Jennifer Griffith's Blog, page 24
February 27, 2013
Moon Rise, Moon Set
I saw both the moon set and the moonrise yesterday. It was nearly full and spectacular. Silver white against the deep blue of the predawn sky, just above the horizon of the jagged mountains to the west of our desert valley, it took my breath away. In fact, I had to change my running route so I ran directly west for a full mile so I wouldn’t miss a second of it that was possible for me to see. Fabulous.
Then last night, after the Boy Scout banquet, we were all piled in the truck and heading for home. I happened to glance to the east, and there coming up over the brow of the eastern ridge was the golden yellow moon. I gasped. “Look!” I told my husband and kids. They all saw it, and then I made my husband turn a U and go drive east for a couple of miles so we could see it as it rose above the mountains and into the black night sky.
I don’t know that much about the moon. I did touch a moon rock at the National Air and Space Museum last month when we were there visiting Washington, D.C. It seemed a lot like a rock. But way cooler because it was from the moon. I imagine, like that song from “Waiting for Guffman” about Mars, the moon could actually be pretty boring, if I were there.
However, yesterday, from my vantage point three million miles away here on earth, it was the most spectacular part of my day. It reminded me that the heavens are grand, that I am small, that God’s creation is vast, that beauty is nigh if I look for it.
In fact, sometimes all I have to do is look up.
February 25, 2013
Meet Adrienne Monson, Newly Minted Author!
Tell me this hair isn’t fabulous! It’s amazing.
First off, the most important question: do you snack when you write? If so, on what? (Don’t say blood.)
How’d you know I was going to say blood?
Yes, I snack, eat lunch – you name it – while I’m writing. As for the what – it’s different every day. I eat a lot of salads, but they’re hard to eat while writing. If I could choose a favorite snack, it would probably be cookies. (I know, so terrible, yet so true!)Tell me about your your new book!
Vampires and Immortals war with each other, both hoping to find the prophecy child first. Leisha is a reluctant vampire who still loves her estranged husband, an immortal who’s sworn to kill all vampires.
I love the art on this cover. Super creepy and artsy!
What got you started writing? Have you always written?
I used to write when I was in fifth grade. I even won a couple of writing contests. It tapered off when I got to Jr. High. When I became a stay-at-home-mom, I started writing again. I really felt my novel had potential and immersed myself in the writing industry. It taught me a lot and helped me to grow as an author. The rest, as they say, is history.
Who are your biggest literary influences?
There’s too many to name them all. Just a few authors: Terry Goodkind, Brandon Sanderson, Kim Harrison, and Karen Marie Moning.
In Dissension, there is a whole slew of vampire lore you tap into. Is all of that part of known folklore, or did some of it spring from your imagination?
Most of it came from my imagination. I think reading lots of books just help to tap into that part of the imagination to create your own stories.
I saw an article where you were referred to as a “local vampire expert” a short while ago. How does one become such an illustrious thing?
Lol. Well, have an obsession (like vampires) for the majority of your life, read anything and everything related to said obsession… and I guess you become an expert. I certainly didn’t take a course and become certified online.
I heard that Dissension has more than one installment. Tell me about that. Are you finished with the sequel(s)?
I’ve just turned in the second manuscript (Defiance) and have started book three (Deliverance). I’ve always known how this trilogy would end. So even though it’s not completed, I know exactly where I’m going with it.
I’m a writing mom. You’re also a writing mom. How do you balance that?
First off, you have more kids than I do, Jennifer. So you’re probably more qualified to answer this!
I do try make sure that my family is the first priority. I have a toddler who naps while my older child is at school. So I utilize that time. I’m also a stickler about early bedtime. My kids are in bed by eight. So that gives me a total of three or four hours a day to work. It may not seem like much, but it’s what I have to work with right now. I very much look forward to the day when both kids are in school.
When you first found out your novel had been selected for publication, what did you do/think?
I was floored. It was almost surreal. Then I signed the contract and realized it was actually happening! My husband and I called everyone to let them know. It was like having a baby or getting married.
Do you see yourself writing about the undead exclusively, or do you plan to branch out?
My next WIP after the trilogy will be about demons – which is loosely related to what I’m writing now. I also have another idea for a psychic living in regency times. So, I definitely plan to branch out. That’s the great thing about writing paranormal romance. There’s a lot of different paranormal elements to be used.
Where can someone find you on the web?
Ready for this? There’s quite a few. Here’s all my author links:
Web site: http://www.adriennemonson.com/
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/adriennemonson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/adriennemonson
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6584385.Adrienne_Monson
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/adriennemonson
Thanks so much for being part of this bloggy blog today, Adrienne. I hope DISSENSION sells a zillion copies!
February 16, 2013
Welcome to Goathead Island, Kids
It’s February 16th and about time to pull weeds again around here. The air is full of smoke from weedburning.
Ever since my husband and I moved to this town 13 years ago, we’d been looking for land to build a house on. It’s a rural area with a slow economy. I figured, “How hard can it be to find a five-acre chunk of land?” Turns out, pretty hard.
For yeeeears, I trolled the newspapers, drove around looking at empty fields, kept my eyes peeled for “For Sale By Owner” signs on rusty barbed wire fences.
There were a few false alarms along the way. One 5-acre piece seemed pretty good. It was fairly close to town, had a powerline at the property boundary, and had a ready made track for dirt bikes. Bonus! It didn’t end up working out, though. Partly because of the colony of gang people who rented the adjacent piece.
Another false alarm was an even closer brush with danger. It was a 20-acre parcel at the base of the mountain. It was really nice, and we could maybe have enough land to start what the family calls “a patch,” and all our kids could grow up together on some kind of Griffith compound. Good times! We even put down earnest money.
But further investigation showed it was in a major floodplain. Like, the whole entire mountain drained through the parcel. Since then the people who dropped trailer houses on that parcel have been flooded several times, I’ve been told.
Close call.
One bit of land would’ve been great if our town’s landfill didn’t charge. Why? Because there was so much junk on it already we could’ve filled half the city dump. But it would’ve been fun to do shooting practice on the sixteen old toilets that were out there, among other things. It’d cost us half the price of the land itself in city dump fees to clear it off.
It got pretty discouraging as literally years would go by and I could find nothing in a reasonable price range without some intensely impervious defect. (Like being situated at the end of a three-mile, pothole rutted dirt road with no utilities, or being adjacent to land zoned for a hog farm, or being on the loop of road where most of the city’s assault cases originate. One place we liked was a mile from land that suddenly got approved for the first open pit mine allowed in the U.S. in over 25 years. Scratch that.)
Anyway, long story short, fall before last it finally happened. I scanned the paper and saw in the classifieds a one-liner: 4+ acres. It was on a paved road about a mile from where we live, but surrounded by fields (and a couple of the nicest houses in town). It had water, power, septic. And it was a reasonable price.
It had to be a misprint!
But it wasn’t.
And we bought it.
And last year we planted trees on it, the beginnings of a fruit orchard. Nectarines, pomegranates, peaches, apples. We’ll plant the pecans as soon as my husband puts in the drip system. And the pistachios. I’m excited about the pistachios. Who can ever get too many of those?
Someday we might build a house, but for now, it’s providing something even better: goatheads.
Raise your hand if you know what a goathead is.
Raise your foot if you’ve ever had one embed itself in it? Holy ouch! Those thorns can pop a bicycle tire (and have done so to me more times than I’d like to admit.)
The land we bought is so covered with goatheads (despite my vigorous pulling of that weed and tumbleweeds with the kids for hundreds of hours last year in the blazing heat) that you have to use a plastic knife to scrape them off the bottom of your shoe before you get in the car or else they’re all over the carpet here at home and in your foot every time you get up to go to the bathroom in the night.
So…
My dad likes to name stuff. He names his trucks. He named his farm “Disappointment Acres.” We thought we should name our land. When it was just a bit of ether in our imaginations we had a bunch of names for it I won’t bore you with.
My husband wanted to name the land “The Orchards” since he’s planting so many trees, or “The Hundred Acre Wood,” in honor of our daughters’ decade long obsession with Winnie the Pooh. The kids and I are in agreement, it should be called GOATHEAD ISLAND. If I had a nickel for every tear my 8 year old has shed over getting one of those thorns in her foot…
This was in my shoe a minute ago. Does it look like a goat’s head? Or maybe the devil’s face? Seriously. INFESTING the four acres. You should’ve seen that guy’s truck’s tire. Totally covered.
Still, I guess it’s far better than hogs or toilets or floods or a huge mine. The goatheads (and the mountainous tumbleweeds that have officially “gotten away from us”–and I had to pay a guy with a backhoe to shove them together and burn them today, which is what has me thinking of this whole process in the first place) are not a bad thing. They’re a great reason to wrench my kids away from TV and computer screens (and myself, if truth must be told) and stand in the fresh air (not hog air, thank heaven) and labor for a good cause.
Pulling weeds is good for the soul. I hope Goathead Island gives the kids a sense of the land and the sky and the dirt. We all need a little more dirt. Seeds grow in dirt. Kids grow in dirt. I grow in dirt. Whether we ever build a house on that dirt or not, it’s a grand thing to have dirt that belongs to us. That, I think, might be the American dream. At least it’s my American dream. And I’m thankful for that beautiful, goathead-infested dirt.
February 9, 2013
Pac Man Fever versus MineCraft Fever
“Cache Valley Mall, too good to be true…Close to you.”
That was the jingle on the radio near the beginning of the opening of the Cache Valley Mall in Logan, Utah. At lunch yesterday, I was trying to keep my kids from numbing my mind with unintelligible chanting and endless talk about the videogame “Mine Craft” so I told them about the Cache Valley Mall. They are country kids, so malls seem exotic and urban, and they associate them with escalators (exotic fun!), so I figured it would catch their attention.
It worked!
I told them about the KarmelKorn shop with the clear bins full of caramel corn and cheesy popcorn and rainbow-colored caramel corn.
My 10 year old daughter went into ecstatic raptures when she heard about Hunk-a-Bread, where you could buy and eat…a hunk of bread. The bread could have butter or honeybutter or raspberry jam or a slice of cheese melted on top.
Orange Julius impressed them less.
They thought JCPenney was something to do with their cute friend Jaci from church.
I had to explain to them that ZCMI was a store that the church owned and had dresses and Garanimals and shoes and underwear and that my aunt worked there when she wasn’t teaching school. They were puzzled as to why anyone would name their store Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institute. It seems a stretch these days, doesn’t it?
But I saved the silver bullet for the last: Aladdin’s Castle. The arcade. “Back then you couldn’t really play video games at your house.” They were aghast. They said they’d heard I had an Atari when I was growing up. “That was later,” I said. I told them about the games. “They were like Wreck it Ralph.” They scrunched up their noses. “With graphics like that?” I told them about the pole position games with steering wheels.
And then I pulled out the granddaddy of all–I loaded up for them the song someone had uploaded onto youtube: Pac Man Fever.
Ultimately, they thought the song was sad, the way the singer wasted all his quarters and had to go home, but would be back the next day. They’re probably right. But it’s not that much sadder than when they blow their whole day playing or talking about Mine Craft, I say. And at least it gave us something else to talk about during lunch, and kept them “off the Craft” for at least a half hour.
Today they’ve spent about six hours playing in and out of the box that came with our new dishwasher (as the old one finally gave up the ghost. It no longer responded to being kicked as hard as I could — an odd number of times — with my heavy wooden clogs.) And the king Crafter, my 15 year old son, put the dishwasher in with his dad. So it was a good day. Next we’re going to milk a cow at some friends’ house so my 8 year old can MAKE CHEESE for her science fair project.
Yes, I like being a writer, but being a mom? That’s where it’s at.
February 8, 2013
Guest Blogging Over at R.K. Grow’s Site!
Social media is pretty amazing. We meet people from all over the world–and we never leave the comfort of our pajamas! (And they don’t know we’re in our pajamas. I assume everyone thinks of me blogging in my ball gown with my tiara.)
Recently I met via Twitter a really fun fellow writer, Rebekah Grow. She’s got a fantastic looking blog (I wish she’d show me the ropes on how to spruce up a WordPress blog. Geez. It’s SO beyond me.) and she interviewed me a few days ago and has posted the interview here.
I liked the questions she asked. It gave me a chance to think about the good things about writing and the stuff I have learned as I’ve tried muddling through this strange world.
I hope you like it!
Oh, and here’s a picture I took last spring. I need to think spring at this point!
February 7, 2013
Hello, Johnny Raincloud! Will You Write My Scene?
This morning I woke up super cranky. Well, I didn’t actually realize I was cranky until the sharpest replies started coming out of my mouth. It was weird, like an ABC Afterschool Special, where the body and brain have been switched and the soul doesn’t recognize itself. “Who is that shrew and why is she saying that with my lips?”
By lunchtime it hadn’t subsided at all, and I was at the point of indulging in self-destructive behavior, like eating, oh, I don’t know, about two cups of melted mozzarella cheese. It’ll improve my mood, I told myself. Cheese has magical, mood-improving properties.
Ultimately, what did help was hearing the darling little boy visiting my 5 year old daughter say the blessing on our lunch (er, cheese.) It was the sweetest little prayer in the most precious voice. It melted away at least 35% of my grumpiness. Bless ‘im! And then when he came in and three times asked me, “Where are the heads?” an additional 35% evaporated. (He was asking about the stack of Lego Mini-Fig heads, I eventually divined.) What a good thing he came to play.
Anyway, overall I was so irritated with the fact that I was irrationally irritated, that I asked myself, why do we have to have these off days?
And the inner writer in me answered: “So we can write fight scenes. And breakup scenes. And domestic drama scenes–and not ruin an otherwise lovely day on a day when we’re feeling quite delighted with the world.”
And so, I leave off the editing I’m finishing up (just 15 pages to go out of the 1000+ I’ve done in the past three weeks) and heading over to my work in progress, where I fully intend to scratch out a few good fight scenes with that residual 30% grumpitude.
Might as well make the most of it!
February 2, 2013
Is Revising a Goal the Same as Quitting?
I have revised my New Year’s Resolution. Already. I mentioned this to my husband, and he said, “It’s good to give up sometimes.” But, I argued, it’s not giving up. It’s changing my focus as a result of better information.
My big plan was to make myself stop eating cold cereal—any cold cereal. This is because cold cereal has traditionally been my nemesis, causing me to grab great handfuls of it every time I walk past the closet where I keep it. It’s been my go-to writing fuel.
What I thought would happen was that cutting it out of my diet would dramatically decrease the calorie intake of my day. I mean, it’s kind of possible I was getting 1/3 of my calories from it. I know, yikes.
But what did happen was that I replaced the snack of the relatively low calorie, air-filled sweet, grain-based snack with…delicious muenster cheese. And pecans. And peanuts, delicious peanuts. These are not low calorie foods. And for some reason, I was eating the same quantity of these foods as I was eating cold cereal.
This did not produce a desirable effect.
And so, with better information, I am abandoning my ill-conceived goal of removing my favorite food from my life and re-entrhoning it as a staple in the snack kingdom.
Meanwhile, today is going to be a great day. My daughter is getting baptized. Such a sweet girl and wonderful daughter. Family and friends are coming. It’s bliss. Cold cereal for everyone!
January 31, 2013
Reading to Keep Out the Cold
I know, I know. I live in Arizona. I have NO right to complain about the cold. I spend 3/4 of the year wishing it were colder, to be honest. But this morning, when it was about 20 degrees and we still have no heat in our house, I thought, dang. It’s cold. We worshipped the space heater for a while, I’ve got the oven turned to 450 degrees, and I open it every few minutes to let the hot air blast out of it. We’re wearing sweaters. I’m going to have to bake something today. Again. Bread? Cinnamon cake? Baked potatoes? More cookies?
Phooey on no heat. And I’d go into why I’m too mad at Marvin the Heater Fixer to call him again, but it is too long of a story for a blog. It’d need to be my next novel.
So, I’ve been weathering the cold by disappearing into books. Since the cold weather set in, it seems like my TBR pile (to-be-read) beside my bed has been shrinking quite nicely. And with the return of my Kindle (after it was so sadly smashed last summer), it’s been nice to have the e-reader option back again.
Right now I’m reading a bunch of manuscripts for writer friends, but when I need a break from editing, I am going back and re-reading C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. If you haven’t picked that up before, it’s great. And it’s not about divorce at all. (Or I doubt it’d be my type of story.) It’s a kind of a fantasy about a bus ride between Hell and Heaven, and for some of the characters it’s a round-trip. I love seeing Lewis’s incredible insights into man’s foibles and hangups. I’d forgotten how good it is!
I’m also reading Dissension by Adrienne Monson on spec, a vampire book. (Vampires are generally not my thing, but it’s a great plot!) Plus a biography of C.S. Lewis. And a couple of other books. I like having several books going at once.
With the e-reader I’ve been having a good time reading the books of an author I met online, Jolene Perry. I love contemporary teen stuff, and she’s great at it. They’re the kind of book I can stay pulled into even when kids are practicing piano and watching Phineas and Ferb in the same room. So far I’ve gone through Insight, and Spill Over, and The Next Door Boys, which is an LDS novel. Luckily she’s got more books. Don’t you love it when you find an author you like and then you find out he/she has a bunch of other books? It’s great.
Here are some more of the books I’ve read lately:
Edenbrooke by Julianne Donaldson (read on the Metro and the plane back from D.C. Fabulous Regency romance. Super clean. Delightful twist.)
Variant and Feedback by Robison Wells–great dystopian teen series. Totally loved it.
Aura by Rebecca Talley, another writer I met online and a good, clean contemporary teen fantasy.
A few by Sarah Dessen: Someone Like You, Along for the Ride, The Truth About Forever. Of those, Along for the Ride was my favorite. As a mother, I kind of found Someone Like You revolting–the daughter who made good choices all her life goes off the rails? Not the kind of book a mother of three daughters should ever read.
The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag and A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley. Do I love Flavia de Luce, the 11 year-old prodigy and mystery solver on her father’s estate in 1950s England? Yes, I do. She’s got the best voice I’ve read in yeeeears. I’m taking my time with this series, spreading the reading out so I can savor it.
Confessions of a Serial Kisser by Wendelyn Van Draanen. This I just grabbed off the YA shelf in the library. So funny and fun. I do love a good YA.
Sermons in a Sentence by John Bytheway. Fabulous. And delightfully brief.
The Book of Mormon. The Pearl of Great Price. Now I’m in the Old Testament again.
J is For Judgment by Sue Grafton. I listened to this on tape while I was painting the living room. I do think the heroine of this series, Kinsey Milhone, is one-of-a-kind.
Heaven is For Real by Todd Burpo. I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read this book. It changed me. It was wonderful. I don’t know how many times I’ve thought of it since I read it. Hundreds.
The Dating Deal by Melanie Marks. Okay, this is my favorite LDS YA I’ve read in a long time. I loved it.
Not My Type by Melanie Jacobson. Okay, this is my favorite LDS chick lit I’ve read possibly ever. So fun. So delightful. So hilarious.
Shaking Down Santa by Susan Corpany. This book was just the perfect way to top off my Hallmark Cheesy Christmas Movie Binge. I loved the characters and all the wit. Susan makes me laugh. A lot. And I am dying to see this turned into a movie. (Get on that screenplay, Susan.)
I also read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Charlie St. Cloud, Persuaded (by Jenni James), The Fourth Nephite (by Jeffrey S. Savage), and some other nonfiction books. Plus the editing projects, which have been actually really good!
I guess it wouldn’t bother me if the weather stays cold for a couple more months.
January 29, 2013
Getting Back in the Game — Running and Writing
So, while I was in DC, I didn’t run my morning run. For one thing, we were staying with my cousin Hillary and she lives in a hilly neighborhood, and I was pretty sure my knees couldn’t take it. For another, our entire days were taken up with walking around looking at the sights, and I figured it’d count for exercise. (I think I somehow gained 2 pounds on the trip. Or else the new scale my husband bought weighs differently. Why don’t all scales weigh things the same? I don’t get that.)
Anyway, when I got back on the road on Friday morning, it was fine. I was slower than ever and winded, but the feet moved and I made it the whole 3 miles.
Then Saturday happened. Have you ever wondered, “What if my whole body were coated with cement? And then I were plopped into a vat of cold molasses? And then I tried to move?”
Well, that was me. It took ridiculous effort to make it all three miles. I had to do that mental game, “Just one foot in front of the other,” over and over again.
Luckily, when I started up again yesterday and today, my body kind of gave up its resistance to the task, figuring, I guess, that this was going to be the deal again so it might as well play along. The run felt like it felt before I took the vacation break. Weird. But, yeah, whew!
Anyway, this gets me thinking about the task of writing. I’ve been on a bit of a writing break for a few weeks as well. I was on a roll right at the new year, cranking out 55 pages (!!!!) in less than two weeks. Then I quit. I started editing manuscripts for friends (I’m going to be at 1000 pages of editing by the end of this week, I believe.) And there was the trip. There’s a good chance my parents will visit this weekend and stay several days. By the time I start up the writing process again, I fear I’ll be a lot like a rusty old tractor–or like rusty old me after too long not running. I just hope my brain can get back in the game without too much effort. The story is still sparkling around in there, hitting me with ideas from time to time.
Here’s a pic of the spiral staircase at the U.S. Supreme Court. Let’s pretend this is the way my brain looks while I’m thinking up a story. Let’s not pretend these are the stairs I should be running up every morning to delete those two pounds that magically appeared in the last week.
Spiral staircase leading to the 2nd floor courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court
January 25, 2013
Going Dark for DC/ Threats and Bribery: The Delicate Balance of Parenting
So, for the past week I basically went dark on internet interaction. It was weird to leave the “computer me” behind–all my editing projects and writing and this great swirling pit of time-suck known as social media that must be done when a person has a book recently in publication. It was nice to just be non-connected, truthfully. In fact, I think I’ll start making myself take a week off here and there on a regular basis.
The Potomac side of Mt. Vernon has always been my favorite. No wonder Washington wanted to give up the presidency and get back to his farm and this view.
So, the whole impetus of this was that my husband and I took our two sons to Washington, DC, to see the nation’s capital, including the Capitol, so they could get a better sense of the absolutely great and blessed country they were fortunate enough to be born into. We saw a zillion things, including a few crazy people on the Metro, and a surprisingly large number of women in full length electric-purple fur coats. Oh, and President Obama (from a distance.)
It was a very cold night, but the boys read the speeches engraved on the walls. Such a great man, such a fitting monument.
I should add here that the trip was a result of a bribe. When our oldest started piano lessons in Kindergarten 9 1/2 years ago, I offered him a bribe: when he could play 100 hymns from our church’s hymnal I’d take him to DC. He was born there, so I kind of knew even then he would like to see it. Especially because at the time he was obsessed with space and I’d told him about the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. In the first week of January, he crossed off number 100. So cool!
I really was proud of him. It’s a big accomplishment as far as I’m concerned. In my piano career of 4 1/2 years, I only made it to being able to play about 10 hymns, and only 2 well enough to accompany anyone. Not that it stopped me from trying (and subsequently making a fool of myself in various church meetings. In fact, I remember being in a meeting where they were desperate for a pianist and agreeing to play the right hand of the opening song. After two verses, the person conducting stood up and stopped me, saying, “Oh, let’s stop there and put ourselves out of our misery.” No lie.)
The way I figure it, a young man (or anyone, really) who can play the piano is always welcomed with enthusiasm wherever he goes. You’re never a drain of the economy of the church if you can play the hymns.
I basically started saving up for the trip when I offered the bribe, and it was worth it.
Over the years I’ve realized that there’s a delicate balance in parenting. Being no expert, I can’t say how this will pan out as the five entrusted to us mature, but the times when things seem to go best — best mix of good behavior and kids-moving-forward-toward-reasonable goals, etc. — has seemed to be when we as parents employ the correct balance of THREATS and BRIBERY. I should throw in there that all important spice of PRAISE.
“If you guys finish your homework by dinner we’ll eat ice cream.” = Bribery
“If you guys don’t finish your homework by dinner you won’t get ice cream.” = Threats
“You guys are so great! You finished your homework! Let’s have ice cream!” = Praise.
Usually, however, my husband has more creative threats than this. They’re random and often relate to some chemical experiment he’s doing in his greenhouse or at his mine. My favorite of all time was about five years ago, “Are you guys going to behave or do I have to get down the sulfuric acid?” Har. As if. And I guess while my threats and bribery are meant to be taken seriously, his are mainly to shock the kids into laughing, which changes the subject from the bad behavior, accomplishing the same thing anyway.
So, back to the D.C. trip. I had to praise my kids because as we walked through Arlington Cemetery, all the way from the Iwo Jima Memorial to the Tomb of the Unknowns (to watch the changing of the guards), a good mile or two walk, our boys were very reverent as we walked over hills and past acres and acres of our honored dead, taking in the enormity of the sacrifice offered to them so they can be threatened or bribed into eating ice cream after finishing their homework here in this great, free land.
