Caitlin started high school today and Rebecca began 7th grade yesterday. It takes my breath away to think that this is possible. I still think of them as little girls who would wave to me from the school bus window in the morning. In contrast, Caitlin dyed her hair black last night (on top of the glowing shade of brass that a home peroxide job from last week created), and Rebecca wore a pair of shorts to school that read "Can't touch this" on the butt.

From their perspective little has changed - they came home to find me lobbing selected profanities at the school district transportation coordinator to whom "logistics" must be a foreign language, since they scheduled Caitlin's total commute to and from school as over 3 hours. It apparently takes a sacrifice to a minor deity to get this changed, so we will try to find some other method of transportation.

Movies: Watched the end of Vanilla Sky last night. Another one I should buy. When did it become acceptable for cable channels to provide commentary at the end of a movie along with squeezing the end credits into a tiny window at the bottom of the screen, drowning out the music running and making the credits unreadable? This has been standard fare for broadcast channels for years, but I didn't expect Showtime to stoop to these same tactics.