Farley's pictures

We stopped for a night at our friends' the Urmstons house where the girls took a bath and Farley pulled out her camera and took these great pictures:





Farley's son Oscar got into the act...


Breakfast in the morning...

My girls!

thanks, Sully, for this great photo of the girls and Bella:

The Third Plague and the End of an Era

You may be wondering what Maggie is doing now that her girls are gone back east for 2 weeks?
Well, I'll tell you. First, I slept for 17 hours straight. Then I donated some gently used clothing to the Episcopal thrift store up the street, attended a trunk show at a neighbor's and babysat my lovely nieces, including Miki:

Then more sweet sweet sleep, yoga, house-hunting, cupcake baking, and jumpy-house jumping.

But that all changed with one late night telephone call: "Then the LORD said […] "Stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt."

and the next thing you know, my neighbors are advising me (through closed doors) to hire a chimp to check me for lice. just kidding. My very sweet neighbors and sister actually volunteered to do my nightly lice checks. What do single people, people who live outside of Portland, without sisters, do when they are exposed to lice?

All this lice excitment takes me back to the days of the all night canoeing on Florida rivers and the Everglades, of nightly lice checks because the juvenile holding cells were just ridden with lice. I am sad to report that the Outward Bound STEP program, one of the most successful programs for adjudicated youth in Florida, will end on June 30, a victim of state budget cuts: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Outward-Bound-STEP-Yulee/119227004828478?sk=photos#!/notes/outward-bound-step-yulee/the-end-of-an-era/119333018151210. Working for the STEP program was the best thing I've ever done, and I had really hoped my girls would someday be STEP instructors too, or students even.
But back to the plague. If things take a turn for the worse, there's always this option:
In the meantime, I'm hoping to convince Yahweh that my girls, being 1/8 Jewish, ought not to be the victims of this scourge.