We had a good party for Michael Francis. (Note to self: a six-foot Subway party sub is too big, even for our large extended family.) Michael is a great kid, thoughtful, funny, interested, hard-working. We're having a great time watching him grow up. We have a beam in our kitchen where we've recorded kids' heights. Michael's is very close to, if not a bit ahead of, his father's height at that age.

Around the dinner table, we talked about the popularity of poker among high school students. Some kids are betting $100 in a game, a lot for a high school freshman. Michael doesn't play, but many of his friends do. This being Massachusetts, there was a bit of confusion until we all understood that we were talking about poker, the card game ("pokah") , and not the Polish dance ("polkah").

Matt gave me his new AIM screen name and I learned that he likes a few songs from the band G-Unit.

Theirs is a very busy family. Tess and Krista came for a short while and then were picked up by the mother of a friend to take them to another birthday party. Matt had a basketball game at 2:00, Joe at 4:00. We all know that this will only get worse over time. The children in a nuclear family become the cloud of probabilty circling around it.

In a follow-up email regarding my discussion of the taxes on my mother's estate, a friend related his similar experiences. It's about numbers on a page and it's about more. I don't know that I could have understood it at the time, but it would have been good to learn about money, relationships, and money and relationships when I was much younger. The teachers then kept saying, "This is important," but it's rare that it was. What has had a greater impact on my life - trigonometric functions and their inverses or knowing how money, and the lack of it, would shape my life. Money is certainly not the only or even the primary force in my life, but it would be foolish to ignore it.

We visited with my father on Saturday. What's a good gift for a 91-year-old? A new cart for hauling firewood, of course.

In case we ever need to find out the phone number that someone had in 1971 in north central Massachusetts, we're all set. A 1971 phone book is setting on my father's kitchen counter.