Here’s a rather entertaining video from our visit to Rocky Mountain National Park showing the SHA girls — Becky, Shannon, Kristy and V — running away from the terrifying spectre of… a chipmunk.

Note also my girly giggle.

You might hear Becky saying something about “bubonic plague.” The reason is because, during the drive up, I had been reading aloud from a pamphlet outlining the various dangers campers might face in the park, and one of them was the possibility that various creatures, including chipmunks, might be infected with the plague. The girls took this remote risk a little too much to heart, methinks. :)

BTW, I’m sorry for not getting my full gallery of Denver pics up yet. Maybe later today. They’re online now! :) Of particular interest, the all-important boob picture:

Heh.

I’ve split the gallery up into three sections: the Denver Zoo, our day in the Rockies, and other pics from the trip. Enjoy!

P.S. Aww, ain’t we cute?

We went to Rocky Mountain National Park today, which was awesome. Here’s our signature group shot:

And here’s the first official Becky Baby Bump photo, taken in Estes Park in front of an ice cream shop:

More pictures to come later. Now, I gotta pack and get to bed. Tomorrow morning, we head back east. Thanks for the memories, Denver!

Eating mashed potatoes on the roof of a 34-story downtown highrise at 3:30 AM:

This is what the view was like:

Sorry for the lack of blog posts. We’ve been out and about in Denver, and Flickr’s moblogging service is broken, so cell-phone photo blogging isn’t working. Anyway, here are a few pictures from the last couple of days:

In less than 18 hours, I’ll be taking the bar exam. So needless to say, the cramming continues apace. But I figured I’d take a quick study break and show you the beautiful view that Becky, Kristy and V got yesterday when they drove up into the mountains near Denver:

Here’s a shot of V and Becky, looking out at the stunning vista:

And, speaking of stunning sights, check out how blue Becky’s eyes look in this picture that I took this morning:

She’s officially 17 weeks pregnant as of today, by the way. Little Avocado Loy is now “about the size of a large onion.” :)

Okay, back to my last few hours of cramming for the essays…

Becky’s latest hobby — which I think is really cool — is sending letters, care packages and various requested items to American soldiers stationed overseas through BooksForSoldiers.com. We can’t afford to break the bank on this effort, but a lot of the stuff they want is surprisingly cheap (in some cases, they just want letters, even from strangers, which kinda breaks your heart), and it makes you feel good to actually “support the troops” in some tangible, even if very small, way.

It’s sometimes amusing, and sometimes heart-rending, to read the lists of things that soldiers are requesting. (You have to be an “Official BFS Volunteer” to view the troop requests; it’s free to join, but to become an official volunteer, you have to get the application notarized.)

For example, it’s kinda funny that some of these guys, after spending their “on duty” time fighting real-life insurgents with real-life weapons, want to spend their “off duty” time playing violent video games and shooting each other with squirt guns. Then again, it serves as a reminder that these are young people, mostly young men — barely older than boys, really — who have volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way, away from their families, in defense of the freedoms that so many of us take for granted (a noble decision whatever one thinks of their current mission). That fact hits home repeatedly when you read one request after another for video games, DVDs, and glossy magazines like Maxim.

On the tear-jerking front, your heart hurts when you read soldiers’ requests for gifts to send home to their children for birthdays they’re missing, or the request from an expectant father who wanted baby books so he could audio-record himself reading them aloud, then send the tapes to his wife so that she can play the recordings to her belly, allowing their unborn child to hear its daddy’s voice.

Anyway, I’d encourage anyone with a bit of free time to get involved with this. It gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to think you might be brightening somebody’s day “over there.” And if you don’t have the time or energy to send stuff yourself, but you still want to help in some way, make a donation via my PayPal link — I’ll put all PayPal contributions received for the remainder of this month into Becky’s send-stuff-to-the-soldiers fund. Here’s the link (it’s also in the left sidebar):

Becky has a pair of posts about the Iraq war. Meanwhile, Casey muses about the nature of love and relationships in an era of geographical mobility and volatility. All three are interesting and worth reading.

UPDATE: New on Becky’s blog, her Order of the Phoenix review. It’s not as effusive as mine, though the film was still her favorite of the five. And she writes, “After anticipating another cringe-worthy performance from [Daniel] Radcliffe, I was pleasantly surprised by his acting in this film.” (She also, ahem, seems to think he’s rather hot. But I guess I can’t complain, in light of my recent Megan Fox blogging. Heh.)

Casey, describing his 4th of July party: “Maybe 30-40 people showed up. The best thing is that everyone brought beer, but very few people drank beer (I always serve copious wine at parties). As a result, I estimate that I presently control 26% of the world’s beer supply.”

Today’s NYTimes Science Section is all about evolution. Which, while interesting in itself, might not have caused me to post anything here. The fact that this article is about my advisor, on the other hand, I think warrants a post.

We decided to give our kitties a wee taste of freedom and adventure today. While sitting out on our front porch — Becky typing away on her iBook, me studying for the bar — we deliberately left about a slight opening in the sliding door, just wide enough for a cat to slip through.

Butter, perhaps having heard horror stories about the dangers that curiosity poses for her species, stayed safely ensconced inside the apartment. But both Sasha and Toby ventured out into the great unknown:

We kept a close eye on them, of course, and didn’t let them stray too far from the porch. Toby seemed right at home, which isn’t surprising, considering she spent a good deal of time outside during her kittenhood: in the yard, garden and driveway at Becky’s parents’ old house in Buffalo, across the street in Bassett Park, and even at more exotic, faraway locales like Mount Rainier and the Oregon Sand Dunes. Anyway, today she happily took advantage of the opportunity to use concrete to scratch an itch, and then went merrily exploring in the nearby bushes.

Sasha, on the other hand, has been an almost-exclusively indoor cat for her entire life, so she was a bit more skittish, wandering no more than a few feet from the fence (as the top picture suggests) and quickly scampering back when she got too spooked. Indeed, she ran back inside the house after maybe 10 or 15 minutes, having apparently had enough of the great outdoors. (At this point, Toby was still wandering through the shrubbery.) But of course, in stereotypical cat fashion, she decided she wanted to come back outside as soon as we shut the door. I couldn’t resist videotaping her adorable efforts to paw through the glass:

Heh.

* * * * *

In light of our baby news, this post reminds me of a classic Loomer-Loy family story — one of my all-time favorites, actually.

Before my parents had me, they had two cats: Shirin and The Pooka. And of course, as “cat people” are wont to do, they would constantly regale their friends and relatives with tales of all the amusing things their cats were doing. (Sound familiar?)

Then, in 1981, they got pregnant with their first (and, as it turned out, only) child. They had been married for almost four years when they sat my dad’s parents down and gave them the big, long-awaited news: a baby was on the way! Naturally, Papa and Nana Loy were excited and thrilled. But after the initial expressions of joy and congratulations, Nana — a.k.a. Helen McNamara Loy, she of the famously sharp tongue and acerbic Irish wit — muttered out of the side of her mouth, “Thank God, now we can stop hearing so much about those G**-damn cats.”

I wonder if, up in Heaven right now, she’s saying the same thing about me and Becky. I’d be a little disappointed if she wasn’t, actually. :)

* * * * *

Speaking of Nana Loy, it so happens that my mom just sent us a photo album — it arrived in the mail today — with a bunch of great pictures of me and Nana. She died when I was very young, so I don’t really remember her. But I was her only grandchild, and I’m told I was the great joy of the waning years of her life. You can tell that from the pictures, actually. Here’s one of me on Nana’s lap:

I mentioned before that Nana was Irish. She was, in fact, 100% Irish, and is the source of all my Irish blood (that I know of). She wasn’t fresh off the boat, though: her family had been in this country for quite a few generations, since at least the era of the Great Famine, if not before, from what we understand. But anyway, you can credit (or blame) the McNamaras for my red hair — which, as you can see, hasn’t really changed color, or style, since I was a toddler — and my total inability to get a tan. :)

Nana was prominent in Connecticut political circles. Indeed, occasionally somebody from Connecticut will recognize my name and figure out that I’m Helen Loy’s grandson. I bet this post will get a few Google hits from folks who remember her. Among her many endeavors, she won the Republican nomination for Secretary of the State in 1962 (losing the general election to incumbent Ella Grasso, who would go on to become the first female governor in the U.S. who was not the wife or widow of a former governor).

Through the magic of Google News Archives, you can read excerpts of some Hartford Courant articles from the 1950s and 1960s that mention her — just search for “Helen McNamara Loy.” (You can find a few others if you search for just “Helen Loy,” without the “McNamara.” She normally went by just “Helen Loy,” but she included the “McNamara” on the ballot because she wanted the Irish vote!! Heh. The European ethnic communities in Hartford used to be very important voting blocs.)

Even cooler, from 1945, Papa and Nana’s wedding announcement! Man, Google rocks.

Anyway, here’s a photo of me with both my parents and all four of my grandparents — from left, Papa and Nana Loy and Grandma and Grandpa Loomer:

Hard to believe we’ll soon be a full generation removed from that photo! In less than seven months, we’ll be able to take another picture like that, with me and Becky in the foreground holding our baby, and Papa Loy, Nana Loomer, Dziadzia Zak and Babçia Zak lined up behind us. What a life!

And to think, this started out as a post about cats. :)

Just a random shot of Jay walking his basset hounds (a.k.a. Robbie’s short-legged buddies) the other day:

Release the hounds!! :)

I should let Becky render the verdict on this one, but I think her 25th birthday has been a pretty good, if laid-back, one. When we got up this morning around noon :), I gave her her two presents: Season 1 of Kyle XY on DVD (she’s been intrigued by the TV ads) and two tickets to the PBR rodeo in Nashville on Sunday. (Becky was all jealous when I went to the rodeo in Denver with Kristy and V, so I jumped at the chance when I saw the PBR tour was stopping in Tennessee on her birthday weekend.) We then went out to our local IHOP for brunch, which was a nice little treat. After coming home for a while, we went to see Surf’s Up, which was surprisingly good (though I’m pretty sure the concept for the movie originated with a bunch of Hollywood stoners sitting around smoking weed, and one of them said, “Hey man, I have this awesome idea for a movie! See, there’s this penguin, and he surfs! And then there’s this other penguin, who’s a washed-up former surfer! And they’re friends with a chicken! It’s gonna be awesome, man!”). When we came home from that, I made Becky a birthday dinner of Kraft Mac & Cheese and cantelope. I know, very fancy and romantic. :) Anyway, it’s been a fun day, and the weekend in Nashville should be great. Yee-haw!

It’s surprisingly difficult to come up with a fitting birthday tribute to the love of one’s life. Nothing seems adequate! I could write a silly (or sappy) poem about Becky, or post a cute picture of her, or just say “I love you, honey bunny! Happy birthday!” … but surely there’s something more meaningful I can post, especially on a birthday that feels like something of a milestone (a quarter century!). Yet I’ve been sitting here, staring at this screen for the better part of the last hour, and I’m still at a loss.

Hmm, well, here’s an idea. Maybe it would be fun to think about where we were, both geographically and in our lives (now our life) as a couple, on each previous Becky birthday since we met. Cue the BrendanLoy.com time machine…

(more…)

Casey writes Pericles’s obituary.

Casey’s super-cool octopus, Pericles Antikythera Irwin, has died.

Pout, pout. :(

Octopi are notoriously hard to keep alive in captivity, so Pericles’s death less than five months after his arrival isn’t a poor reflection on Casey’s skills as an aquarist. Nor is it a huge shock. Still, it sucks.

Well, I’m glad we made it up to Rochester in April to meet the little fella while he was still alive and kicking sucking! Here again are the awesome videos I posted previously:

Farewell, Pericles. As Casey says, “May the angels greet [you] with crabs and clams.”