La bella quinceanera *

My niece Cathy turned fifteen this week, and her proud parents Walter and Gloria threw a big quinceanera party in her honor. In Latin America, the fifteenth birthday is the equivalent of the "sweet sixteen" parties sometimes celebrated for girls in North America, or like the Jewish Bat Mitzvahs -- a rite of passage into womanhood. They are sometimes very extravagant, rivaling wedding receptions. (Basically, they are a dry run for Wedding Day.) Cathy is a very smart, talented, and pretty girl who is becoming very good on the piano, and Jacqueline and I are proud to be her aunt and uncle.

* Any Spanish-speaking person knows that there should be a tilde (squiggle) above the second n in quinceanera. Several months ago, however, I learned that using non-standard ASCII characters messes up my RSS feeds, so until I can fix that glitch, I have to avoid using such characters and accents in Spanish words in my blog posts. Deadline for doing so: New Year's Day! (Spanish-speakers will know what I mean by that. )

Left to right: Shary, Walter, and Cathy, who was treated like a princess for her fifteenth birthday.

Posted (or last updated or commented upon): 15 Oct 2007, 10: 45 PM .

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My blog practices

My general practice is to make no more than one blog post per day on any one category. For this reason, some blog posts may address more than one specific issue, as indicated by separate headings. If something important happens during the day after I make a blog post, I may add an updated paragraph or section to it, using the word "UPDATE" and sometimes a horizontal rule to distinguish the new material from the original material. For each successive day, blog posts are listed on the central blog page (which brings together all topics) from top to bottom in the following (reverse alphabetical) order, which may differ from the order in which the posts were originally made:

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* part of "Macintosh & Miscellanous" until Feb. 2007

The date of each blog post refers to when the bulk of it was written, in the Eastern Time Zone. For each blog post, the time and date of the original posting (or the last update or comment thereupon) is displayed on the individual archival blog post page that appears (just before the comments section) when you click the [LINK / comments] link next to the date. Non-trivial corrections and clarifications to original blog entries are indicated by the use of [brackets] and/or ~~strikethroughs~~, as appropriate so as to accurately convey both the factual truth and my original representation of it. Nobody's perfect, but I strive for continual improvement. That is also why some of the nature photos that appear on the archive pages may differ from the (inferior) ones that were originally posted.

The current "home made" blog organization system that I created, featuring real permalinks, was instituted on November 1, 2004. Prior to that date, blog posts were handled inconsistently, and for that reason the pre-2005 archives pages are something of a mess. Furthermore, my blogging prior to June 1, 2004 was often sporadic in terms of frequency.

Blog errata
(preliminary)

April 4, 2008: "Andy Ashby" should be "Andy Jones"

April 3, 2010: "Mike Morgan" should be "Nyjer Morgan"

: "" should be ""

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