Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Pix
The child is father to the teen
Slow vacation-Monday morning, although I am on call, so anything could happen . . .
I’m cleaning our spare room, and found a few photos to share. These are scans from print photos, hence the cruddy quality. First, Jake at 16 months:
How dare you dress me in so many primary colors?
And at six years (no telling what Karen’s doing inside the Miata):
Bwaahaahaha! I locked Mommy in the car!
And finally, Jake at age 8, already perfecting the look which would be his stock and trade as a teenager (Karen says, “Proof that he was never a child.”)
Jake with his cousin Katie
D.
Antipasto dinner
Antipasto for dinner? Yeah, really! If you’ve never tried this, you should. It’s dead easy, tasty, and healthy (depending upon what you put on the plate).
Here is what tonight’s antipasto included:
Baguette slices
A very runny brie
An Irish cheese, some smoked gouda, and one of my favorite cheeses, manchego
Hard Italian salami, coppa, prosciutto, and mortadella
A peeled carrot
Chorizo
Red grapes and honey
Dried mango
You’re only limited by your imagination (as you might have guessed by my inclusion of dried mango and chorizo). I’ll often include a sliced apple or pear, and dry-roasted almonds or walnuts. Honey is a must — there’s just something so right about dipping nuts and grapes into honey and contrasting that with a sharp cheese.
Other times, I’ve included pate, which I guess is the same idea as chorizo: something a little spicy and fatty, as if the cheese weren’t fatty enough. Olives are a nice addition, too, as are gherkins or those giant capers.
Done right, you’ll have all the major flavors and textures represented (and with a little care, you can get a number of different colors onto the plate, too). It’s a pricey thing to put together but you’ll have lots of good leftovers in the fridge.
What did you have for dinner tonight?
D.
PS: I stole this photo from my friend Stan’s facebook page because I miss him and Jayna and Elissa, and I love this photo so much. Oh, how I miss them.
Happy Father's Day, Stan!
What passes for nature, here in Bako.
This weekend, Jake and I went exploring. First we went to the California Living Museum, a small but well maintained zoo that had raccoons and bald eagles and a couple of hungry brown bears, among other things. Despite the fact this was a Sunday and there’s precious little else to do in Bako, there were few people at the park. We were calling it a ghost zoo.
Here’s one of the neater inhabitants, a porcupine who had quite a jones for his zookeeper. He kept trying to get her attention because he wanted to be petted.
He was cuter in person.
Afterward, we drove up the 178 as far as Jake could tolerate. He gets carsick. The 178 is a narrow, curvy two-lane highway that skirts the Kern River on its way to Lake Isabella. Reminded me a lot of the 199, except that the scenery here is rather more Mars-like than it is in the Pacific Northwest.
Odd thing, I never noticed that power line when I snapped the picture. My brain edited it out.
Hot as hell Sunday . . . at least 100 . . . so hot we eventually gave up, turned around, and drove back to civilization, anyplace we could get a cold drink.
I miss redwoods. I miss ocean.
D.
Then and now
September, 2006, I posted Boy mit Bagels:
Three and a half years later?
Jake had doubts that the head-to-head comparison would show much change. I guess he hasn’t noticed himself outgrowing all of his clothes.
My boy is growing up!
D.
I miss PaintShopPro
I have it on my old computer, the virus-infected one. Can’t turn that one on — the monitor swivels 360 degrees, it rubs itself with old floppy disks, and it says unseemly things about my dead grandmother. I don’t know what possessed it! (Sorry, sorry. That’s for my son, who (A) loves puns and (B) claims, correctly, that I’m not funny anymore.)
I’m installing PaintShopPro Photo X2, which is photo massage software I bought a couple of years ago thinking I was buying an update for PaintShopPro. Fat chance. I got the first PSP when it was shareware, and if I want to stick with it I’ll have to pony up the real dough. Still cheaper than Photoshop by a factor of two. Anyway, Photo X2 is all well and good for photos, but sometimes a guy really wants to do some truly narsty photoshopping. Well, okay, here we are, the bad boy is installed . . .
Hmm. Not bad.
Photos below the cut.
So far, so good
My son has logged three days of high school, not counting the orientation day (wherein they played Simon Says and sang ‘several dumb songs’). He seems to be assimilating back into the mainstream with little sturm or drang. Well, maybe a little drang. Maybe lots of drang with Theology, since introspection isn’t Jake’s bag, and introspection is what it’s all about.
He has some sort of project involving four photos of himself and a paragraph explaining “how the journey of his life is like an adventure.” We picked four out of all the photos I’ve posted to the blog. Not this one,
which is one of my favorites.
I picked him up today after I was done in the OR. My patient scared the shit out of me as I was leaving: his pulse oximeter bottomed out. Due to his pigmentation, his nail beds looked blue, which didn’t help my worries. But then he started moving, which dead people don’t do, and when I readjusted the pulse ox, the numbers came up nicely. Effin machines.
Anyway, when I picked him up, he was talking to a girl who was a head taller than he was. I resisted the urge to tell him, “Yeah Jake YOU ROCK baby!” I’m trying not to be an embarrassment to my son. I really am! I can still remember how uncomfortable I was after my first date, when my dad asked if we had “gone parking.” I’d never heard that expression. The explanation, that was the embarrassing part.
Tomorrow is Back to School Night. Guess it’s more of a Back to School Night for us than it is for a lot of other folks there.
D.
Crunch . . . and my new black friend
Here’s the damage:
The body shop owner said, “Well, that’s undriveable.”
I thought he meant the car was totaled. Visions of a 2009 Camry danced in my head, but I knew it was too good to be true. No, it wasn’t totaled, just undriveable. He explained: “If you had to open the hood, you’d never get her shut again.”
So they put me into a PT Cruiser, which my insurance will pay for. They’re curious-looking cars, sort of like VW bugs that have been stretched on The Rack. Roomy for a small car, but the turning radius sux and the damn car loves to blare it’s alarm. I think I’ve finally figured it out: it wants me to open it via the remote. If I get anywhere close to it with a key, God forbid, the alarm kicks in. Weird.
Below the cut: Stephen Colbert has nothing on me!
Mass marketing
I like the fact this is out of focus. Makes the viewer really study it . . . and then there’s the delight of the slowly dawning revelation. The Oh. My. God.
Literally.
D.
Pals
Today (Tuesday, that is) was the last day of the meeting. Once again, the educational quality was high, and the company was outstanding:
. . . or maybe I just think it was outstanding company because they paid for my drinks and my dinner. Thanks, guys! That’s Bruce and Sandy on the right, Eli and Kathy on the left. Bruce, Eli, and I trained together at LA County Hospital.
I don’t pretend to understand what folks who serve together in wartime feel for one another, but I think it’s safe to say that we “County veterans” possess a faint shadow of that same feeling. We served together in stressful circumstances. No one was shooting at us, no one was trying to blow our asses off with IEDs, but hey, when your chief repeatedly screams at you that he’s going to rip off your head and shit down your neck, you feel at least a twinge of threat —
Okay, okay. It’s a reach. They’re pals of mine, the kind of pals who will still be pals even if I don’t see them for ANOTHER ten years, but hey guys let’s try not to let it go that long, hmm? Especially not now that I’m living in wine country and you have a perfectly good excuse to come visit.
D.
PS What funky photos these cell phones take . . .
PPS I do believe that’s my finger at the bottom of Bruce & Sandy’s photo.
With friends like these . . .
This came from Corn Dog, who writes
I took the bags out from under your eyes and added hair which is a distorted copy of your beard . . . The only thing missing is a big dangly earring.
I look like a malpractice case from Hair Club For Men.
D.
P.S. What BAGS under my eyes?
P.P.S. More from Corn Dog: “You with John Edwards hair. I am a master.”