Ashley and Ammon have cute little kids!  And they grow up so fast — the last time I saw them was in August and already I can see the difference. Teya (2 yrs) looks about the same, but she’s bolder and much more talkative.  She also had a rather disastrous play-date with a boxer puppy across […]

They don’t call northern New York “the North Country” for nothing — it’s cold here! 11:00am in Watertown, NY I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I mean, we’re practically in Canada here.  It’s a wonder there aren’t polar bears.  (I did find a French-language radio channel from Montreal, which is fun.) The wintry weather is beautiful, though, and so […]

This is the tree on which Lady honed her lighting technique:  two strings (200 lights) for every foot of tree; one light on the very top. As for the ornaments, I miss all the family ornaments that we had accumulated over the years!  We had a tradition growing up that every year we’d get a new […]

Proving, once again, that she is her mother’s daughter, Ashley has 800 lights on her three-foot Christmas tree.  [clapping, wild clapping all round]  Over the years there apparently has been an inverse relationship between the size of the tree and the number of lights at the Stuart home:  Each year the tree gets smaller but the number […]

Ammon is in town this week for a conference/training.  I took advantage of my presently non-soul-crushing work schedule and invited him out to dinner.  Anticipating his capacity to eat large quantities of food, I took him to Hill Country, where we ate approximately three small to mid-sized farm animals.  With our hands.  Delicious, yes, but not for the […]