Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Pix
Because Kate’s doing it
I know I promised you a Berkeley travelogue, but I’m having trouble feeling motivated. I mean . . . Top Dog. The Campanile. Sproul Plaza. Telegraph Avenue. East Bay Vivarium.
‘Nuff said. I’ll write more about Berkeley when I feel ready to give it the love it deserves.
This morning, while procrastinating because I dread editing blog-hopping, I chanced on this lovely post from Kate, my long lost twin. How I love those old black-and-whites, even if they’re photos of strangers. (Although, since I can really see Kate in her mom’s picture, they don’t feel much like strangers.) That one of Kate’s parents in the photo booth captures a time, a mood, an emotion.
On that note, here’s a photo my sister sent me last week. I had never seen this one before.
That’s Sis looking pensive, my mom and dad above her. My first thought when I saw this photo: I don’t know these people. My sis is — what, eleven years older than me? Or twelve? So, for me, these parents are young.
I mean, really young. My mother looks barely legal.
But it’s not even their youth which looks so startlingly unfamiliar; it’s their happiness. I see real joy in their eyes, joy and hope, the expectation young people have that the life ahead will be full of good things.
Maybe it was just an instant, not representative of the era. Or maybe they were truly that content with each other. I don’t know. Considering what they became, I’m not sure which possibility disturbs me more.
D.
Travelogue I
Before I get started, I want to give a little lurve . . .
First to longtime lurker Never That Easy, who awarded me her Perfect Post Award for October, 2006. Here it is:
. . . which I won for my Smart Bitches Day post, Boys Need Romance. Thanks, NTE! If this keeps up, I’ll have to start stacking awards on my sidebar.
Next, some furry love to Erin O’Brien, who aims to one-up my cameltoe extravaganzi with one of her own. Kinda. Sorta. Thanks, gorgeous.
One question: if the plural of clitoris is clitorides, and if a group of sharks is called a shiver, a group of roebucks a bevy, and a group of parrots a pandemonium, what should we call a group of penises? I vote for slither, which happens to be one name for a group of snakes. But I’m open to suggestion.
By the way, when I do my shopping today, I’ll be sure to buy an ejaculation of Krugys for all you Krugy-flaunting women willing to send someone like ME your home addresses. Suckers.
On to the travelogue.
Karen gets outwitted
Another Jake story, courtesy of the boy’s mom. I’ll tell it as she told it to me:
Why I’ll Never Again Tell Jake I’m Smarter Than He Is
Before Jake turned two, we began struggling over food. I wanted to steer him towards a healthier diet but he objected. He objected by putting his finger down his throat, thus throwing up the objectionable food item.
After a while, he learned he could get his way by faking it. He would put his finger to the side of his mouth, which (at least at first) still got the desired reaction out of me but didn’t have that nasty barf side-effect.
But I figured out his little trick.
“HAH!” I said. “I’m smarter than you. I see what you’re doing — you’re putting your finger to the side of your mouth! Well, it’s not going to work.”
Whereupon he stuck his finger down his throat and threw up all over me.
Behold the face of cold cunning:
D.
Thirteen memories of Jake
I would have posted a lot more pictures, except the HP Scanner Gremlins are disgruntled this evening. Oh, well.
1. Karen was given a “3% lifetime chance” to conceive. In preparation for IVF, she had to get a baseline ultrasound to look for fibroids, etc.
The infertility doc’s partner did the ultrasound. “Well,” he said, “there he is.”
“There who is?” Karen asked in what I imagine was her Must Be Aggressive With Doctors voice.
There was Jake, of course. And there was egg on the infertility doc’s face. Um, so to speak.
2. Jake was a real kicker. Get me the hell out of here! he would scream.
Here’s a picture of Karen and her good friend Kira. Karen’s the pregnant one:
3. Karen had a relatively easy delivery. By the time she asked for the epidural, her doc told her, “Give me another five minutes and he’ll be out.”
Sorry, no crotch shots of the delivery. I remember thinking, No, for the love of God no, get him the hell out of there already. I suspect that was the last time Jake and I ever agreed about anything.
How big? 5 pounds, 2 ounces. For a comparison, this is a normal-sized pacifier:
4. Karen and I are hyper-rational types. We thought of ourselves as scientists back then, even though neither one of us made much dent on the world of science. Imagine our surprise when the post-partum parenting instincts kicked in.
Wow.
We argued over who would get the job of changing diapers — we both wanted to do it. (Yeah, that didn’t last.) We were like toddlers fighting over a new toy.
5. Jake had the best nanny. Julietta had raised three daughters of her own, and she treated Jake as if he were her fourth child. We wouldn’t have survived those first seven months without her.
6. Jake’s first word. Soon after arriving in San Antonio, the three of us were having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. Or, rather, Karen and I were having lunch, and Jake was having a bottle.
I pointed at a young couple at a neighboring table: 20-something gal in short-shorts, guy with handlebar moustache and baseball cap. “Bubba,” I said to Jake. “Buh . . . buh.”
“Bubba!” said Jake, who had never before uttered a syllable.
“Great, Jake!” we said. “Do it again! Buh . . . buh.”
Nothing.
Nothing at all for another two years. Now we can’t shut him up.
7. When he was about eighteen months, we took him to the San Antonio mall to buy new shoes. The saleswoman was a Hispanic gal with a low-cut top and ample cleavage. Karen and I watched open-mouthed as Jake grabbed two handfuls.
I imagine he was curious, never having seen anything quite like that before. The saleswoman laughed it off and seemed a whole lot less embarrassed than Karen or I. Afterwards, I told Jake, “You know, once you turn two, you won’t be able to get away with that anymore.”
8. Before he turned three, he figured out how to do things with the TV remote that we couldn’t do. Not content with Total Control Over Television, he tried to use the remote to shut off the room lights and the swamp fan. Then he pointed it at us, hit the off button, and laughed maniacally.
9. The kid has always had an amazing mind. You know that game, Tower of Babel? That’s the one with a stack of seven disks, one smaller than the next. You’re supposed to transfer the stack from one post to another, one disk at a time, never putting a larger disk on top of a smaller one.
Unbelievable would have been if he’d figured the puzzle out at age 2. Sorry, he’s not unbelievable. Amazing, however, was watching Jake play with it for two hours nonstop. Most adults don’t have an attention span like that.
10. And then there’s that puzzle with pegs and holes. You’re supposed to put the square pegs in the square holes, round pegs in the round holes, and so forth. Before he was one year old, he figured out how to do it the right way, but he did it that way only once. Forever after, he kept trying to figure out how to get the pegs to go into the wrong holes.
If we hadn’t seen him do it right that one time, I suppose we would have been pretty worried.
11. Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? I do. For two or three nights, I took Jake outside, put him on my shoulders, and pointed out the comet to him. I doubt he remembers this, but at the time, it seemed like an important thing to do.
12. Early religious instruction. One of the San Antonio synagogues had a fair — a Purim fair, if I remember correctly — so I took Jake to the fair to soak up some Yiddishkeit.
To this day, I regret not having a camera. They had set up a Jonah and the Whale ride: little kids climbed into the whale’s mouth, bounced around inside his stomach, and then slid out . . . well, you can guess how they slid out.
13. Twelve memories, and we haven’t even scratched Jake’s fourth year. I wanted to close on a recent photo, however. Here’s Jake, today, practicing Tae Kwon Do at the dojo (do they call ’em dojos?)
You know what to do. Leave a comment below and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Next week: Thirteen Things I Learned from Cosmo, Part Quatre.
Lyvvie? Gene Tierney. Definitely Gene Tierney. (Not Lyvvie’s most recent post, but how could I resist?)
Pat goes a-voting (don’t you Canadians know the election is in November?)
See Dean choke the bald giraffe
Darla introduces us to author Jim Butcher
Placate May’s screaming dreamer
Trish’s Thirteen Ghosts of Toronto
D.
Best picture ever.
Click on the photo to see the full-size, full-color pic.
We took this photo in April, ’96, at Huntington Gardens, one of the nicest places in LA (and about the only redeeming feature of the notorious robber baron’s villainy). Karen looks so happy in this, and Jake has such a precious “WTF?” expression, as if he were debating the wisdom of this whole life thing.
Had another cud-chewing memoirist bit in mind today but then I thought, Eff it. What’s really important? These two are really important.
Today is Jake’s day. No homework, except we’re “making him” watch Scotland, PA. (He read Macbeth earlier this year, so this movie should be a nice tie-in. Plus, it’s funny as hell.)
Afterwards, we’ll pick up cat food, make a run to the bank (the kid never spends any of his money. He likes to say he’s richer than we are. He certainly has less debt), and buy fudge.
And for once, tomorrow’s Thursday Thirteen is a chip shot: Thirteen Memories of Jake — with more photos.
D.
Looks like jelly, but it’s snot!
Snot, glorious snot.
But before I give you snot, go over to Michelle’s blog and sign up for her giveaway of Ellen Klages’ debut novel, The Green Glass Sea.
Ah, yes. What were we talking about? Snot.
Hang on. Snot’s good enough to wait for.
A while ago, Karen pointed to the bed and cried out, “Take me! Now!” Actually, she cried out, “There’s a degu and it just raced under the bed!”
Jake saw nothing. I saw nothing. I went downstairs to check the degu cage and Jake called after me, “We have four.”
Yeah, thanks. So I counted four degus.
“We must have five degus,” I told Karen. “Or else you saw a rat.”
Now our cat is prowling around the bedroom, searching for the rodent Karen hallucinated not one hour ago.
Snot below the fold.
You know you play too much World of Warcraft when . . .
Your son asks, “Why are you wearing your leopard armor?”
We got some dude off the street to model those undies. Really. Some guy who just happened to be hairy like me. I mean, you don’t really think I’d put my butt up on this blog, do you?
D.
More nekkid blogging
The Nekkid Challenge is still open, and I’m ashamed to add, Erin and her readers are leaving us in the dust. I can’t get Kate’s mom’s tush out of my head, but the rest of you have not been forthcoming.
Groan. Do I have to do everything around here? Karen, come over here a sec. I need your help.
More nudity below the cut.
They done good
When I came home today, my wife sung happy birthday to me while my son accompanied her on the didgeridoo:
What with all of us laughing and Jake insisting on getting the entire rendition done without mistakes, it took about thirty-four attempts before I got my song. Afterwards, we went out for sushi, and then we came back home to chocolate cake (which, cuz of my reflux probs, will have to wait until tomorrow).
I’m a very happy man.
D.
PS: This was Jake’s idea, by the way — pretty damned original, if you ask me. Also, he wants me to mention how he actually sung “Happy Birthday” through the didgeridoo. No mean feat.
Who else is (wo)man enough for the nekkid challenge?
Over at Writer’s BBS, there’s a custom for noobs: you gotta get nekkid. For those square BBSers, getting nekkid means telling something revealing about yourself.
Here in the blogosphere, getting nekkid means GETTING NEKKID. Hell, as for that other getting nekkid, I do it nearly every day I blog. But for the record, I recently gave you this:
Getting nekkid nekkid, that takes a special breed of cat. Or, should I say, Vixen. Yes, this evening, Dean’s very own SxVixen joined the esteemed ranks of nude bloggers. And not to be one-upped, Dean has done it, too. Nice legs, Dean, but next time smile for the camera. It’s not a high school football team portrait, for heaven’s sake.
Erin O’Brien got the ball rolling, today posting an historical review of nekkid-model- with-chair photography (and she’s right. Christine Keeler really is one hot babe). So the question stands: who is next?
Here’s my short list of folks I think might be just crazy enough to take the nekkid challenge:
Gabriele! Instead of a chair, you can use some strategically positioned chain mail.
Kate! Impress the hell out of your sons. Or squick them out, one of the two.
Kris! You’ve already given us clickable cleavage. Now we want a bit o’ thigh, too.
Candy! You’ll be the talk of the Smart Bitchery.
Monica! I would never forgive my own cowardice if I didn’t include you on this list. I figure you’ll either (A) oblige the request, or (B) come up here and kick my sorry ass. Either way, you’ll be satisfying a fantasy.
No guys on the list . . . imagine that. But of course, you have Dean and me. That should be enough manhood for the whole blogosphere.
D.
P.S.: If I didn’t put you on the list, please do not be offended. The more people I include, the greater the chance someone really will come out here and kick my ass . . . probably some smelly biker named Bubba.
Which is not one of my fantasies.