Friday, December 29, 2006

A Fistful of Cuteness, plus Craggy McSnowsalot

I sort of promised some photos from my trip to the PNW, so here they are:

First, we must establish that Z loves chanukah:

Here he is with his first gift and grandpa herman’s menorah - DO NOT DISTURB a child in the zzzzzone....

He loved chanukah so much he’s like a menorah himself in a way -

He keeps going till he just burns out.

One afternoon, K and Z and I went to the Seattle Center (which is curiously eccentric, disconcertingly enough) to visit the Children’s Museum and whatever else they had going on.  The SC is where the world’s fair once was, and hence, where the Space Needle still is.  Here it is through a skylight of the big exhibit space/food court where we spent most of our time:

The lobby of this structure (the “Center House,” though “house” didn’t make any more sense than “center” does) had a big ol’ model train running on an enormous track laid out in the central area of the food court.  Zach wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it.

The Children’s Museum was a lot of fun and featured, among other exhibits, some “habitats” from other nations.  One was Japanese and included a train station variety kiosk where the japanese peoples buy all manner of comestibles.  This photo shows some of the drinks on offer in the display’s vending machine. 

For my fuller life, indeed.

Just outside the sun was setting and we were getting hungry so we just took some photos as we wandered back to the car:

A few days later we took a drive up through the Snomoshpit pass (I may have some of these details fuzzy) to a great “snow play” area, with plenty of authentic water-based snow:

Zach had never seen snow before and when he woke up in the car he was pretty dumbfounded - but as soon as he got out into it he was totally stoked, as I believe the young people put it:

We left as the sun began to drop behind the mountains and the air filled with an ethereal mist:

yeah, messed-up link, sue me I am moving on regardless to, finally, this tourist shot I took from the car on the way back to our place.

That’s all the photos we’re going to bother with right now, I think.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to post my “overcoming entropy” piece before the new year starts - it’s sort of thematic, if I can get off my ass to make it happen.  Right now I’m satisfied that I got these damn photos cropped down and posted.  Hope it’s a good way for you to conclude 2006.  It might just have to work for me.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

There and Back: a Saga

It’s been a holly, jolly freaking xmas at the hucklechut, which is of course, where chuckles goes when he’s not at home.  I flew north last Thursday morning for a yuletide visit with Tara, Phil, and the toddling Nater-tot, and we had a damn fine time REGARDLESS.  Regardless of what?  Hee....

We should have known things were up for a serious xmas-jacking when we gave T a call from the baggage claim upon landing to see where she was in the “picking us up from the airport” process, to discover that she’d mentally scheduled us for a PM pickup, not an AM pickup.  Slight freakout, easily overcome.  But then.... things got a bit dicier as, that evening, Nate started repainting the house with half-digested milk and cheese.  He got a stomach flu that would. not. quit, and his mom and pop were up all. night. long taking care of his sad, sad alimentary canal.  And no, the peristalstis was not purely of the reverse sort - he had horrific mudbutt and the accompanying monkeyred assfury too, just so he could be as uncomfortable as possible. 

I took the opportunity to get out of the house for a few hours on bikes with Phil and a neighbor, both of whom totally kicked my ass but I do have the excuse that I am not biking anymore or even remotely exercising.  I’m just proud I only fell badly enough to cut myself open once.  It was a fun ride through a forested park full of downed boughs, drowned gullies, and enough hazards that we kept stopping to saw through random branches over the trail.  It was a full-body workout and I enjoyed it. 

I’m glad Phil got out too, because the evil hurlgut got him that night.  It wasn’t till we left three days later that he was able to keep down more than saltines, and he spent most of his time with us (forcing himself to be sociable, no matter how he churned with agony) kneeling on the rug with his head down, trying valiantly but ineffectively to maintain digestive integrity.  Tara got it too, the next morning.  For most of our stay, all the members of our host family were yakking the chyme like Linda Blair on the Exorcism-a-Whirl. 

Regardless, we had fun on our visit and I’m glad I was able to help out a little.  At one point brother Frankie called, asking if Kelly, Zach and I had succumbed to the dreaded barfplague.  He asked after us by my surname.  Tara didn’t hear him well.  “The Assmagic?  Is the Assmagic okay?” It may not have been my name before, but now I’m having new business cards made up.  Hell, I may even be making up a new business altogether.  (Tragically, I can’t recall what we were talking about when we misheard each other and the conversation veered to the subject of monkey choad.  But obviously, it was a good conversation.)

Kel, Z and I got out to a kid’s museum for a few hours, and later, to the snow so Z could see it for the first time.  Fuller reports on some of that later, perhaps, with the photos, but let’s skip to yesterday, and the challenge of leaving our beloved relatives: On the plus side, Z had a great time at the airport: he met a 3-1/2 year old who taught him to hop and they ran and squealed around the terminal like piglets on mda.  I got some surprisingly good fish and chips for supper and Z asked for a taste of the tartar sauce on a french fry - to his credit, he swallowed it, even though he didn’t ask for it again.  In the airplane, when we started rolling from the gate he shouted “byebye!” to every item on the tarmac - painfully cute, if you’re not trying to sleep through it, which would have made it just painful I guess.  And when we took off, we flew through a serious snowsquall, which was cool to see from that perspective.  And then, once we landed we got lucky and were not soaked by the sporadic but torrential showers that drenched everything except for those brief periods when we were getting from the baggage claim to the bus stop, and from the parking lot bus to our car.  It could have been a lot worse. 

Of course, there were also the aspects of that trip home that were not so great.... The flight was delayed, and then more delayed, and then… augh… though we’d left at 6:45 pm to get to SeaTac at 7:30 for a 9:30 flight, we we didn’t board till nearly 11, and then there was no airport crew to “push us back” from the gate so we waited in our seats for another 40 minutes as Z got progressively more and more agitated and impatient.  Once we finally got airborne at nearly midnight, Z was a total dervish in our laps for an hour, spinning and slapping and yanking on the tray tables and spilling his crackers and generally being a handful.  He was asleep when we landed, though, and even slept through the world’s loudest floorbuffer - being test-driven that evening on the baggage claim floor.  But even the buffer was not as loud as the screaming squeal of benches being dragged back into place across the terrazo floor after the buffer was turned off.  The mens’ room in the baggage claim area was out of service.  The parking lot bus driver was kind of… wired; he spoke with a heavy accent and lots of energy and sowed much confusion amid the large group of tired impatient people who miscommunicated with him about where he was going and how to find their cars. There were lots of sour moods on that careening bus.  Turns out, several people could not find their cars and one of them needed a jump for a dead battery.  Things kept taking longer and longer.  The storm brought hard rain and heavy winds, which made driving home an adventure in caution and self-preservation.  I took the car pool lane to the bay bridge toll booth and discovered that it was so closed that I actually had to drive around a weird little parking lot to find a place where I could roll over barriers in the road to get back to an open lane.  Wind on the bridge was even worse and I was driving with white knuckles, but at least I knew the road really well - I just picked my lane and went for it.  Till CalTrans coned it off, of course, pushing all the traffic off the freeway for construction as soon as the bridge ended and making me fidget through surface streets to get home. 

Eventually, we did get home.  At 3:30 am.  Yes, that’s nearly 9 hours after we left.  For a 90 minute flight.  It’s a good thing I ate like a pig for four days prior and got about 2 hours in the gazebo hot tub before loading out for the airport and generally had such a lovely time with our dear family up north, because I felt like crap this morning.  But no stomach flu.  It’s the little things that make it all okay sometimes.  And with that in mind, forgive me if you’ve already seen this, but here’s my holiday message to you all: whatever life hands you, rock it all night long.  Let this poor emaciated gyno-eunuch be an inspiration to you.  Mainly because, I cannot even watch this all the way through even once.  Tell me how it ends, okay?  For now, I am out of here.  More later.  In fact, all the later you can carry.  Bring a later sack for convenience.  And don’t forget the laterhosen. 

UPDATE with additional amusement: Nicknames!  Phil has long had a great nickname: “Burma.” Tara got an even better one during our trip: “Jemima Curbjob.” With a nickname like that, a woman can get away with most anything!  Also, Kelly told me she was working on a good nickname for the parking bus driving.  The winner was “Nutty McSpeedBall,” but I think I prefer her runner-up: “Speedy McNutBall.” Something about a good nut ball at this time of year… it just says Christmas to me.  So maybe my problem is a speaking evangelical nut ball.  Or, alternatively, maybe not.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Navel Commission

I don’t have the focus to type up anything long, so here’s a few weird notions I’ve had to bat around my various lobes:

There is a new series of billboard ads going up around town to fight childhood obesity.  They show photos of cute kids reaching for a burger or a soda or something like that, to encourage parents to step in and make a difference.  I support that message, but I can’t help but wonder what it does to a child model’s self-image to see him- or herself as the actual literal poster child for childhood obesity.  Might as well give up on those Hollywood dreams now and take your greasy solace in those fries that fell out into the bottom of the bag….

Have you seen the blue camos?  They’re like the green ones you might have for the forest or swamps, or the tan ones they use for the desert, or the tan and grey ones for “urban theaters” (sounds so refined!)…. And now you can get them in blue, too, different shades of blue from indigo to cornflower in overlapping, intersecting, coruscating closed curves of varying shades.  They’re very easy on the eye, but they do raise a question for me: in what environment would they perform the camouflage function of making one less visible?  The word “camouflage,” as we know, dates only from 1917, deriving from the French word camouflet – a “puff of smoke,” on the notion of “blowing smoke in someone’s face.” The British navy in World War I called it dazzle-painting.  This information is from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which has endeared itself to me permanently by both introducing the notion of “dazzle-painting” to me, and the image of camouflage as the pigment design equivalent of blowing smoke up someone’s… is it the face up which they blow smoke in France?  Well what a world.  Anyway, the blue camos: are they so you can sneak around unseen underwater, or through raspberry jello without being detected, or what?  If the tank top came with the jello, I would have to get it just for the marketing tie-in.  Come on, jello-tops are sure to become a collector’s item instantly. 

(cf: potato wrestling)

I also want to give a shout out to the good people of Oregon, where you can pay a little extra and have a license plate that does more than tell on you when you make illegal U turns – it also supports the common cultural trust.  Ancient traditions, keening melodies, painstaking craftsmanship and emerging artistry – all this is our entrusted culture and we should all cherish it just as we cherish the natural environment, benevolent technology, and our elected overlords.  I think it’s very cool that there is a special license plate just to support this phenomenon. HOWEVER: it’s got the weirdest damn image on it I’ve ever seen on a government product.  New out of the box it looks like it’s been fading on a fencepost for a decade.  I finally went to their website and figured out what it actually is: NOTHING.  It’s abstract, meant to elicit the phenomenon of culture, rather than any culture in particular.  It’s devoid of actual visual meaning, save what you project into it.  Well thank you Oregon DMV, for blowing my mind.  You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?  Don’t be so damned smug.  Just because you make the plates doesn’t give you free license to play games with them. 

Costume idea: Islamo-hippie woman.  Very simple: just two items needed!
* Burkha
* Burkhinstocks

Well, I had a couple other brainspasms to share but one of them just isn’t worth bothering with and the other one, I just plum forget what it is.  I’ll remember soon enough and I just got me some killer memobooks to write it down in then (thanks sis!).  Remembering things, that’ll be me from now on!  Meantime, sorry, four random bits of lint from the itchy navel of my mind is all you get.  Don’t forget to floss.