arkansas

Kimmi takes a turn at the pins below. While in Arkansas, I was relaxing too much to take many photos, but I played around with some remote lights one dark night as we were playing pinball. I mostly like this shot - we were playing in a room mostly lit by the pinball machine. Unfortunately, Seanly was hiding behind Kimmi and is not really visible in the shot.

On the last night we stayed there, we played a final round to determine the champion of the world. I started out with a very strong first ball and never looked back - making me the reigning world champion (as determined by us).

We have returned. Kimmi, daddYman, and I drove to Chicago to pick up daddYman's sister Nina (pronounced neener) and then down to Berryville in Arkansas to visit daddYman's brother (Seanly) and family friend Kriste-le. Good times were had by all! Pinball, poker, good food, and lots of conversations and memories. Can't miss... especially when the weather cooperates by staying below 100.

It was a pretty durn good 4th - especially as Seanly and I, occasionally abetted by daddYman, solved the world's problems. It turns out that some of the solutions involve minding your own damn business. As for the other solutions, well, we came to no consensus.

I got some photo editing in and showed off some photos to Kriste-le and Nina. Now we are back in town and back at work. If you want to read a recent op-ed I wrote and was publishing in a paper in West Virginia, check out my new work site, muninetworks.org. You can also see a recent interview I did about the site.

In other news, Michelle and I completed another house inspection today. She has details on her blog about the new house. The other house fell through after the appraisal came through way lower than expected, leading us to realize we could not finance that house. The appraisal was low, somewhat absurdly so, but there was little we could do so we had to move on. If someone gets that house for anything near the appraised value, they are lucky lucky people.