David Spangler is one of the founding parents of PSCS. He’s also a good friend of mine, someone who’s given me good guidance in a variety of ways for more than 20 years. Without David, I daresay I do not know what I’d be doing now. So I pay special attention to David’s writings and thoughts, and really like this piece he posted online yesterday.
Need this to make sense? Click here.
So now that the new TV season has started, Ella and I really miss each other. I mean, geez, yes, we’ve missed each other since she moved to Portland in July (well, I can only really say that I’ve missed her…). But now that our favorite shows are back on, it’s hit a critical point.
For instance, on Sunday night, one of our favorite shows, one that we’d watch together every week last year in the comfort of our home, returned from its summer break.
That’s Brooklyn 99, the funny cop show on Fox. Now we’ve never watched it on Sunday night when it airs, well, because we don’t have regular TV at our house. But we would watch it, typically, on Monday nights on Hula Plus which is connected to our TV through our Roku 
(if that sounds like some foreign language, you may want to put your VCR away and work on moving into the 21st century). We’ve long had plans to continue this tradition this fall, with each of us watching the show and chatting via text or FaceTime.
And that’s what we did last night, we watched the first episode of the new season “together,” Ella in Portland and me in Seattle. We even each sent the other a screenshot from our phones, each of the photos now immortalized here.
That’s sweet!
Whew, what a busy Sunday. First and thank goodness, the Seahawks looked more like their usual football selves and won, shutting out the Bears 26-0. That was some good news for this football-crazed city. Had the Seahawks lost, I think we would be in shut-down mode. People would be forced to move, property values would plummet, and Starbucks would close. It was that serious.
On the downside of sports, Celeste’s soccer team lost 3-0. But on the positive side, she played well over 45 minutes when she expected to play only 5. Why? Two of the girls on her team got hurt and there were not enough subs. Celeste got thrown in to the action at left defender. She did great, despite the loss, and I think she feels pretty good about it.
Next up, it was Dwight’s birthday party tonight. He turned 81 on Friday and tonight the family got together at Melinda’s childhood home for a little party. That’s a pretty good picture of Dwight up there on the left blowing out his birthday candles. 
The cake was a gift from the History Channel, go figure. Representatives were in town doing some research for a program about the infamous hijacker D.B. Cooper. Dwight has some theories that the producers were interested in hearing.
After dinner, Perrin drew what she is calling “fusion” pictures. There was one for Melinda, and others for Chloe, Ella, and even one for me. But this one on the right, fusing Celeste and Rapunzel, is pretty slick. Note the hair, obviously.
All of this, and I didn’t even mention the eclipse that a rare clear night in Seattle allowed us to witness!
I don’t have a picture to accompany today’s post, the first time I’ve ever tried to get away with this. And on a day in which so much happened…
– Chloe had several friends over for dinner, many of whom came into town because one of their college friends tragically died on Sunday in a mountain climbing accident. It’s just not right for 21 and 22 year-olds to have to deal with the emotions and tragedy involved in one of their close friends dying.
– Celeste has been working hard on a specific homework assignment having to do with a transcendent experience. She’s supposed to express in 250-300 English words an experience that is causing her to expand a paradigm, as if being a French teenager in the United States doesn’t cause her to do this on a moment-to-moment basis.
– And here we are on a day in which one of the most tragic traffic accidents in the city’s history took place, on a road in which Melinda and I were driving three hours earlier.
I have no picture to post but many pictures in my head…
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Andy Smallman 