As you probably know from Kat's blog (which is sort of the New York Times to my blog's biannual trailer park newsletter when it comes to getting news first), we went camping this past weekend at Dogtown Lake near Williams, Arizona. It was three families each with a two year old. It went about as you would expect. I'm not sure what I thought going in, but there was no shortage of crying. My plan was that I would be able to blog because camping normally allows sufficient leisure time for such pursuits.  I wrote part of this while I was there, but, as you can see, it did not go up while I was still enjoying the smell of verdant pines.  Also, I tried to type it on my iPad, which meant I had a solid hour of corrections to make anyway.

It was very pretty  at the lake and the weather was great. I'm (still) not very good at sleeping on the ground, but I was not cold. It was nice though to be spending an August day in Arizona and feeling chilly. I'm a big fan of Williams. It has a great golf course. The weather is beautiful. It has nice mountains. It has lakes. It has Rod's Steakhouse. I'm on board with it. Apparently Kat's dad is on board with it, too, although Kat and Kat's mom don't feel the same way.

Although Prescott has some things going for it as well.  After a healthy meal of In-n-Out Burger this evening, I told Kat that you really cannot beat living in Arizona and yet not needing to run your air conditioning in the evening in the middle of August.  Also, the movie theatre in Prescott reopened this week, so I'm no longer living in a two-horse town without any of those newfangled moving pictures.

But let's get to the important stuff: Ada facts, which is my name for news about Ada and the toys that are left strewn all over the house, sometimes to such a degree that you have to sift through them down to lower levels to see the toys she used to play with before moving on to newer, more annoying toys. So, yeah, the Ada facts are these.  She is improving by leaps and bounds. She is able to say complete sentences regularly. She can sing the ABC song with very few mistakes. She can sort of count. And, of course, she's not really interested in hanging out with me. (The other day I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk. She said no. But then when I went to go sit on the couch rather than go for a walk, she complained to Kat that I didn't leave! She wanted me to go for a walk by myself so I would not bother her!).  In short, she is learning quickly. She loves to "play castle" and talk about what the king and queen are doing. She loves to play with her horses, watch horses on television, ride actual horses, and talk about horses. There are a lot of horses in her future. And in my future. And in my bank account's future.

She's also kind of a jerk sometimes. She is definitely experiencing the terrible twos. Some days she fully adheres to the Groucho Marx song "Whatever It Is I'm Against It."  And I'm not really the disciplinarian in the family. Kat regularly says: "Jeffrey, parent."  But since I don't really know how to do that, I can usually get away with just giving Ada a hug and telling her it will be okay.  However, improved parenting skills on my part are probably necessary.

In other news, I recently finished Manifest Injustice by Barry Siegel, which is a recently released book about William Macumber, a man who spent nearly forty years in the Arizona Department of Corrections for a murder he likely did not commit. His release was the culmination of more than a decade of work by the Arizona Justice Project. Sharon Flack, an attorney I work with at the firm, worked on the Macumber case for the AJP while in law school and for many years after.  She plays a prominent role in the book, and though I had worked with her for almost three years, I had no idea she was a part of such an amazing story.  (Although I did start to get an idea when I noticed like twenty copies of the book in her office).  But nevertheless, it is is an excellent book and highly recommended.  Like most books I like, it's not exactly a feel-good beach read, but you will have an appreciation for Mr. Macumber and how he continued to make an impact on the world even while he spent more than half of his life in prison.

I have not blogged or tweeted because I have been busy, but I am going to try to be better about that. There is plenty going on, although my problem is most of it I cannot talk or write about and the rest is often not worth documenting.  Although, as a person who regularly reads deposition transcripts, the fact that something is not worth documenting does not mean that it does not nevertheless get documented.  So even if it might be boring, I'll try to put it down here on digital paper and see if I can make it less so.

Last, Kat and I recently Netflixed "Shut Up and Play the Hits," which is sort of a concert film/documentary about the end of LCD Soundsystem.  I would not call it a good movie, although it was a good final concert.  But my favorite line from my favorite LCD Soundsystem song "All My Friends" is: "If I'm sued into submission, I can still come home to this."  And that is what I think about when I look at the photo below.  That just about no matter what happens, I will always have these two to come home to, and that is a great thing to know.