The Scarpelli's

Hawaii, 1976.

Mom, why aren't you wearing your wedding ring?

Victor poses outside of the skatepark with his new board.

We were lucky....the tornadoes that came through here on Tuesday night / Wednesday morning just missed us. Thank you for the concerned phone calls. A co-worker sent me a few photos and I thought I'd pass them along. His daughter attends Union University and was in the dormitory when a tornado hit. I've included an excerpt from his e-mail:

"Thought you might be interested to see a picture of my daughter's dormitory at Union University in Jackson. I took this yesterday. We went there to pick her up and see if we could salvage anything from the dorm. She was in the building on the right when the tornado hit. About 80% of the dorms were destroyed were 40% of the buildings on campus. Of 1,200 students in the dorms, only 51 went to the hospital and only three were seriously injured. There were no fatalities on campus. Merideth and four other girls were trapped in their bathroom until fire fighters were able move some debris from the door. They climbed out of this mess without a scratch. It appears she lost nearly everything she owns, but that really doesn't matter much at the moment. Please keep the kids and people at the University in your prayers as well as families who have lost even more..."

We just celebrated three birthdays here; Victor's, Renata's and mine. I missed two of these birthdays, working on a project for a large pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis. I can't tell you the name 'cuz I'm sworn to secrecy but you can probably figure it out since they've made the news recently, due to a $1 billion settlement. Just chump-change to them.

So sorry, no birthday photos today. I took a good one of Victor with his new skateboard but somehow it disappeared from the camera, just some pictures of Meeko were left...