Friday, December 26, 2008

Happy, Happy Fiftysomething Birthday Bill!

Yet another year together, yet another year shared. Wishing you wondrous times, experiences, and unexpected delights during this newest birthday year.

My love till the end of time.....
Bill

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

An Angelic Voice......Art Garfunkel...

Snowed in, emotions running high, Christmas nearly here.

Listening to "All I Know", written by the always brilliant Jimmy Webb, and sung with that gut wrenching, beautiful voice of a young Art Garfunkel....this soothes the soul like little else....


Sunday, December 21, 2008

Christmas Sing-A-Long......Compliments of Barenaked Ladies & Sarah McLachlan

My very favorite Christmas offering. Makes me smile every single time I hear it. Enjoy....joyful toe tapping encouraged....

Monday, December 15, 2008

Library Harp Concert

Yet another free concert sponsored by the Arlington Heights Memorial Library this past week....

Harp Concert

Harp Concert2

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Arlington Heights Santa Sleigh 5K Run

The Arlington Heights Rotary Club held its first annual Santa Sleigh 5K Run and 1 Mile Walk this past Saturday, drawing over 600 runners and walkers supporting this terrific event

Among the runners? Some of our fearless Arlington Heights Memorial Library staff! There's Christopher, first on the left....

Library Santas

The fund raiser brought in $16,000 to help with Rotary Club Internationals efforts to eradicate polio worldwide, and to help the Arlington Heights community effort, the Drive to Revive Memorial Park. Go Christopher...Number 114!

CK Santa Run

It was a magnificent sight to see hundreds and hundreds of Santa's clad in five piece red suits and white beards running through our downtown streets. Though we did miss the very beginning of the race, we heard that it began with a rousing chorus of "Jingle Bells" and lots of "Ho, Ho, Ho's".

Santa Run Begins

Santa Runners

Well done Christopher!
After the Race

And well done library staffers!
A Race Well Run

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Christmas Concerts by the AH Concert Band

The Arlington Heights Community Concert Band performed two Christmas concerts this past week.

The first at the acoustically perfect Lutheran Home.....

Tess at Lutheran Home
Bill in Waiting
Tess at Play
Band Members
Tess at Piano
Singers at Concert
Band Members 2

And the second concert at Forest View this past Sunday....

AHCCB Christmas
Tess at Keyboard
Tess & Robin

Friday, December 5, 2008

When The Children Cry - Sungha Jung

Absolutely mesmerizing....

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Monday, December 1, 2008

Garrison Keillor on Barack Obama

Sitting on Top of the World - By Garrison Keillor
International Herald Tribune
Published November 13, 2008


Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation.

It isn't gloating, it's satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning.

He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool.

Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor - he said, "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher."

The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back.

He'll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law.

I just can't imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference - the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis - you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin.

Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early Nineties, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of The Harvard Law Review, instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could've written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama's is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons.

His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails - imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes The First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.

Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty." Distributed by Tribune Media Services.