Bragg Family South

Well, I better get a fall-related blog post up, before it ceases to be fall!  Pictured above is Kenny and one of his fellow scouts learning about archeology and helping to sort some artifacts for the local archeological station.  This was one of many things Kenny was involved in this fall, including playing in the high school marching band, helping me fix the lawnmower (below): serving as a scale for one of my work-related photos--the logs pictured below were cut from a pine plantation on our deer hunting lease (look at those growth rings!): (he's done a little bit of deer hunting with me), and of course enjoying the festivities that accompany fall, such as carving pumpkins with the rest of the family: All of the kids have been busy; Stephen was on a soccer club that won their particular division: Stephen is sitting in the middle of the picture above; they played almost all their games after dark, and my cell phone camera would only produce pixelated b...

I see that it has been a couple months since my last blog, so I better get my act together, and get a few more pictures and stories out there...Beth is pictured above with one of the little girls we go to church with who just adores Beth (and vice versa).  We have stayed extra busy since the last blog post (when Beth, Stephen and I had gone out to Montana in July).  I just haven't been as diligent in reporting on our activities... Since Montana, we've: Kept the world at bay by playing some new board games (well, at least Hope and the kids have)... Kenny's gone on several Scout camping trips... Beth and the cats have taken MULTIPLE naps... We managed to catch a minor league baseball game in Little Rock... We took advantage of the long Labor Day holiday weekend to visit the Shiloh Civil War battlefield again... And on that same long weekend, when we weren't at our campsite we went to the Memphis (Tennessee) Zoo and the IKEA in that c...

So who is this "corny" guy that is so befuddling to Beth?  And where were we?  More on this later... As some of you know, we (Beth, Stephen, and I) just returned from 10-day long trip out to the western U.S.  I had a business meeting in Bozeman, Montana, and we decided to wrap that meeting around some family vacation time...Well, at least those who could go (Hope and Kenny had other commitments that kept them in Arkansas during this period).  The remainder of Bragg Family South piled into our minivan and headed north towards southwestern Minnesota, our first National Park/Monument/Historic Site on this trip.  Our destination was Pipestone National Monument, which preserves a cliff line made of a soft, pretty reddish stone that Native Americans carved into pipes (hence the name) and other objects.  Below, Stephen examines an outcrop of this rock while doing his Junior Ranger badge: Beth and Stephen enjoyed climbing on the rock outcrops there: ...