Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: July 2010
More photos
Now that I’ve figured out how to use our scanner, I’m a scanning fool.
Jake with his grandma
Happy days.
Jake does Avedon
Somewhere around age 5 or 6, Jake lost interest in photography. It’s a shame. I think his Lego infatuation deep-sixed all other interests.
Jake with his favorite food.
He’s in McCarren Airport, by the look of it. Boy mit pizza.
The family . . . shame these aren’t digital photos, you know?
D.
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.
Dreaming of pets
This happens to me regularly: I’ll dream of neglected pets. Call it unresolved guilt; I still wonder whether I could have or should have done more for the pets I’ve owned who have died on my watch. Snakes don’t handle big moves, nor do frogs. Lizards and frogs often have narrow climate requirements.
In these dreams, I’ll find cages with forgotten pets in a back room I don’t often check. Last night, I was trying to clean a cage in which I had added way too many species. There were poison dart frogs and anoles, a Chinese water dragon, a dumpy frog. While I was cleaning the cage, the lizards kept trying to make a break for it. The water dragon leapt out, I grabbed his back (taking care not to grab the notoriously detachable lizard tail) and some of the skin came off in my hands. In horror I examined my lizard, who was in obvious pain, trying to decide whether to suture the wound, dress it, or give it up and euthanize. I dressed it.
Toward the end of the dream, I noticed two snakes poking their heads out of the cage’s substrate: a red-tailed boa and an emerald tree boa (which we’ve never owned). Long forgotten pets who had somehow survived, possibly by munching on our other pets.
In real life we take care of our animals, of course, but in these dreams I am often guilty of unthinkable callousness: I have left cages without food or water for weeks or even months, only to discover that my pets have grown, reproduced, thrived without my help. No connection with reality, in other words. In the real world, some pets fail no matter how much effort I put out (like my two water turtles, purchased last year, who refused to eat anything I put before them).
We have always kept pets. The morality of keeping pets has always interested and troubled me. Once a pet is in the pet store, he’s already a captive. Am I doing a favor by buying him, knowing I stand a better chance to do right by him than the little kid with a passing whim? Or does my purchase merely provide positive reinforcement to an industry that continues to capture/breed and imprison wild animals?
The logical endpoint of that line of thought would leave me a vegan, of course. And that ain’t gonna happen unless I can figure out how to fix a vegetarian meal that doesn’t bore the hell out of me and everyone else in this household.
D.
Potty humor. Literally.
My nose/head still hurt and all I really want to do is sleep, but it’s only 9 PM, and I doubt I could convince Karen to go to bed that early. So that means you get more drivel from yours truly.
Are you familiar with the TNG Edits? Here’s an example (most aren’t quite this juvenile; phallic humor is more typical):
Here’s a link to the others. Go crazy, spend a few hours soaking in the wonderfulness of jandrewedits. One of the recurring jokes is Data’s artistic . . . um, abilities. Here’s a good one.
I wish I had the time and energy to do this kinda stuff.
D.