Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Pix
Butterflies, sweetbreads, and pommes frites
Seattle has two butterfly exhibits, one at the aquarium and one at the zoo. We’re not big butterfly fans (Karen, you’ll recall, is a tarantula-keeper, Jake loves his kitties, and I’m into poison dart frogs), but there’s still something mighty cool about being surrounded by hundreds of gorgeous butterflies.
At the Pacific Science Center, you enter and leave a large greenhouse-like enclosure through an antechamber. That way, the butterflies have a harder time making a break for it. The docents are vigilant about brushing butterflies off the path, so we didn’t see any colorful corpses.
Weather, for Seattle, was unseasonably hot and rain-free. The butterfly enclosure felt like a sauna. Still, how often do you get to see so many of these cuties in one place?
As for the zoo, their tarantula collection impressed Karen. Hers is better (of course!) but she was happy with their obese Poecilotheria regalis. (Arachnophobes, don’t click on that link.)
We just missed the lions having sex by about two minutes. We were within earshot and it was kind of obvious. Roar. Roar. Roar. Roar roar roar roar roar roar . . . eh, you get the idea.
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My life in food
Before we get down to any serious foodie goodness, I want to hype a post Dean wrote yesterday on the joys of the mature feminine form. Here’s a snip:
And that is beautiful; the realization that there are more important things than false nails and eyelashes and having exactly the right shoes to go with exactly the right skirt to show off your legs. Men who truly appreciate women don’t look at those things. We are attracted by laughter, intelligence, the creamy expanse of cleavage or the delicate curve of the collarbone, by the sexiness of hair falling from a braid or by the beads of water on softly tanned shoulders.
Romance crowd, if you don’t know Dean already, check him out. If I could write about my wife the way Dean writes about SxKitten, I wouldn’t have to write posts like these.
Back to FOOD, or, Why We Go On Vacation.
Thirteen things I bought
Jake’s growing up. Here he is enjoying a hunk of bread in Il Terrazzo Carmine.
We rented a lightweight wheelchair for Karen for this trip, and Jake insisted on doing most of the pushing. (Except down steep hills. Karen kept flashing on Kiss of Death; I kept imagining the chair careening downhill, Jake bouncing along behind it, saying, “I can handle it! I can handle it!”) He didn’t put up a fuss when we went out for sushi or dim sum, and he even tried most of the dishes. He likes dim sum now. Hallelujah!
We didn’t get into any major rows, either, for which Jake and I both deserve praise, but since Jake isn’t the adult, he gets most of the praise. Grumble. Anyway, all in all, this was a highly successful vacation. I’ll tell you more about it later, but for now: thirteen things I bought on our vacation*.
Where did he go?
I’m the Vice Chief of Staff at our little community hospital, which means all illicit drug sales, bootlegged whiskey, gambling, and prostitution have to go through me. (Note to JCAHO: I’m kidding. KIDDING, do you hear? Those government guys have no sense of humor.)
In February, the hospital arranged professional photos of the officers — the chief of staff, vice chief of staff, and secretary. Only this week did our photos show up in the hospital lobby. The photographer did something funky to the photos, made them look like tintypes. That’s my excuse for why it took me ten seconds to recognize ME.
I didn’t like it. Not one bit. The guy in the photo has a bull neck and a round head. Where did those come from? And he’s old.
That’s not me, I thought, whining in dog-frequencies.
This is me:
The only difference between me and the guy in the photo, this photo, is (A) I have better taste in music these days, and (B) I have facial hair. Otherwise, we’re still the same. Both of us have the same goofy laugh, the same love of food, the same twisted romantic view of life. Both of us can make love up to one time per evening. (Joke stolen from Steve Martin. I couldn’t resist.)
I know this sounds like a vain rant, but that’s not quite it. I feel no urge to see a cosmetic surgeon, even if I had money to waste on such things. I don’t mind aging, either, not in any abstract sense. Each decade of my life has been better than the one before, so at this rate, my Golden Years will be divine.
I wonder, though, why I have so much trouble internalizing some sort of appropriate self-image, something that ages as I age. Why, whenever I look in the mirror, I expect to see that guy in the Yes shirt.
I also wonder how sometimes an afternoon can last forever, while high school and college seem like they were yesterday.
That’s enough maudlin self-indulgence for one evening. Bottom line, that “professional” portrait was one fugly photograph. I’ll bet the photographer was an ex-patient whom I sent to collections.
D.
For love
This is challah, love in bread form. One of these days I’ll learn how to take a decent digital photo.
Karen appreciated my challah, but my little heathen, a focaccia fanatic, gave my challah the thumbs-down. That’s okay — it just means he doesn’t love his dad. (KIDDING, Jake, KIDDING!)
Today’s Smart Bitches Day post will focus on the following question:
What do your characters do to show their love?Â
Because, you know something? Protestations of an eternal bond are like, feh. Just feh. Screw the words, I want to see actions.
Flickr and Google go toe to toe
In high school, we called them crackers. They functioned as eye magnets and brain-befuddlers, distracting us from the joys of higher learning. A teenage boy cannot not look at a cameltoe.
No, no, not that.
I almost changed my mind about writing this post. Could I stoop this low? But this very afternoon in the grocery store, I heard a muzak version of the Beach Boys’ Kokomo, which everyone under 35 knows as The Camel Toe Song.
Clearly, a Higher Power was speaking to me.
Thank heavens he takes after his mom
I’ve started and stopped this four times now. Kate’s right — I am off my game.
It cheers me to think that my son is better than I am. He lacks the depressive streak. He also lacks the self-esteem problem . . . for good or ill. Low self-esteem is a tremendous motivator. I often wonder how folks with high self-esteem manage to accomplish anything in life. Don’t they wake up and lie there in bed all day long, delighted with themselves?
Below the cut: Proof that my son is better than I am.
Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas
Not one minute ago . . .
Jake: What are you doing?
Me: Just scanning a couple —
Jake: It looks like you’re photoshopping.
Me: Huh? No, I’m cropping.
Jake: Well, you’d better not be photoshopping those pictures to make yourself look better than me.
Me: You’re so vain / You probably think this blog is about you / You’re so vain / I’ll bet you think this blog is about you, don’t you, don’t you?
Jake: Huh?
Pix below the cut.
Results of the Great 2006 Scone-Off
Our contestants: Beth and Kate. Click links to get the recipes.
Procedure: With meticulous care, I mixed my dried cranberries and cherries in one bowl so that each recipe would have identical fruit. I set everything up so that I could combine my wet and dry ingredients with something approximating simultaneity, in order to bake them all together. Unfortunately, I forgot to add the butter in Beth’s recipe.
This blog needs some color
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
- You can never have too many frog photos on your blog.
- You should only handle a frog this size after he’s had his weekly bowel movement.
- If your frog’s mouth is four times as wide as your thumb, never ever wiggle your big toe in front of it.
. . . because he will try to swallow your entire foot. Impossible is not part of his vocabulary.
D.