Happy Birthday Jerry

My father in law Jerry is a big science fiction fan. It fits him perfectly. He likes to have a nice escape from time to time, but he likes to keep his brain turned on.

He's turned the kids on to a number of things and it's fun to watch them share this together. He asks questions. They ponder and answer. Cool.

Jerry is also a bit of a collector. He does favor old toys. He's gathered a few Pez dispensers over the years, amongst a number of other curiosities.

The kids are naturally attracted to the toys, but very respectful. They belong to Poppa after all.

So it was a cause of great joy when they came across this set of Star Trek themed Pez dispensers at the grocery store. We live in a small town. We have one store. There it was. They had to get it for Poppa!

His birthday was coming up. They took me aside countless times to remind me about going back to the store for Poppa's Star Trek present. There was much whispering and even more serious conspiratorial "secret" whispering. This went on for weeks.

Thankfully when I went back to the store, there they were. I was afraid they'd have sold them all...but I guess science fiction themed collectibles are not quite the rage here. Good for us. Really good for the kids.

And Poppa of course.

Getting to be here so this kind of thing could unfold was the whole reason this move made sense from the beginning. All the rest is gravy.

Happy Birthday Jerry. Thanks for everything.

Crazy Quilt

At times I am lazy and self-centered and think all the home-based life skills Robin and I are trying to teach the kids are things we've come to ourselves.

This is nonsense of course. We learned them. At home. From our parents.

One of the things I learned at home, as a very little kid, was to sew. Besides just learning to mend, my mom had each of us (yes the boys too) go shop for a pattern, then cut and sew a complete shirt. They were simple shirts, but they were shirts we wore. Pretty cool.

All these years later, millions of meals later, and I thought the skill my mom would reach for more and more would be cooking. She is a culinary genius of a jazz sort. She clearly has lots of deep fundamental strength and a wonderful sense of improvisation and personal style. She does cook more in a week than most of us do in a couple of months. But that's not really where her creative expression has taken shape.

It seems it's the sewing she's come to. And nicely enough, so has my sister...at the same time. So now they sew. Together and apart.

Lately they're both quilters...of different sorts, and at the same time the same sort...or they sort that out. And we get stuff stuffed with stuff.

So I laid down the law and demanded real quilts. Not quilted stuff, but quilts. One for each of us. My sister got the jump on my mom, mostly 'cause mom's still cooking at the same time. And writing. Dang.

Izzy got his quilt today. He got kinda wrapped up in it first thing. It's crazy and beautiful. Just like my sister and my mom.

Easter Landscape

This is a bit of a departure for me. I don't normally find myself sitting outside taking pictures of the landscape. Flowers and trees and rocks are pretty, and I do enjoy them. Certainly having relocated the family back to Robin's home has brought about a new appreciation of the landscape. It's new to me. It's beautiful. It's everywhere. I have time to look, and to shoot.

All that aside, I don't shoot the landscape much. Instead I just enjoy.

If you've seen my business site, you'll see that most of what I do is portraiture. Even my commercial work ends up being portraiture of stuff instead of people, but it's done the same way.

This landscape/scenery stuff is different. The people who shoot it are different too. More solitary.

Then on Easter Sunday I found myself on the side of the road shooting this hill of poppies. The hill got me. It's so vertical it looks like something out of a chinese painting. So I pulled over and took a couple of shots. About eight or so frames into shooting I noticed the deer. I guess she was concerned about what I might be shooting with.

On another day, on another hill, she might have had reason to worry if she were a he. On this Easter she had nothing to worry about. Whereas I was shooting, I was still just there to enjoy. And share.

So here you are.

Hey there sports fans!

Izzy is a natural. I don't get it. When I was a kid we were not allowed to participate in organized sport, Little League in particular. The hippy parents seemed to have a visceral distrust of anything involving a uniform, 'leadership', 'team spirit', and competition of a physical sort.

Seeing as how we were in the midst of the war in SE Asia I'm not all that surprised. The uniforms all had american flags on them...definitely a 'red flag' with my pink parents.

I wanted to play ball however. All my friends played. But I never got to. I remember lots of talk about how I was not built for sport. That was a bit of a downer...being told I couldn't do something before I'd had a chance to try...so I do my best to encourage Izzy. I don't need to do much. It's all just in him.

But where my son Izzy gets his obsessive interest in the game is a mystery. The profound skills he's shown us all baffle me even more. Everyone's son or daughter is, of course, the best on the field. Naturally. But Izzy has generated a buzz with the other, far more sports-minded, parents and coaches. They tell me he's got natural talent.

He's is good at this. Really good. He sure didn't get this from me or his mom.

Funny thing is he's seen maybe two live baseball games, and perhaps a total of 10 innings of TV baseball. Not near enough to have observed in any kind of real way. At the ballpark he's quite a bit more interested in the hotdogs and candy. He's 5.

So how on earth he's become the go-to playmaking kid causes constant wonder. My kid. Absolutely his own person. Cool.