Brian’s Utah Weblog

Hallowe’en is the best holiday. You take the kids out to trick or treat and neighborhood kids come by your house for candy. It reminds you why you love your neighborhood and your neighbors.

Best of all, you can go out and tell your neighbors how you hope they’ll vote next week and all of them are home. I remember the year Todd Taylor (now Utah Democratic Party Executive Director) sent us out to canvass with sacks of red-white-and-blue locally made candies to give away to each household we visited.

I was at Washington Square Saturday having a picnic with my family while the peace rally was going on. There were a few hundred people making their voices heard including the Progressive Democrats and the Quakers. The Quakers set up a large memorial of empty shoes commemorating soldiers and civilians who lost their lives in Iraq. The Ron Paul campaign set up a booth and warned us that none of the leading Democratic candidates are promising to pull out of Iraq. Rocky closed the rally with his indictment of the president’s blundering and abuse of our nation and our troops in Iraq.

Our mayor gives a great speech. The out of town relatives only heard a minute of it but they were impressed.

Update:  Wasatch Watcher has video.

My baby cousin died today.

He was nineteen years old.

I last saw him at Thanksgiving dinner.  He seemed robust but a bit teenagerish. I knew he got in trouble sometimes but I thought he would find something good to do, something he cared about, eventually.  Being a teenager is hard.  Sometimes the consequences are just too awful.

When I was in junior high I would visit my aunt and uncle and my infant cousin in their ground floor apartment a few blocks from us.  He would giggle and cry and demand to be fed.

Another Thanksgiving photo, this time from last year.

Here’s another Rosalie photo from Thanksgiving.

Charlotte thinks there’s nothing wrong with Christmas that a little more commercialization couldn’t cure.

Five years ago I booked a last minute ticket to fly home (my round trip ticket couldn’t be changed) and sat in a snowstorm four hours on the runway. Eventually we departed for Salt Lake and arrived in the middle of the night. I was barely in time for Charlotte’s arrival in the world just before 3:00 am.

Today Charlotte turns five years old. Here she is blowing out candles.

Check out the cookie turkeys.

Yes, those are chocolate chip pancakes that Charlotte and Rosalie are eating.

More than a decade ago, people who were disappointed with holidays dominated by consumerism started to set aside the busiest shopping day of the year as “Buy Nothing Day.”

Immediately after the family gatherings of Thanksgiving millions of Americans start their holiday shopping.  Instead we could take the day to renew our appreciation that the best things in life cannot be bought with money.  And we could avoid the crowds.

Buy Nothing Day 2006 is November 24th.  Celebrate in your own way.

Next weekend is Charlotte’s fifth birthday so today we take a look back at baby Charlotte on her two week birthday.

Rosalie ran a fever today. I gave her some acetominophen and she perked up enough to chase around with big sister, but she asked to be put back to bed afterward.

Here’s a picture of Rosalie in happier days. In this case the happy day was Hallowe’en and this happy moment came before the massive consumption of candy.