Thank you for all the e-mails while I was on vacation. However, despite the overwhelming number of requests, I am writing another blog. Takes me back to the days I played piano at a Sheraton Hotel and would ask the crowd "Any requests?" "Yeah, please, play somewhere else." To which I would reply "Never heard of it but hum a few bars and I'll try to pick it up." This has been your old, bad joke moment of the day.

*While I was away, the FirstNews team showed pictures of themselves back on their first days of school. I'm glad I was away. I'm not sure I have a photo from the actual first day of any particular school year. No, not because they were being chiseled out of limestone and were dropped on the way to mastodon-riding practice. The fact is my mother had a Brownie. One of those you would hold down in front of you and look through a foggy view-finder on top of the boxy camera. We once got an entire roll of film back that featured nothing but shoes and light fixtures. My mom was not going to give Ansel Adams a run for his money. There was another time...at the homecoming parade...when my brothers asked her to use the Kodak Super-8 and capture the event on film. We got a fleeting glimpse of some of the queen's court and a fuzzy look at the band but, mostly, we saw stop signs. Completely in focus...not shaking at all...stop signs. We counted about eight shots of stop signs in the three minute docu-mom-entary. So, our family was a little photographically challenged...in some ways, I liked it much better than today.

Now, there are cameras everywhere taking pictures and videos of everything at anytime. Cell-phones with cameras are standard equipment. In this digital age, we can capture a moment and send it around the world in a seconds. My wife takes great digital photos. At least, I think they're great. Usually she never gets around to actually printing any of them so I am going by what the images look like on the tiny, in-camera screen. (I look thinner in the small pictures so I'm okay with that.) After family get-togethers, everyone e-mails their photos which is nice but I miss actually holding a picture in my hands, fondly remembering the good times together and, then, using a Sharpie to give my brothers Groucho mustaches, crossed-eyes, horns and tails. To this day, I have trouble walking by a magazine on anyone's coffee table without wanting to do a little magic-marker-makeover on whomever is on the cover. I have to wear a cow-bell anytime I enter the magazine section of a bookstore.

*Before wrapping this up, I have to make a quick correction on a previous blog in which I accused my father-in-law of grazing on grapes while shopping. He insists he never took a grape but pleads the fifth on pea pods, beans and the occasional half-gallon of chocolate ice cream.

*Congratulations to all the great runners, walkers, strollers and, like me, standers at the Fifth Annual Stroke, Stroll and Run yesterday morning. It was a cool, cloudy, comfy morning to be out for a wonderful cause!

*As I mentioned in the last blog, the main reason I was off last week was to help get the kids off to their first day of school. More about that tomorrow but I do want to mention a little exchange my wife and youngest boy had last evening. Harrison is ten and in the fifth grade. He saw a commercial about parents dropping off their child at college and said to his mom: "That makes me a little sad." "Because, your older brother is only a year away from going off to college?" she asked. "No. Not because of him. Because of me. When I go off to college you and dad will be very lonely because you named me and that means you've gotten attached to me." He's got that right.