What's new?

Well, let's see. It's been quite a while since I posted anything about our life here in the Rogue Valley. There must be something going on...

We had some friends over for lunch after church on Sunday. It was a family of five who we really have enjoyed getting to know. I made black refried beans a la Rachel Ray and we had a tortilla bar. Afterwards, we played some games. We finally broke out our game of Taboo and had a lot of fun with that.

We have been trying to invite people over more often lately to entertain. We are going to try to have a family over at least once a month.

To change the subject - I taped the movie Chicago when it played on TV and watched about half of it. What a dumb movie. Here is the review that I wrote and posted on Netflix:

"So I have been wanting to watch this movie since it came out because of all the awards that it received. I was curious about these actors doing their own singing and had heard that they performed quite well. I tried, I really tried, but I could not sit through the whole thing. The main characters of this story are entirely unsympathetic characters. The women have killed men in cold blood. These murders were not the aftermath of years of physical and mental abuse, which is why most real women are in prison for murder. The only prisoner who might have an interesting story, sings her tale in Russian, so we don't even know what her plight is. The lawyer is in it for his own gain. The prison matron takes money for favors. So if it's not about the characters, then maybe it's about the musical numbers? If so, they certainly didn't float my boat. All sexy, scantally-clad women dancing around in suggestive ways. I suppose that really appeals to plenty of people, but I found it unattractive and rather offensive. I found no good reason to keep watching Chicago past the half-way point. Frankly, I should have turned it off about 30 minutes in."

But we did recently watch an interesting documentary about the Debolt family. They adopted a bunch of special needs kids so that now they have 20 children. Four of them are biological and the rest are all adopted. Most of the adopted kids have physical disabilities and many are from Vietnam. It was encouraging to see the independence that they have fostered in all their kids. Inspiring stuff.