Forked

I have a feeling I would not be capable of bringing in a friggin' plastic fork to eat my lunch with if it was stabbed into my forehead. And every day I bring something to eat that requires one.

Oh well, at least I am getting in touch with my caveman side again.

PM For AM

"I was dreamin' when I wrote this, so sue me if I go 2 fast.
But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant 2 last"

- Prince, 1999

Just Because

You've seen quite a few crazy and improbable things on my blog before.

But because you probably haven't seen a picture of Maddie carrying Elmo and tempting fate with a rosebush yet, here it is.

You're welcome.

More Scenes From An American Pub

More Food, Of Course

Mom & Pops came over for dinner last night. I made fettuccine with pesto and a cabbage salad. The pesto was made using Heather's very special "Porch Basil", which is an intelligent, cultured, and much more refined species than that dreaded "Yard Basil". :)

Here are some scenes from the table...

The Girls, In Jeans

We Grow At Home

A nice couple with a heavy Eastern European accent showed up at our door and said they were our neighbors from down the street. They left us off a big bag of fresh veggies and fruit "We grow here, at home", and told us to stop by any time.

Who said the good old days of small town neighbors were gone forever? On our block, apparently, they live on.

Kevin Or Kim

I went on a rare but much-needed date with the trophy wife this weekend! We got a babysitter and went to one of our favorite places for dinner, Macaroni Grill. It was a relaxing and romantic time, and we laughed and joked and did all the things people do before they have kids.

The Mac Grill house wine flowed like water as we laughed about how the hostess said to us:

"Hi, welcome to Macaroni Grill. Your server will be Kevin, and she'll be right with you"

We tried to figure out if Kevin was going to turn out to have a second use as an obscure girl's name, or if, in our giddy state of euphoria at being let out of the house alone, perhaps we heard the name wrong.

Kevin turned out to be Kim and we laughed all over again.

He was a pretty good waiter actually.

Everything was wonderful. We really need to do this kind of thing more often.

Peek-A-Poo

Birthday In Canada

My one and only sister is in Canada for her birthday this year, so I am sending her an international HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!

Hope you have a good one Mims!

Combo Plate

OMG! Zach would be in heaven! Two of his favorite things on this Earth, gloriously and lusciously intertwined.

It's A Snow Day Today!

Interfacebook

Alone among my friends, Dennis refuses to join Facebook. We all have our reasons for joining or not I suppose, but we talk so much about it and the comings and goings that happen on there that I think he actually IS on Facebook. In a way. I am his Dennis-to-Facebook and Facebook-to-Dennis interface.

Anything you want to tell him? Just post it on my wall and I'll get him the message and post his reply. Maybe this is how stuff got done before computers.

"You Grow Them Long And Lean"

Brooke's 9-month checkup yesterday confirmed what we already knew, that she is bean-stalk tall. Her height is, to borrow an overused phrase, "Off the charts". But in her case, she really is off the charts. She's so far above 97th percentile I think they need to make a new one.

In fact, if you follow her height along horizontally, she's 50th percentile for a 17 month-old!

As Howard says, we should keep having girls, we could end up with a WNBA team!

Jake, Socialite

Jake has gotten as many emails as I have today: 1 each. His was from North Main Animal Hospital, who is laboring under the delusion that Jake still lives with us. Apparently he needs a fecal sample test and some shots.

My email was from Dennis. I don't need any tests as far as he knows.

To-Not-Morrow

Mads: "I borrowed this crayon from school"

Mommy: "We will have to take it back tomorrow"

Mads: "No, to-not-morrow!!!!"

Words

Mere words fail to describe the extreme heinousness and unbelievability of the Japanese Pizza Hut Double Roll.

So I will not try.

Flower Girl

Here's a sneak preview of Maddie's flower girl dress for Erik & Linda's wedding!

Me & Heatherbaby!

Don't we look cute? Especially the redheaded side of "we"?

The Music Within

Here It Comes...

Maddie had her first dance classes yesterday. These were just "free samples" to see how she liked them. She seemed to really participate in the ballet class so we're going to sign her up!

Laundry

How cute are these freshly washed clothes?

Fallout

Brooke has been having some really difficult nights lately. She sleeps fitfully if at all, and is very hard to get down. She's got a cold and probably a tooth on the way, we think.

Here is the fallout of one particular battle, fought in three rooms over the course of five hours.

Forgotten...Almost

As we were all fighting for the couch during a movie this weekend, it suddenly hit me that we had forgotten to give Zach one of his birthday presents! So here it is, the big, blue, warm, cozy, comfy chair!

Snouts

I was in the "chilly" aisle of the local discount grocery store, muddled and befuddled in a decision between brands of hot dogs for Zach's birthday party. They didn't have Dearborn dogs, my usual favorite, and I ate far too many Oscar Mayers in my childhood to stomach any more.

I was about to grab the Ballpark Franks when I saw some new brand called "Bar-S", previously unknown to me, that was on sale for $1 an 8-pack. As I stood there examining the ingredients of the suspect new sausages, the stock boy leaned in and said:

"They're all made from pretty much the same parts and pieces".

Which I guess is true enough. I mean, let's face it, unless you personally watch your hot dogs being made, you really have no idea what's in them, I don't care what brand they are. I've seen the "good ones" made on How It's Made, and it's not pretty. So I loaded up the cart with my new found dogs, which I was fully prepared to pay 12.5 cents a piece for.

At the register, the discount price did not come up correctly in the register, so a long process unfurled wherein the zitty cashier rounded up the stock boy who chased down the manager and we all stood talking about the finer points of hot dog pricing in a discount grocery store.

Eventually it was discovered that the price was wrong because they were in the process of LOWERING the price on my discount dogs yet again. They were now 50 cents a package!

At this point I began to worry a little about buying a pack of hot dogs that costs less than a candy bar. I mean, now these things were less than a quarter the price of the name-brand units. But the helpful and perky crew again assured me that these hot dogs were probably made in the same plant all the other ones were, and anyhow pig snouts are very nutritious.

So it was that I purchased five sets of hot dogs at 6 1/4 cents per cylinder.

And they weren't bad. I mean, they puffed up like corn dogs in a rain storm, which means they were filled with various cereals, but I haven't got any gripes about cereals.

And the real test, the interface with the end user, went very well. Everyone liked my el-cheapo dogs.

Jack The Knife

More morning commute fun!

The Early Cat

Have you ever heard of an OS being released early? Well, now you have...Snow Leopard is shipping on Friday! With it's shiny new 64-bit undercarriage, blazing multi-threading improvements and support for using your graphics engine to speed up everyday tasks, It's well-worth the $29 price...so pre-order it, Mac-Heads!

In A Flash

We had a great weekend with my friend Ingrid and her family. It all went by far too quickly and now it's over, but I got lots of really good pics of the time they had here....

...I just don't have them ON me.

Soon!

Balls

Wish me luck today, I'm gonna need it.

I am playing golf with my department at work. Now, normally that would seem to be a cool thing to do on a perfect sunny day, but it's not in my case.

I was never much into golf. I think my many years of high-focus baseball has pretty much insured that I will always swing a club like a bat. But it's even worse now, because I haven't golfed in at least ten years (literally, that's no exaggeration), indeed I haven't even so much as hit a ball or handled a club. Oh yeah, and my clubs: I've got a pretty crude set of starter clubs that have languished in my spider egg-pod and rodent-dropping-infested golf bag in the garage for far too long.

I do, however, have a very cool shark club sock for one of my lucky drivers. That counts for something.

When my boss asked me if I golfed in an effort to get me to participate in this event (oh, and by the way, there is a ringer foursome who are very good golfers that win this thing every year so winning is out of the question), my exact response was:

"I guess it depends on your definition of golf. I drink beer and drive golf carts with the best of them, but my drives usually end up ripping through groups of unsuspecting golfers on adjacent fairways, with occasionally disastrous results."

He said that would be fine, and to please bring in my $40 the following day.

Forty bucks, by the way, would by lots of beer at the Lotus. Don't think I haven't made that mental trade-off and scowled in agony.

At least this is a scramble, which means I can go for broke and try to contribute the only way I know how: I can hit the ball a mile when I connect properly. Not always in a straight line, and not always without injury, but occasionally my ball will be used and I will at least have that.

Usually the constant flow of cigars and beer help things out, but I fear this outing is a more spartan event, in keeping with these lean times. We'll be lucky to have a cart.

I had hoped for rain all week, mainly because we don't live in a hurricane-prone area. Bad weather would at least give me one more excuse to perform badly. But alas, it is a perfect day today.

Our team needed a name and my suggestion was "Four Guys With One Ball Each". We got our starting hole assignments yesterday and we start at hole 13. Fitting.

At least I have the shark.

Rite Of Passage

Zach is a rough and tumble guy. He knows that when you play with fire you'll occasionally get burned, so he took his latest injury in stride. This is the fairly grievous leg wound he got from falling off his bike on a gravel road. He gashed it open pretty good, but it didn't stop him from getting right back on the bike and riding home. That's my boy :)

Ben

This is Zach's good buddy Ben. They pretty much rule the roost together in the summer months, not unlike their fathers used to back in the day.

Bolting

Usain Bolt. What a cool name for a sprinter. But he's also got the speed to wear a name like that. This guy is incredible. He comes from Jamaica but he might as well come from Mars. He's been smoking fast even for him lately, not breaking but shattering world records in sprinting as if they were grade school times.

He just ran the 200 meter dash in 19.19 seconds. That's insane. He has now set five world records in five consecutive events. He's set the bar so high he's breaking his own records now, having left everyone else in the dust.

I almost feel sorry for the guys out there chasing him, they are world-class runners, some of the fastest people on the planet, and Bolt's making them look like old grannies with walkers.

About all they can do is fight for second place.

Backed Up With Bits

I'm sitting in the middle of a big backlog of edits I need to finish. There are the birthday shots from last weekend of course, but I have a big wedding shoot that I need to post-process, and soon.

So in the very near future I'm going to have to stop running around and plop myself down in the big leather chair and roll up my digital sleeves under the soft glow of the Cinema Display and get at it.

Sharing August 20th

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", 1926.


It's easy nowadays to find out which famous people you share your birthday with. It means basically nothing - it's pure coincidence of course. Add to that the inaccuracies of our Gregorian calendar system and it probably means less than nothing. But it's still interesting to think that you were born on the same day as someone everyone knows.

Since it's Zach's birthday today I looked up his Birthday Mates, those (other) famous people born on August 20th. Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. Cool. Isaac Hayes. Shaft, cool too. Don King. Mr Crazy Hair? Ooookaaaay. Salvatore Quasimodo...whomever that is. Benjamin Harrison, dead president. Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Now THAT'S AWESOME!

Zach shares a birthdate with H.P. Lovecraft, one of the great horror writers of all time!!! This dude was right up there with Poe. The photo above is a picture of H.P. at about Zach's age. Innocent looking, isn't he? Not the kind of kid you would peg as growing up to spawn the Cthulhu Mythos and The Necromonicon.

Now, of course my good buddy Howard is also an August 20-ite, and I would be remiss if I were to leave him out of this discussion, obscure as he is :)

Happy Birthday you crazy bunch of disparate 8/20'ers!!!

"I Want Daddy To See This"

Maddie was so proud of how cute she looked this morning that mommy captured the moment and sent it to me. It made me smile!

10

Wow. Ten years. That's a lot of skinned knees and spilled ice cream. Lots of laughs and lots of tears. I am having trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that my little baby boy is ten years old now and on his way to his last year of elementary school.

Zach was born on the Friday before the 4th Annual Dream Cruise in 1999. He was a big baby, I remember hearing a nurse whisper "Oh My God, he's HUGE!" as they put him on the scale. He was 10 lbs, 2.5 oz.

Zach has always been a thoughtful and logical kid, coming up with an endless stream of questions about all kinds of deep subjects on a regular basis. And he has called me out on many occasions when he knew I was wrong and he was right. He wears me down and builds me up again. He has been drawn to many of the same things I was at his age: space, dinosaurs and cars, things to build with and things that destroy other things.

He loves to be scared, to read and watch spooky tales, but sometimes pays the price later on when the lights go out and the images do not.

He's a talented artist and he's got a very perceptive eye.

And oh how we love to tease him about his "girlfriends": Bethany, Miranda, Arianna. The red face and the barely-hidden smile and the shout of "Dad!".

Zach adds so much to our family that I can't even recall what life was like before he arrived.

We love you Z, and we can't wait to see what changes the next ten years with you brings.

It's i Time!

We're very excited about my friend Ingrid & her family's visit tomorrow! I haven't seen Ingie in more than two years so it will be nice. They're staying with us at the Wild Mansion for a couple days. I'll post pics...I promise!

The Hunt For Read October

"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I have just finished reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, a masterwork of post-apocalyptic survival and one of the best novels I've ever read. A man and a boy, and sometimes other characters desperate and foul, wandering the roads looking for something, anything, better. Maybe in the south, maybe there they will get relief from the brutal cold of the never-ending winter that has shrouded their new world. Everything is ashen and gray. There are no living plants, and very few animals. All people are nameless, for names no longer matter...the only one mentioned in the book turns out to be a lie.

This all happens in the near aftermath of some black tragedy that is not described or understood, indeed, whose details don't even matter, and has taken the known world out and civilization is no more.

This is one of those books that stays with you for a long time. I'm not even sure I can start another book just yet, it seems like I need more time for The Road to sink in, otherwise I might just keep chewing on it while I mouth the words of my next book without comprehension.

The Road is just the kind of book I love, well written and honest, very descriptive and minimalist at the same time. I guess you could call it "economical" in that sense. Each sentence says so much using so few words. McCarthy's style reminds me of a cross between Hemingway and Nabokov.

It's also a very difficult book to read, because of the horrors involved in trying to survive in a world that is no longer able to sustain life. There is staggering inhumanity, cannibalism, rampant murder, and most of all an overwhelming sense of indifference. The world has been pared down to one thing: survival.

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

At one point in the story the man and the boy find an old man wandering the roads hungry and feeble and they offer him food. He asks if he could give anything in return and the man says:

"Yes, tell me where the world went".

I am interested to see how faithful the movie is to the novel when it's released into theaters in October. I hope justice is done and Hollywood doesn't try to lace sentimentality into the story, because in the novel there is none.

...

Nevertheless, I am starting to scout new books for the one I want to read next. I read on my iPhone now, I love the format and ease of reading, no light needed, and my books are always with me. And the app I use, Kindle for iPhone, is tied in with the Kindle store on Amazon and you can send free samples of any book to your phone to try out. I usually read the beginnings of a couple dozen books before I choose one to read next. I only have so long on this planet and I hate wasting time on sub-par reading material.

Any suggestions?

"He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasn't sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while they just looked out through the silted glass to where the track turned away in the waste of weeds. If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all eternity and that no train would ever run again."

The Mirror

The Road

More craziness on my way in to work, this time some kind of house blaze as seen from I-94.

The fun never ends.

P.S. The distortion at the bottom of the frame is due to the angle I had to shoot through the windshield.

Running Time: 5,256,000 Minutes

Legend has it that Richard Attenborough's brilliant movie Gandhi took over ten years to make.

Due to children and other daily responsibilities, I would not be surprised if Heather and I take longer than that to finish watching it. It's become a running joke with us: "If we ever get enough time, let's watch Gandhi".

We've seen it before, of course, but never looking and sounding as good as it does on Blu Ray. So far we're up to the part about the old villager telling his sob story about growing Indigo for The Man. We get to watch about ten minutes at a time, which really interrupts the flow of the piece.

At this rate maybe the kids will be old enough to watch the ending with us in another nine years or so.

Actinidia deliciosa, A Fruit Of Many Names

One of my favorite fruits, this is. Blessed with a rich and illustrious history over it's many-thousand year journey to me from Southern China, it has gone by many names:

Macaque peach
Macaque pear
Vine pear
Sunny peach
Wood berry
Hairy bush fruit*
Unusual fruit
Wonder fruit
Strange fruit
Chinese Gooseberry
Melonette

But we know it by the marketing name given by it's successful New Zealand export companies: Kiwifruit.

* This is my favorite, for some reason. I am using this name for it from now on.