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"You can't just say, 'Well, you're a stupid idiot,' and let them drown. It would be pretty hard to justify that."

Well-said.

I've been lightly following this case over at Yahoo... mostly just following the comments. A surprising number of commenters apparently wanted this girl to die to teach her parents a moral lesson of some sort, or to save money. Others would've been content if she'd just been raided by pirates and raped. Let me say that if I get stranded on a lifeboat with these people, I'm eating them first.

People make a fuss that she's 16 years old, that this situation happened because of her age and the poor judgment of her parents. This may be true, I don't know. Maybe she's not competent enough for this sort of trip.

But it occurs to me that many seasoned sailors have drowned in the past, some with more years of experience than she has even had on this earth. This isn't always because they're careless or stupid or even drunk, it's because the sea is dangerous. It was dangerous a thousand years ago, and it will be dangerous in another thousand years as well. I'm not so sure it would've been any LESS dangerous if she'd had her mommy, daddy, and teddy bear with her.

And even if it was the stupidest, most asinine thing for any child to ever do - get a grip. If you think she's not old enough to make this choice, then she's REALLY not old enough to die as a punishment for her bad decisions.

Some more pictures!

Jenn has one or two on her phone she MUST email to me soon. Jennifer?

These were all taken today. Today was a non-uniform half day. It was ALSO a doctor's appointment... whoops. So the nieces went home with somebody else, and when I picked them up we went with another friend to play for a while in the yard next to Saint Paul's church, which is nice and quiet. One day I need to take pictures of some of the neighborhood around here, the houses with all the stairs are quaint, though impractical, and I'm not sure you all realize exactly how many stairs I'm talking about here! Ana is in the purple dress, and Evangeline has the pink one. I really like that pink dress!

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Ana has recently learned to roll her Rs, and has taken to doing that EVERYWHERE, even in words where it's not even rrrrremotely apprrrrrroprrrrrriate. She likes how it sounds, I guess.

More interestingly, I noticed today that when she stresses a word... you know, when she italicizes it, she tends to add random Ys (consonantal) in... cyome on! I think she picked this up from one of us, though that's just a feeling. I can't recall any of us saying words like this at all anyway.