Crusades.

We arrived home last night, exhausted and laden with much-needed baby booty. C's family was unbelievably generous: with a few exceptions (stroller being chief among them), our shopping list is closing in on "done."

We lucked out with the weather yesterday, too: clear skies, bright sun, warm winds and light traffic made for a relatively easy drive. C even decided to commemorate the trip with a shot of the sun dipping into the ground:

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From the annals of Stormtrooper Academy: Zaman Online ("first Turkish paper on the Internet") reports that while butchering innocents at Haditha, US marines also managed to murder the first cousin of Samir Sumaidaie, Iraq's ambassador to the US.

You gotaa give the marines credit, man: people said that Abu Ghraib would go down as the worst clusterfuck of the Iraq war but those never-say-die leathernecks just raised the bar for human rights abuses. Top that, Rumsfeld.