Steven Helmer Publications

My oldest daughter has a little bit of a break between figure skating competitions and decided (along with her coach) to revamp her music and program. After going through a bunch of songs, it sounds like she will be skating to "Once Upon a December," a song that was made famous by the movie Anastasia. She hasn't actually seen the movie (come to think of it, neither have I) but she is a Tara Lipinski fan and added it to her list of potential songs because Lipinski used it during one of her Olympic performances. In addition to that, she decided to make another change, at least for the next couple of competitions. Up until this point, she was competing at the Beginner Freeskate level. She was doing relatively well and improving with each competition, to the point she probably could make the jump to high beginner next year. But, after some discussion and getting the thumbs up from her coach, she's going to make a switch and finish out the year competing in the sho...

There were people out fishing already this morning and, because of that, the pelicans weren't as close to the shore as I normally see them. But, I still managed to get a photo of these three as they swam by.

I kept my morning walk relatively short this morning, both because it looked like it might rain and because my camera needed to be charged after Saturday's trip to the Mackenzie Center . I did, however, manage to get a couple photos. This includes this photo of a rabbit that let me get surprisingly close before hopping off.

I guess I'll have to be careful about what I touch today (my wife has already told me to stay away from her) because I seem to be having one of those days. I decided to mow this morning before it got too hot and, about halfway through my yard, my self-propelled mower suddenly stopped being self-propelled. I'm not really sure what happened yet. The mower was too hot for me to take a closer look. I'm hoping the belt just came off of it or something. But, my yard work suddenly became twice as hard and I was pretty pooped by the time I got the rest of the yard mowed. On top of it, I was doing my laundry today and, when I opened the dryer to check on my clothes, the handle popped right off of it. And, of course, it's not as though I can just pop it back on. A piece of it broke off so there's no easy way to re-attach it. My wife suggested trying to use gorilla glue. I'm going to let her do that though. I'm afraid the whole door will come off if I try.

Our oldest cat, Echo, does not take no for an answer when he's hungry during the night and seems to be very creative with getting his point across. Originally, he would scrape at the carpet (loudly). Then he escalated and started getting on my nightstand and knocking things off. And, once we adopted his little brother, he started getting Mouse in on the act too. Early this morning, they introduced a new trick. Apparently, we were successfully ignoring him because he (and Mouse) decided to do something new. Both of them got underneath our dresser, making plenty of noise in the process. Keep in mind, this is not an easy task. The dresser sits flat on the floor and the only way for the cats to get underneath it is by crawling behind it (a tight squeeze), making themselves completely flat and crawling into the very small gap between the floor and the bottom drawer. I'm not even sure how Echo managed to do this. He's not a small cat by any means (he could stand to lose a cou...

Synopsis: After once again foiling the Joker and Gotham City's other villains, Batman uses his fame and glory to overcome the loneliness he feels because he has chosen to isolate himself from the rest of the world. However, when a new police commissioner takes over and the Joker and the other villains surprise everyone by surrendering, it flips his life upside down. To make matters worse, his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, accidentally adopts an orphan. Who's in it? The animated movie uses voices from Will Arnett , Zach Galifianakis , Rosario Dawson , Michael Cera and Ralph Fiennes . Review: My wife, oldest daughter and I saw the trailer for this movie a few weeks ago and, even though it is a film we normally wouldn't make an effort to watch, we thought it looked interesting enough to add it to our Netflix list. We received it on DVD this past weekend and ended up watching it for our family movie night on Saturday. While it (predictably) wasn't as good as the prev...

I saw these growing near my back door while I was grilling some pork steaks this evening. I thought they looked pretty cool so I took a photo with my cell phone.