unearthed, like a fossil

The above title refers to the following photos. (how's that for a lot of references in one sentence.) Since visiting the Serven house and reading Doug's post, I have been more wary of my verbiage. But it's like, kinda hard not to use these words sometimes, you know?

Speaking of words, I've been noticing over the last few weeks how cumbersome the Russian language can be. It is just so much more wordy than English. Lots of Russian words are really long - some of them are compounds. And they just express things much less efficiently than English-speakers do. In my English-to-Russian translation class (which I suck at), if I translate pretty much word-for-word, the result is usually mostly grammatically correct but completely stylistically wrong. And the Russian version is always significantly longer than the English. English puts value in the ability to be as succinct as possible. Russian does not comprehend this possibility. So where I would like to shorten, they would like to expand. And so my anglified tongue stumbles over the Russian constructions and painstakingly spells them out. Yet Russians still manage to speak so quickly with such a troublesome language. Baffling, I tell you.

Anyway, back to the fossils. I dug these photos out of the depths of my hard drive the other day, previously not even realizing their existence. And though they are now right about a year old, I find them to be worth posting anyway. For those of you just tuning in, these outlandishly-good-looking kids are my little brother and sisters, residing in the same chilly land which I now inhabit.

Behold, the youngest two:
And the next two on the way up the chain:
My, how cute.

And I found this funny. A seemingly failed attempt such as this:
is necessary to create a successful result such as this [though it's still looking a bit squinty]:
And a token shot of Carrie in the nightgown I used to wear: