My birthday has me worn out and I had to refuse yet another
celebratory dinner at the Cheese Cake Factory today. The
best thing was taking the little girls to the Shrine circus.
They had never been to a circus and were just blown away
by the whole thing. We had an extra child with us who was
a bit hard to control but it was so worth it. The laughter
and squeals of delight were music to our ears. They have
not yet removed the animal acts from their shows but PETA
has been very active in that area and we told the girls that
this was probably the last year. I felt bad for the tigers
but the elephants looked well cared for and didn't seem to
mind and did sensational tricks. They had a 4 year old
baby elephant who performed with a two year old child and led her off the stage with his trunk. They also had all
4 of the elephants performing together. The children were
just bubbling over with wonder and it was their favorite
part of the show. They also had a cat who performed with
gorgeous white Afghans. Adrienne looks about twenty and I
keep forgetting she is still a child. It was nice to get her away from technology for an after noon. There was a
nine year old girl on the flying trapeze. I guess when
circus children grow up, they want to perform too.

Friday, my sister and my cousin came up to go shopping and
out to lunch. Then friends took me out for breakfast
Saturday morning and the circus filled the afternoon up.
They have started the exercise class at the library so I
am joining them next Saturday, I just wanted to lay around and read the paper today so when the kids informed me that
they wanted to take us to the Cheese Cake Factory today, I
had to take a rain check. They also gave me a gift certificate to Kohls and I may get a new down alternative
comforter with it. Ours is pretty well shot.

I watched Sweeny Todd last night but it was a little too
sickening to enjoy, We were looking forward to sleeping
late today and Ted has managed to but I woke up very early,
and Rex soon joined me. He looks forward to his Denta Stix
in the morning just like I do my coffee.

We have had five homicides in a period of about ten days.
Three of them were by very troubled people who should have
been held by police before they did all this damage. A
sixteen year old boy killed his grandparents and their dog
and stole their car. He video taped the murders and enlisted two friends to help him burn down the house. He
was living with his grandparents after being expelled from
school. There were all the signs of trouble and they had
even tried a military acadamy which probably just made him
angrier. He was caught almost as soon as the firemen put
out the fire. This happened two blocks from our house. It
was a middle class white family who kept to themselves and
obviously didn't believe in psychiatric care.

The second incident that happened was in an Indian family
who had taken in a cousin who was out on bail. Their cousin
murdered their nine year old child in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. Something happened to wake
the child's father who determined she was missing and saw
the cousin standing over a shallow grave with a shovel.

A prominent attorney was murdered by her ex husband. She
had a protective order filed and he just kept on bothering
her. He killed her and then himself. Life is held too
cheap in our society. Sweeny Todd said he killed just
because he could. This seems to have been the motive in
Oklahoma City this past few days.