Late summer activities

Stephen's smirk above reminds me that it has now been almost two months since my last blog post, and I'm falling behind!  My excuse has been that work-related travel and other year-end duties have kept me from keeping up...not a good excuse, for sure!  I'll actually have another post to add shortly (probably after my next stint of work-related travel) to catch y'all up on some of those adventures...

Late summer means we start a bit of a birthday binge, with Stephen's coming first.  He turned 10 this year, and had a party and sleep-over with a number of his friends that weekend:

Late summer also means the kids went back to school (about mid-August, down here).  Beth is now in her second year of band, and that means she's joined the marching band.  Below, Beth is pictured in the band area of the stands, getting ready to play during the football game:

Her 7th grade band plays for the 9th grade football team, and so they really don't do much in terms of marching, yet...they do go out onto the field at half-time, line up in a formation, and play a song.  This is the first step in learning the more complicated marching that will be done later.  Unfortunately, my zoom on my camera does not do a good job of getting a picture of her out on the field, so you'll have to settle for her coming off:

In August, I "retired" as President of the Tunican Chapter of the Arkansas Archeological Society (our local chapter) after 9 years in that role.  In addition to the challenge of working around the duties of this position (largely in serving as the facilitator of our business meetings during the monthly programs we do) given my increased work-related travel, it was time for someone else to lead the Chapter.  They presented me a nice cake at our August meeting:

Of course, there was also the solar eclipse this August...  We had about 85% of totality here in southern Arkansas.  Hope took our kids out of school that day (parents were allowed to do that without it being an unexcused absence) and they went to Arkansas Post National Park for a set of activities.  I stayed on campus to work, and only briefly strayed outside during the peak of the eclipse.  The picture below is of a tree's shadow showing the degree of eclipse we had here:

Rick Pruden came down Labor Day weekend for a visit.  On that Sunday, he and Stephen and I pulled out our canoe and went down the Saline River.  We came across some wildlife (note the snake that Rick is taking pictures of below):

While the river was rather low, the weather was very nice, and we had a good paddle:

Of course, Kenny is also in his high school's marching band.  He is pictured below playing his bass clarinet:

High school football is HUGE in the South, and even though our kids don't play football, we are going to a lot more games to see them play in the band.  It is also a nice sense of community...but does get to be yet another challenge to meet in our already busy schedule.  In the picture below, we made a road trip to Magnolia, Arkansas (about 2 hours from Monticello) to watch that game:

It was an entertaining game, with the Monticello Billies (in the white and blue uniforms) winning it after a late rally.  We didn't get home until after midnight, which was later than ideal...