° C), Wednesday 11° F (-11.5° C), Thursday 10° F (-12° C), Friday 12° F (-11° C). It for sure hasn't been that cold during the three and a half years we have lived here. At least it's been dry, so there was no ice.

On Tuesday evening, during this bitter cold, we all bundled into the car and went to a Celtic Christmas concert in Corvallis. It featured a long-time favorite musician of mine, Jeff Johnson on keyboard, world-renowned Celtic flutist Brian Dunning, and local (Portland) violinist Wendy Goodwin. It was mostly instrumental, with a couple of poems, and a few sing-alongs of Christmas carols. It was a very lovely, wonderful concert, given to a packed house at the LaSells auditorium on the Oregon State University campus (only 20 minutes from our house). Joanne has played in that same auditorium with the youth symphony she was in last year (see the video in our April 2008 blog entry).

Jeff and Brian have recorded many albums together, including A Quiet Knowing Christmas, which contains many of the songs they played that night. Follow the link and listen to the samples to get an idea of what we heard that night. Of course, it was more wonderful in person!

OK ... so that was the first eight days of the month! Whew! I'm getting worn out just recounting it! Then the next night was Crazy Hair Night at Olivia's weekly Awana's Club meeting. So Catherine made a bunch of little pony tails all over Olivia's head, and then attached ribbons and Christmas tree ornaments! And she won first prize for the craziest hair! Looking at the pictures makes me want to sing, "O Christmas Tree! O Christmas Tree!" Have you ever seen a walking Christmas tree?

 
For Christmas this year we took a week to go down to Santa Maria to visit with my parents. We sure did cram a lot of activities into a small number of days! One of the things we did was to see a stage production of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe at the PCPA Theater, just blocks from my parents' house. Check out the video below to see some highlights.

 
For the rest of our activities while we were in Santa Maria, pictures say it better than words, so I've gathered the highlights into our new Christmas 2009 photo album.

Be sure to check back next month ... we have some interesting news to share with you ... "for the times they are a-changin'".

November 2009
 
Have you heard about Rifqa Bary, the 17-year-old girl living in Ohio who has been threatened with death because she left the Muslim faith and became a Christian? Her family immigrated from Sri Lanka when she was younger, and from what I have heard, it appears that they may actually be in the country illegally. Anyway, once her father found out that she had become a Christian, he threatened to kill her for apostasy, a crime under Islamic Sharia law. In July Rifqa hitchhiked to the bus station and fled to Florida. Upon arriving, she contacted a pastor who took Rifqa into her home.

Her parents wanted her to come back, saying that she had nothing to fear. They got the help of a powerful Islamic organization, C.A.I.R. (The ACLU-like organization for Islam in America), and commenced a court battle during September and October to have her returned to Ohio. Now she is virtually a prisoner at the Franklin County Children Services. A judge in Ohio has restricted her Internet and telephone use, and it appears that she has very little contact with the outside world. She is pretty much under house arrest. Right here in the good ol' USA!

There are a LOT more details regarding this situation. Be sure to visit the Web site that has been set up for her, where you can read all those details, and also keep up-to-date on what's happening with her. Keep Rifqa in your prayers every day!

I was just reading on the Atlas Shrugs Web site today that it is possible to send Rifqa Christmas cards! Here is her address:

Rifqa Bary c/o Angela Lloyd 255C Drinko Hall 55 West 12th Avenue Columbus, OH 43201

 
Be sure to put a return address on the envelope, or, according to the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Facility rules, "the mail shall be discarded." Also, "Mail is not read but will be screened for contraband items. Pictures, money, gang and drug symbols or writing is prohibited." Let's send an avalanche of Christmas cards to her this holiday season that will strengthen and hearten this courageous young woman. My card is heading out the door on Monday....

All three of the kids are working hard on improving their musical abilities. The Music Room in our house is definitely getting used! Joanne has been playing the violin for about 10 years now. In addition to weekly lessons, she decided to participate in the youth band at church rather than the Corvallis youth orchestra this year. Recently she even played with the church worship band at one of the Friday evening Tool Shed meetings. She has gotten a good amount of positive feedback.

But Joanne is no longer the sole musician. This year Jeremy and Olivia have started learning instruments too. Earlier this year, Jeremy started taking electric guitar lessons. (You can see Jeremy with his new guitar in our June Blog entry.) Then his teacher moved, so he found a second instructor. Then it turned out that he couldn't continue with that teacher either. So we're looking for a third teacher, while Jeremy continues to practice on his own.

In September, Olivia started piano lessons. She has a really great teacher who is pretty demanding, in a good way. Olivia is rising to the challenge and making excellent progress. This weekend she had her first recital. As you can see in the photos, she played a duet with another little girl called Gabriela. They did a great job ... too bad video cameras were FORBIDDEN at the recital!! Have you ever heard of such a thing?!

When Olivia first started, all we had was a cheap keyboard that didn't have all 88 keys, and which were not weighted keys, so you couldn't play softer and louder depending on how hard you pressed. We quickly realized that she would need something more like a real piano. We found a great deal on a Casio keyboard at Costco, which you can see in the photo above. Now Olivia practices on that piano a good 45 minutes a day, rain or shine! She's making progress by leaps and bounds. Now she's learning a few Christmas songs ... we'll try to put a video of her playing on next month's blog.

On the day before Thanksgiving, Catherine spent some time in the garden, tearing out old vegetable and flower plants that had pretty much run their course for the season, now that winter is approaching. She told Joanne that if she wanted to make a last bouquet of flowers from the garden, she had better grab some flowers quickly before they ended up in the compost. So Joanne picked and arranged the poppies and other flowers you see here. I can't believe that we have such nice flowers in our own backyard, and Catherine can't believe that they are still blooming at Thanksgiving. On the day of Thanksgiving itself, we were blessed to enjoy our meal with a visit from the Indian maiden Olivia.

Today, the morning after Thanksgiving, Olivia and I (Brian) were the first ones downstairs at around 7:30. It was raining, as it had been all night, and all Thanksgiving afternoon and evening. We looked out the back sliding glass door onto the patio, and what did we see? A dark-colored lizard, slowly creeping across the bricks! It's the first lizard I've seen in Oregon since we moved here nearly three and a half years ago!

Well, it kept on creeping right up to Catherine's plastic garden clogs (crocs), then it crawled over the first one (on the right in the photo) and down the other side into the space between the two shoes. It stayed there for a while, then the next time we looked, it had crawled half-way through a hole in the shoe on the left. And that was the last we saw of it. If you want to see the lizard close-up, move your mouse over the photo. Happy Thanksgiving, Liz!

October 2009
 
 
To the right is an awesome recent photo of Mt. Hood, the highest peak in Oregon (11,249 feet / 3,429 m), as seen from the International Space Station.

Well, since we're orbiting the earth, you don't want to miss the incredible, breath-taking photos from the Hubble Telescope. There's nothing like them! They will be sure to put you in awe of God's handiwork. I've picked out a dozen or two of my favorites, and I'm going to use them to make my own 2010 calendar through Zazzle.

 
So there you have it, whether you're looking up or looking down, seems like there's always a spectacular view from Earth's orbit!
 

On Monday 12 October, Jeremy and I went to a Rodrigo y Gabriela concert up in Portland. If you have never heard of them before, you're in for a real treat! I've got so much to share about it that there's no room for it all here ... so I've created a separate page on my Brian's Bits Web site. It's full of photos that I took at the concert, as well as some YouTube video clips, lots of details about what we experienced that night, links, and more! Check it out here: Rodrigo y Gabriela Concert.

 
Now I just have to tell you about two delightful and enjoyable books that I just finished reading: The Friendly Persuasion and Except For Me And Thee, both by Jessamyn West. The books are collections of fictional short stories about Jess and Eliza Birdwell, a young Quaker couple living in southern Indiana, as they raise their children and grow older. I realize my description does not make it sound very interesting. But these books are full of homespun American humor and insight ... one chapter you're laughing, another your throat is tightening up and tears are coming to your eyes ... and sometimes it's both in the same chapter! I can't remember reading such wonderful books for a long time. I highly recommend them! Head on down to your public library, or else click on the images of the books to the left to buy them on Amazon.com.

The big question is which order to read them in. The Friendly Persuasion was written first, in 1945. The sequel, Except For Me And Thee, was written much later, in 1969. However, most of the events recounted in Except For Me And Thee take place BEFORE the events recounted in The Friendly Persuasion. Therefore, her second book is more of a prequel than a sequel. So, if you want to read the books in the order she wrote them, read The Friendly Presuasion first. But if you want to read the stories in more of a chronological flow, you should read Except For Me And Thee first. But whatever order you read them in, DON'T MISS THEM!

Well, my creative juices sure are flowing these days! I've just written a short fairy tale called "The Tale of the Sneezing Knight". To find out what prompted me to write it, and to read the story for yourself, click here.

Get the Flash Player to see this video.
 

September 2009
 
A couple of days ago I ran across one of the most incredible videos I have ever seen. You've got to check out this 16-minute video ... it has a powerful message and is very, very well made (even though there are a couple of bad words). Besides being an awesome video, it has won awards at 8 film festivals. You can also watch it on YouTube.

Catherine's birthday was during the Labor Day weekend, so on Saturday we headed up to Portland for most of the day. Since work comes before play, first we ran a bunch of errands. Catherine did some homeschool curriculum shopping at Exodus Books. Next was Cash & Carry (Smart & Final for you Californians). Then a long stop at IKEA. Finally, it was time to stock up at Trader Joe's. And there's good news for us ... supposedly a Trader Joe's is going to open in Corvallis the first quarter of 2010 ... only 15 minutes from us! That's a LOT closer than Portland! Hurray!

Now that our "work" was done (and believe me, driving around Portland and shopping is definitely work!), it was time to play! For her birthday meal, we took Catherine for a good Old World style meal at the Rheinlander German Restaurant in Portland.

Unfortunately we didn't have a camera with us, but I found a few photos on the Web which I have posted here. The room in which were were seated, we found out later, is called the Swiss Room. As you can see in the photo to the lower left, it has paintings on the wall of the Alps, and at the far end a Swiss village, complete with a little Swiss flag. We were sitting at the table right behind the waiter, where the two ladies are sitting.

After enjoying our first courses of Swiss cheese fondue and then a delicious lentil soup, Greg the accordion player came by to serenade us. As we chatted with him, we found out that his grandfather was from Adelboden in Switzerland, in the same Bern Canton that Catherine is from! Greg and two of the young waitresses sang us songs in German, and it was great fun!

Once we had filled ourselves with the wonderful German main courses, Greg and the waitresses were back to sing Catherine happy birthday and give her a free birthday apple strudel. Catherine was really blessed by the atmosphere, traditional music and great food. She said it was definitely an evening she would always remember. If you are ever in Portland, don't miss having dinner at the Rheinlander for an evening you will always remember too!

After waddling out to the car, we had a leisurely drive to Albany on Highway 99W backroads through Sherwood, McMinnville and Monmouth. All in all it was a lovely birthday day out.

And now, for all of you Lord of the Rings fans, I leave you with this clever and entertaining video from YouTube:

 

 

August 2009
 
August has already been a jam-packed month for the Swiss Byrd Family, and it's not even half over yet! At 6:00 AM (the early Byrd gets the worm!) on July 31 we were heading out for a weekend in Bandon, where I (Brian) spent a weekend at the beginning of the year (see our January 2009 blog entry for more details).

We were off to celebrate Swiss Confederation Day, which is kind of like our Fourth of July. Every year we try to do something special on August 1st. As you can see from the photo below, the kids love their mother country. Where's William Tell when you need him?!

Our first stop was after arriving at Bandon was the West Coast Game Park Safari. This unique zoo lets you mingle amongst a range of animals, including goats, sheep, deer, llamas, donkeys, ducks, geese and peacocks ... and sometimes they can be a bit pushy! Or step on your toe, like a big llama did to Jeremy! The kids were also able to pet or hold some other animals, like a lion cub (see the photo below), possum, ferret, fox and skunk! Awesome possum!!

Just as we were finishing at the zoo, my parents arrived after their 725 mile trek from the Central Coast of California. Then we spent the rest of the weekend enjoying the beach. After two night in Bandon we all headed back to Albany, where my parents stayed a few more days visiting with us. We all even went to a local farm and picked pounds of fresh blueberries and peaches, as you can see from the photo of Joanne and her grandma to the right. In the photo below that you can see the jars of canned peaches that resulted.

Speaking of canning, Catherine and Joanne have been taking some canning classes offered by the Oregon State University Extension Service. During the first two 3-hour classes they have learned about canning fruits and pickling. In the coming weeks they will learn about preserving vegetables, meat, fish and tomatoes. Three cheers for Little House on the Prairie! We are also still eating produce from our own garden ... we had more cole slaw and cabbage rolls, just like last month!

The day my parents returned to California, Joanne left for a three day youth conference with her youth group. They drove up to Vancouver, Washington, just over the river from Portland. By all accounts she had a great time! Olivia is taking another swimming class this month ... she is one of the youngest swimmers in the level four class.

Well, I guess that all for now ... with half of the month of August still to come, I'm sure we'll have something more to write. Until then ...

Well, I guess there wasn't anything more to write after all ... we've been too busy ... time to head to September's entry ...
 

July 2009
 
Ah, summertime in Oregon! Land of abundant berries! As you can see from the picture to the right, Catherine and the kids have been out to the local farms to pick pounds and pounds of different types of berries ... raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and even some strawberries from our own yard. The "pick-it-yourself" farms sell these berries for the ridiculously low price of around $1.00 per pound, give or take a dime to a quarter! So we have been feasting on berry pies and cobblers, fresh homemade jam, berries in our breakfast cereal and yogurt, berry smoothies, berries over ice cream and pancakes ... we are so berry, berry rich!

For the last two or so months, I, Brian, have been working on adding a "virtual house tour" of our new house to this Web site. And today I finally finished it! It's been tons of work, but I think it turned out pretty nice. So in addition to the photos of our new house in our New House 2009 Photo Album, you can also now scroll around floor plans of both the downstairs and upstairs of our house, and see how each of the 49 photos of the inside of our house fits into the overall scheme of things. And, I've made three different sizes of floor plans, so no matter what size monitor you have on your computer, there is a size for you. It starts off with the medium size, and from there you can switch to large or small. To start the tour, you can click on the blue "House Tour" link near the top of each page, or click here to start the tour.

 
For the past few months Joanne has been working hard on pieces of art to display at the Linn County Fair right here in Albany. As you can see from the photo to the right, she brought home quite a few awards. She won seven first-place ribbons and two second-place ribbons, which came with a total of $25 of award money. For the watercolor of my cousins' house in Gig Harbor, Joanne won a Grand Champion award and a $20 gift certificate for a local frame shop! Click here to see the painting. Olivia also won a first-place ribbon for her chicken-wire-weaving of a cat and mouse.

Catherine and Joanne have been putting a lot of time and effort into a vegetable garden in the backyard. As you can see from the photo to the right, they have started to reap some of the fruits (or vegetables) of their labors! This week we have been eating cole slaw, meat and vegetarian cabbage rolls, cabbage soup, and cabbage salad. All that from one cabbage, and there's two more still in the garden!

Jeremy probably thought it was a good week for him to head off again to wilderness boy's camp, run by Canyonview Camp. After five and a half days he came home tired and dirty (we'll spare you a picture of that!), so it must have been a pretty decent time!

In the photo, you can see the same gray backpack suitcase that I used when I went off to Scotland 23 years ago to attend a Discipleship Training School with Youth With A Mission. It was there that I met a lovely Swiss young lady named Catherine ... one thing led to another ... and the rest is history!

So, this has been a pretty full month. August seems like it will be just as busy. But since that is another month, we'll tell you all about it then! Ta ta for now!
 

June 2009
 
In our entry from last month, I was telling you about the photos of our house that I had put into the New House 2009 Photo Album. Since then I have been taking a lot more photos. On the entire west, north and east sides of the development we live in there is a continuous stretch of natural woodlands, swamps, streams, meadows, a river, and wildlife (and I don't mean the party at the neighbor's house down the block!). Within a few minutes' walk from our house, you can feel like you are out in the middle of nowhere!

A few times now I have had the pleasure to meet one of our neighbors, Mr. Cottontail (pictured right ... click on the photo to see it larger with a description). The third time I purposely took my camera so I could get a photo of him to share with you. I've taken a photo journey through the west, north and east sides of the neighborhood wilderness, and collected the best photos into the new Neighborhood 2009 Photo Album. Back in Santa Maria we would have had to drive for hours to find scenery like this. Now it's just a few steps from our house, while still living within the Albany city limits ... amazing! Later this month we should have some more photos of the inside of our house, for those of you who love peeking in the windows of other people's houses as you pass by!

Jeremy's been saving up his pennies, and not too long ago he bought himself an electric guitar. He has really been enjoying practicing on it, and this summer he is taking some lessons from an older friend of his. Even Olivia's been getting in on the action, as you can see from the video below, as she plays the intro to a song written in her beloved mother-country, Switzerland ... maybe you've heard it before?
 
Even though Joanne hasn't been playing licks on the electric guitar, rumor has it that there has been smoke coming from her violin as she has been practicing furiously for numerous recitals at the end of this school year! The latest one (photo to the right and video below) was a gathering of all of her violin teacher's students, giving a recital at the Corvallis public library.

Joanne was part of a quartet, playing the 2nd and 3rd movements of Vivaldi's Concerto for 4 Violins in B minor, Op. 3, No. 10, RV 580, with fellow students Claire, Hannah and Tatiana. The eleven and a half minute video clip below starts when they arrived early at the library to practice together, and finding no music stands, they laid out their sheet music on a counter at the back of the room and went at it.

After running through it once, in order to allow other students to practice their pieces, they then went out into a hallway in the library. But they couldn't very well practice there (you know ... at the library you're supposed to be quiet!), so while one of the girls snapped her fingers to the rhythm, they all tried to play the piece in their heads. Hmmmmm...

Since that didn't work so well, they headed outside to practice in front of the library. Some library patrons stopped in their tracks to listen and watch such a sight. I asked the girls if I should run back inside and grab a violin case to set by their feet ... maybe they would get some quarters!
 

After running through it a couple of times outside, they headed back in and gave their performance at the end of the recital. It was a stretch for Joanne to play with that level of students, but she definitely rose to the occasion. When you're done watching the video to the right, don't forget to visit Tatiana's Web site. (The video file is kind of on the large side, so if it seems to pause a lot while you are playing it, you should probably click on the video once to start playing it, then click on it again to pause it, and wait a few minutes while it downloads ... if you move the mouse over the video, you can see the progress bar ... the gray bar has to get all the way to the right ... your patience will be rewarded with a smooth-playing video. Also, you might need the latest version of the free Adobe Flash Player software, available by clicking here.)
 

May 2009
 
Time flies when you're having fun! We're still digging out of the avalanche of things that need to be done around the house. Between that and going to work (homeschool for Catherine and the kids) there's not much time or energy left over for anything else.

We've been busy with projects both inside and out. In the photo to the right you can see the northern end of our backyard. To see this photo (and other photos of our new house) larger, with descriptions, go to our New House 2009 Photo Album.

Hopefully we will get some closure on some more of our inside projects so we can bring you some inside photos next month. Until then ... have a great Memorial Day weekend ... this is the Byrd Family over and out....

...Well ... speaking of Memorial Day weekend ... this weekend we went for an outing at one of our favorite places to walk: Silver Falls State Park. By 5:30 AM everyone was up preparing sandwiches and making last minute preparations. At 6:00 AM we were on the road. At 7:00 AM we were in the town of Silverton having breakfast at McDonalds.

On our way from Silverton to Silver Falls, we were looking at a deer on the side of the road when our car stuck another deer that tried to cross the road by jumping in front of the car! In the photos to the left, you can see the deer fur jammed into the panel seam above the driver's side headlight, and also the cracked front grill. Yikes!

By 8:00 AM we were on the trail for our eight mile, six hour walk on the Trail of Ten Falls. We have been to Silver Falls numerous times before, but this was the first time we walked the entire loop and saw all ten waterfalls. I, Brian, got a lot more nice photos which I will be adding to our Silver Falls Photo Album in the near future. To see the most recent photos, you will want to look at them in reverse order. The morning was pretty nice, as there were not too many other people on the trail. But by lunch time things were starting to get a bit crowded. The closer we got back to our car at the main south parking lot, the thicker the crowd became, almost like rush-hour traffic on the freeway! When we had first arrive a bit before 8:00, ours was one of the few cars in the parking lot. When we got back to the car about 2:00 PM, the large parking lot was packed out, and there was a line of cars at the park entrance waiting to get in! The early Byrd gets the worm! Yum! You can walk behind four of the ten falls, which makes for some spectacular views and a nice, refreshing spray.

April 2009
 
Wow! Sorry it's been so long since we last wrote ... you wouldn't believe all that's been going on! Right around the time of our last entry, after more than a year of looking, we finally made an offer on a house. And on February 17th we became the proud owners of our first house! All these 19 years of marriage we have always rented. Amazingly, it has exactly twice the square footage of the house we have been renting here in Albany for the past two-and-a-half years!

It wasn't a long-distance move ... only seven-and-a-half miles across town. But no matter how short of a move, it's an incredible amount of logistical and physical work! It's been nearly two months since the house became ours, and we are still trying to dig our way out of the avalanche of things that need to be done. People keep asking how we enjoy our new house. I tell them that we are not enjoying it yet ... it's too much work! But eventually we'll get to the place that we can slow down and enjoy this tremendous blessing.

At the end of March another avalanche hit me (Brian) ... right when I was going to update our Web site for the month, my computer died! I've had it for about 4 or 5 years, and it was starting to show signs of failure ... and then it did! I've been thinking for quite a while what I would do when this happens ... Windows Vista seems like such a dog that I just couldn't see myself going there. So I took the big plunge and made the switch to a Mac. An awesome Mac Pro system arrived 5 days ago, and since then I've been trying to dig out of both avalanches at the same time!

Obviously, any time you have to set up a new computer from scratch, install all the software and organize all the past data, it's a tremendous amount of work. But making the switch from the Windows environment (which I have been using since Windows 3.1 came out in 1992!) to the Mac environment is doubly daunting. For each piece of software I use, I have to find the available Mac options and evaluate which one is the best. Some programs don't have Mac equivalents, but luckly VMware Fusion comes to the rescue, allowing me to run Windows program in the Mac OS, just as if I were in Windows. It's so amazing how well it works that it's almost miraculous!

I'm looking forward to when things settle down a bit ... for the last two months solid I've been spending every waking second (that I'm not at work) working on the transition into our new house, and now the transition into my new computer as well. It's been quite exhausting and intense. At this point there is no end in sight, but hopefully sometime in the summer I will have more down time. Well, I guess I had better run ... the day after my new Mac arrived we went to IKEA in Portland to get some furniture for our enlarged living space, and now I've got a lot to assemble! Until later....

February 2009
 
Before we get into February's happenings, there's one more thing that happened in January. When I took Catherine and the kids to the Portland airport on December 30th, I stopped by a Toyota dealership in Portland to check out their pickups. Then after a couple of days of truck shopping on the Web, I headed back up to Portland on January 2nd, and came back with a new 2009 Toyota Tacoma 4x4 pickup! It sure is a black beauty! I wanted to surprise Catherine and the kids, so I kept it pretty quiet, until now. I'm really enjoying it, and it's already been useful to pick up Joanne's rabbits and their hutch from the family that was rabbit-sitting them. Four wheel drives seem to be pretty popular in the Northwest, with all of the rain and snow and ice. Now I feel more prepared to face what Winter brings.

January 2009
 
New Year's greetings for 2009! The Byrd Family finds itself on different continents this month! Catherine and the kids are spending the entire month in Switzerland, reconnecting with the Old Country, family, friends, food, culture and language. The kids get 30 days of immersive, intensive French language and culture ... ah, the joys of homeschooling! I'm sure we'll have a full report from them next month.

I, Brian, am enjoying silence and solitude home alone. But I have also been enjoying some travelling. One weekend I went over to the coast, and then down to Bandon (in Oregon, of course!). It was incredibly gorgeous there. I took about 475 pictures, so if you want to see them ... don't worry, I narrowed it down to 58 of the best. Click on the photo to the right to go to my Oregon Central Coast photo album.

During my time there, I took three long walks on the beach. There were not too many shells, but there were lots of rocks. I was particularly attracted to the smooth, white rocks I found scattered here and there. You can see an example to the left. It reminds me of the verse from Revelation 2:17 in the Bible. Jesus is speaking and says:
   
I haven't seen a name written on it ... maybe none of those Biblical stones are going to come from Bandon! Or maybe this one is for someone else, and not me! Anyway, it's an interesting, mystical idea, and I'm looking forward to the day when Jesus gives me my own white stone with my new name on it. But for now, since I'm home alone, I guess I had better do the dishes....
 
OK...the dishes are done! Now, it's time to watch a video...it's pretty awesome! I had posted a video by them last year in our October 2008 blog entry, and now they have come up with another winner. If you like it as much as I do, go to CatholicVote.com and make a donation to help them get this commercial on national TV. You can view it larger on YouTube. (Right under the video on YouTube, click on the link that says "watch in HD") Then, pray that President Obama, the other leaders of this country, and the people of this country take this video, and other pro-life messages, to heart. Then, make generous monthly donations to local crisis pregnancy centers so that the women seeking abortions will have viable alternatives.