Whitman boys.

First, last month we went to Sayulita, Mexico. It went as you might expect, and in a photogenic way. Just go view the whole photoset here.

The past couple of days I have spent my time (even taking a physical-labor day off lawyer work) tearing down the roof over our back porch. Why? Because it had become habitat:

I mean, the long-term water damage (due to bad flashing and guttering) was appalling:

but I fought through it, and finished! I didn’t come close to filling the Dumpster, though.

Last weekend, Gus got a tennis lesson from his uncle Josiah.

Since he has the attention span of a four-year-old, that quickly turned into a swinging lesson. Check the hair length!

And Sam can officially climb a ladder. The world is now full of danger.

Where to start? When you blog only once a quarter, or once a season, it’s hard to cover all the ground just past. Things in the rearview appear smaller, etc. So how about in reverse order, most recent to less recent?

TDW just had thyroid surgery this week. It went fine, she is in good spirits, and the initial pathology results showed no malignancy. More results after the Christmas holiday. She gets a neat scar out of it no matter what.

I won a big case, and emerged covered in glory. Back to work.

Sam turned one. He annihilated a bowl of whipped cream, as is traditional.

We got our xmas tree. A small one — in years past Trina has been trying to get one that would brush the 9′9″ ceilings in our living room. This year I pointed out that a one-year-old is as destructive of xmas trees as a brown Lab (there are stories there). So we got a “small” one that we can put on a desk, theoretically out of the reach of the Shmoggins.

We had some drama at Gus’s school, over the course of weeks. He fell under the spell of an evil genius of the preschool classroom, and started acting out in ways that were entirely unlike our wee mellow fellow. Think Gus as Goyle, and this little kid as Malfoy. There were interventions and parent-teacher conferences. Eventually, we succeeded in having the vile miscreant who was influencing our little man expelled. Which is good, because otherwise I would have thrown the little worm into traffic. Gus is back to himself.

Also, Gus finally let TDW trim his hair, after some four months of cajoling, refusals, and obnoxious my-strength-is-in-my-hair-for-I-am-consecrated-to-God speeches out of the kid. Snip, snip. This is after the haircut.

Further and further back…

We have worked and slaved on our three-years-gone basement remodel and are perilously close to being done. Pictures? Pshaw! I’ll post pictures when we’re DONE done, which naturally involves actually buying a couch for the space. Problem, though: we’ll never fit a couch down here (the computer is down in the basement now) unless we get it from IKEA, and TDW has an IKEA phobia. Something about flat-pack pressboard not being heirloom quality. My rejoinder is that we have kids ages 4 and 1, and even heirloom-quality stuff won’t be any longer once they are through the crayon stage. But TDW adopted as her own cause the purchase of a TV for the basement, with the result that we got

THE BIGGEST TV EVER

Actually, I suppose other people have bigger TVs. But I am a little stunned, and a lot proud, and overall just pleased as punch that TDW defied all those obnoxious gender stereotypes and comparison-shopped for a 50″ plasma with 1080i and lots of HDMI inputs and all those other bells and whistles. It’s calling to me now, actually. It’s like I was blind, or trying to watch the radio, until I got HDTV. Now I can count Hugh Laurie’s eyebrow hairs when TDW watches House.

I think that takes us back to maybe October. Hmmmm….October. Hallowe’en. Gus was a dragon.

I won another big case. No pictures there. Gus turned four. We went to a children’s gym. There was jumping and swinging and sweating and pizza. There’s a whole set.

And that catches me up. See you sooner than last time.

There’s plenty of stuff out there on the Intarwebz about phenomena like “facebook fatigue” and one-tweet “twitter quitters.” But what those of us who have been blogging for a long time–years actually, and that’s a lot to think about–who go close to a whole financial quarter without a post? Do we start with an obligatory apologia? A paragraph on excuses? We’ve done that, so now let’s say no. Let’s say here, that you get what you pay for, and here, I pay for my bandwidth, and here, there aren’t enough of you readers for me to offset those minimal costs by selling googleads. So: you get what I give you.

In the middle of July, my grandfather died. Lawson, namesake of Sam Lawson, expired after a long decline. TBW and the boys and I went back to Atlanta for the reception. The folks parking the cars said they parked five hundred cars over the course of a four-hour event — so conservative estimates (and conservative estimates would be appropriate for Lawson) mean that there were probably ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE at his reception.

That bears some contemplation.

I mean, I don’t think you could get a thousand people to a reception celebrating me if you paid plane fare and offered an open bar. So, as my uncle John put it, “he got his money’s worth.”

So we went back to Atlanta, and hung out with my aunt and uncles and first cousins — The Gus and Sam are the first of their generation, just as Josiah and I are the first of ours — and we had a great time. The Gus learned that when it’s 90 degrees outside and 90% relative humidity, spending an afternoon cavorting in a sprinkler with a puppy is an afternoon entirely full. Sam learned that the textures of just about everything in Georgia are similar to the textures of just about everything in Oregon, when sampled orally. For my part, I spent much of the time with my ankle awkwardly taped, the result of a no-incident injury in the Portland airport, as my aging body betrayed me.

There are pictures of that trip on the Flickr page, link to the right, as there have been for months.

Then we came back to Oregon, I worked for a week, and then we went to Black Butte for a week, as planned for months. Nothing special about that trip, as we spent most days in the pool or the sandbox, and the biggest worry was whether the boys were adequately sunscreened. Again, pictures on the Flickr page, and again, link to the right. While we were there, Sam put on a show: he learned to crawl, got a tooth, and then learned to pull himself up to standing. We had luckily been through this with one child already, so the dazzling milestone-passing display left us merely impressed, rather than panicked.

Then, August. What happened in August? I worked a lot. I did a lot of high-quality lawyering, filed several good briefs which caused wailing and gnashing of teeth in the various opposing counsel who received them, and Sam worked on his sprint past infancy milestones. There were a couple of beach weekends out of town for Trina and the boys, each of whom will gladly eat his weight in sand daily given the opportunity. No pictures, no excuses.

So that takes us to September. Gwarsh, that’s fast. And there’s just not much to report. We’ve really mastered our recipe for grilled fish tacos this summer. We’ve spent quality time with brother Blair, his wife Jackie, and their kids, cousins Kai and Ian. HJ finished nursing school (of course), passed her nursing boards first try (of course), and got a job at her preferred hospital the same afternoon that she interviewed in the morning (our star). We’ve taken virtually no pictures — though once again, please hit the flickr link in the right-hand bar for proof of the negative. We are all sharing a summer cold that preceded the change in seasons. We are generally feeling like no news is good news: we are doing fine, getting better, day by day.