Bragg Family South

Here is Beth on her way to her first dance lesson. Hope's signed her up in a local class for a couple hours per week, and she's all excited. Today (Saturday) we drove to the city of Pine Bluff about an hour north of Monticello. Since we had no big plans for Labor Day weekend, we figured we'd make a quick trip to see a few things close to home. First, we went to the Pine Bluff farmers' market, which has pretty well wound down for the year. They have the farmers' in a pavilion along an old river cut-off channel near downtown Pine Bluff. This rather nice structure was built with the intention of helping to revitalize downtown Pine Bluff, which has seriously decayed over the last few decades as traffic has been diverted to the interstate beltway that runs around town. For scale, Hope is the figure in white at the end of this building. There weren't a lot of vendors at this point in the summer, but we were able to get some good looking squash, garlic, tomatoes, pe...

Since we've returned to Monticello from our latest trip up north, we've dealt primarily with three things--rain, which has fallen amply here over the last two weeks; Kenny's starting school (first grade!); and archeology. Last weekend I drove to Little Rock to volunteer on a dig (again) near the industrial part of the city. This particular site is located on a parcel that they are building a factory to build those large, power-generating windmills on. Here, I am holding a broken piece of pottery from this site: This "potsherd" or " sherd " (as it is called) is probably between 500 and 1000 years old, and is shiny because we had rinsed it with water to clean off the dirt. It has been blacked by time and probably its use in cooking fires. It is also decorated in a special manner. First, it comes from the rim of a pot or bowl, and has a decorated margin (top of sherd ) in which they molded a pattern into the rim of alternating thick and thin sections. Seco...

Now that we've settled back into our life here in Monticello, I've finally got some free time to update the blog. When I left off, we were awaiting the arrival of Lisa and her kids before Jenny Bayer's wedding. Below is an attempt to get the kids to pose nicely (which failed, thanks to Stephen's protests): Saturday afternoon, we drove about an hour south to Merrill, Wisconsin, to the wedding of my cousin Jenny Bayer. The wedding was in a park not far from the Merrill home of her parents David and Mary Pat Bayer. It was a beautiful afternoon, if a bit warm, and the bride was glowing: It was good to see some family we hadn't seen in a while--this picture of the groom includes cousin Joshua Bayer (white shirt on end), Jenny's younger brother, and her father David (other end, pointedly giving advice to the new groom): We also saw my Uncle Don, his three sons (Joel, Jesse, and Jared), his new wife Sherry, and his new granddaughter (Bella, I think). Also present were ...