My Name is Judge Roughneck...

Multiple Choice:

1) "I refuse to answer on grounds that I might incriminate myself."

2) "You can't HANDLE the truth!"

3) "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?"

At any rate, we are a legal and official family now. We were in our hearts and minds already, but now at least the State agrees with us.

Here are two different reactions to our court proceedings.

Confidential to Alice

Virtual Tub-time!(Click for extra-big cuteness!)

Three Couplets and a Elegy

Couplets:

After the bucket of suck that is April comes the bittersweet chocolate of May, when the grad students dissertate and move away.

Caleb took a tumble on the back porch stair. This has hardly kept him from his brother's hair.

Sam's become pointy-pointy, as we with Johnson's Oil anointy-nointy. (This one comes with apologies to John Lillison, England's greatest one-armed poet.)

Elegy:

The night before her euthanizing, Cisco -- 17, skin and bones and rotten teeth -- managed her way to the dining room table when our backs were turned and made off with my father's half-eaten Porterhouse steak.

She worked at it beneath the mirror we'd rescued from the trash, holding the bone to the floor with one paw, not so much to argue against what we had made up our minds to do, but as if she were determined -- for a once and God damn it final time -- to have things her way.

(March, 1990- April, 2007)