Yes, I Know Christmas Is Over, But...

...this song has been running through my head all week.



Bethlehem Joy,
Bethlehem Fiesta.
Bethlehem Joy,
I want to be there.

To you this day a child is born
and He shall be a king.
Come and celebrate with me.
Bethlehem Fiesta.
Bethlehem Fiesta.

Merry Christmas!

A Four-Generation Portrait

It's been over 4 years in the making, but I finally finished a major portrait I've been working on!

It's a four-generation portrait of mother-daughters:  L on the bottom left, Stacy of course in the center, her mother Lynne top left, and Lynne's mother Ann (Grandma Ann) on the right.  This was one of the very first paintings I foolishly attempted after starting classes, but I had very high expectations and quickly realized that I'd bitten off more than I was capable of chewing.  Knowing I was not yet up to the task, I shelved it to work on other things until I could get some other portraits under my belt.  About six to nine months ago I dusted it off (quite literally) and had another go at it.

The sad thing about the delayed timeline is that Grandma Ann passed away about six months after I started the painting (about a month before N was born) and never got to see it.  She did see the source picture I took it from and "ooh"-ed and "ahh"-ed over it mightily, but I sure wish she could have seen the finished painting.  She was a woman who followed the dictum that, if you can't say something nice about something, you dug in your heels and said something even nicer.  Flowery and sweet, Stacy and I affectionately called her the Queen of the Superlative.  Every meal was the best one she'd ever tasted; every flower was the most beautiful she had yet encountered - which for a woman in her nineties is saying something.  Her favorite syllable was "-est."  I have little doubt my artist ego would have been well stroked had Grandma Ann gotten to see her portrait.

Stacy and I have a favorite Grandma Ann memory:  We were down at her house in Sun City, California for Thanksgiving one year and Ann proudly displayed a new orchid she had received recently.  It was, of course, the most beautiful orchid she'd ever seen and she'd been watering it faithfully, and didn't you know, that very morning a new bud had opened up.  Stacy and I took one look at the orchid and looked at each other quizzically.   It was clearly a plastic orchid.  "Ann," said Joe, her pleasantly gruff former engineer husband, "It's FAKE!"

"Oh no, dear," insisted Grandma Ann.  "I'm sure it's real, come look."

Practical Joe and doe-eyed Ann spent the next several minutes examining and staking their claims on the floral taxonomy while the rest of us sat back and enjoyed the show, knowing we'd been blessed with another superlative Grandma Ann moment.

Joe, L, Lynne, Stacy & Ann

Studies in Structural Sucrose

N has a wicked cough this morning so he stayed home from church; since Stacy and L had obligations already I was relegated to staying home and entertaining him.  I've learned this morning that there's only so much Candy Land a sane adult can tolerate before he no longer can claim to be in that statistical focus group any longer.  Playing Candy Land with N is not particularly physically demanding, mind you.  He picks out your color.  He holds all the cards.  He flips them and announces the move.  He moves your piece as well as his around the board.  I am reduced to passively sitting and watching.  There are, I suppose, all kinds of real-life parallels involving over-indulgence in candy and a sedentary lifestyle...

Following the umpteenth game, when I finally had my virtual diabetic seizure and called the games off, we spent our time analyzing the Candy Castle and trying to better determine exactly how it was built.  The moat is, of course, molten chocolate.  N was quick to point out the gumballs from the gumball turret cascade down a hidden tube to be flung into the moat on the chocolate water wheel.  N was stumped to identify the flat candies that made up the paddles of said water wheel.  He evidently has not yet been introduced to Jolly Ranchers...  The towers flanking each side of the cake castle are clearly made of chocolate and "banilla" softserve ice cream and crowned with a heavily frosted cupcake.  We discussed the implied culinary technical advances that permit such structural integrity in ice cream on such an obviously sunny day.

After a few minutes I think N started getting a little creeped out by my geek fascination in the discussion and wandered off, leaving me to ponder by myself whether the moat is perpetually heated to maintain its vibrant sheen and silky viscosity, or if it is actually some inferior grade of commercial cocoa-flavored product specifically designed for mass production and a very low melting point.  Anyone interested in taking up the discussion can feel free to contact me.

Very N-deering

I had to run to the grocery store this evening and decided to drag N along.  He insisted on wearing his reindeer antlers.  The little dude was a total babe-magnet!  Not that I was looking, mind you.

(But I sure should have borrowed more people's kids when I was single...)

Happy Thanksgiving!

My Literary Legacy

You're always hearing stories of people going through someone's attic and finding some precious treasure. A long lost Rembrandt. A never-before-seen manuscript from a famous long-dead celebrated author. I've often wondered what people might discover of me when I'm long dead and gone. In going through some old files this weekend, I think I may have gotten a clue.

I vaguely remember one finals week at Georgia Tech and being particularly inclined to procrastinate in my studies. The world will likely never know the outcome of those finals, but now, thanks to my afternoon archeology, the world will forever have a digital preservation of one of my finer literary achievements. I submit to you a short collection of haikus dedicated to that most mystical of meats:

Spam

My kitty and I
Share a delightful repast:
Cabernet and Spam.

Stuff not of this earth:
Delectable angel food?
Alien vomit!

Can I go on? No.
Life has no meaning for me:
My wife ate my Spam.

A long winter’s nap.
My head dances with visions.
Visions of Spam-plums.

Do they distrust you?
Fear you? Hate you , my precious?
They fear your pinkness.

There’s nothing in life
That wouldn’t be made better
With a bit more Spam.

A physicist’s dream
Neither solid nor liquid.
The future is Spam…

Spam saves you time.
There’s no need to digest it;
Glue it to your hips.

My eyes mist over.
I slice another morsel
And think of Gordy.

You seem so secure,
Yet you quiver, as do I.
The humanity.

You can thank me later.

Oedipus Rising

I was working in the kitchen this morning when N runs up to me with a bunch of random toys shoved in a cupcake mold.

"Daddy, I made you a cupcake.  Eat it!"

Not wanting to be rude, I took the cupcake and "swallowed" it whole.

"Ha Ha!  You ate it, Daddy!"  he gloated.  "Now you're going to DIE!!!"  And he trotted happily off, quite satisfied with himself.

I'm going to have to keep an eye on this one.

The La Brea Tad Poles

I've lived in L.A. for about 15 years now; Stacy has lived out here pretty much all her life.  In all this time neither of us had ever been to the La Brea Tar Pits.  Somewhat amazed at this realization, we figured it was high time to see the sludge up close and personal.  A beautiful, crisp sunny November day -- what could be more romantic that taking my Sweetie for a nice little stroll among bubbling pools of hydrogen sulfide-belching asphalt?  I had the day off, and L and N were both out of school too, so we piled into the minivan, hit the Harbor Freeway to the Santa Monica Freeway, burning up enough of yet another form of crude oil distillate to get to the westside.  We stopped off of Fairfax for lunch at the Farmers' Market, people-watching the fashionistas just long enough for Stacy to sink into a funk about how unstylish and untrendy she imagines she's become.  I attempted a couple of quick comments about how pretty I thought she was, but otherwise wisely held my tongue.  There really is no safe response for a male in such a situation.

L being mauled by a giant sloth.

Around 2:00 we got to Hancock Park, home of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as the bubbling puddles of petrochemical festerings.  We spent our first few minutes there walking around the park and gardens.  There were lots of randomly scattered statues of Ice Age mammals begging to be assaulted.  If the flesh and blood versions were no better than the bronze at fending off attacks by small, hairless, upright primates, it really is no wonder they all went the way of the VHS machine.

Wolfgang.

The George C. Page Museum, within Hancock Park, is wonderfully child-friendly, housing all kinds of creepy fossil skeletons extracted from the tar, along with lots of cool hands on exhibits.  One we especially liked involved several large plungers submerged in a vat of viscous asphalt.  You were invited to pull the plunger up out of the thick, clinging muck and discover just how immobile you would be up to your knees in an asphalt pool.  We saw a wall that showed row after row of fossilized Dire wolf skulls, each of which had been pulled from the pits (my picture shows only about a quarter of the ones on display), some reconstructed sloths in all their inactivity, and a number of mammoths that were, well, mammoth.  We also got to watch a short little movie where a snarky narrator rebuked us for calling  periodontally enhanced felines "saber-tooths tigers."  "They're saber-tooth cats!" he scolded.  Too bad he wasn't eaten by one.

L and N, unaware that the saber-tooth stalking them from
behind seems to be desperately in need of a good meal.

After the museum we went back outside to seek out the main attraction - the pits themselves.  N was absolutely fascinated and grabbed the map, insisting on leading us around to the various sites.  For some reason he couldn't quite get his arms around the term "tar pits."  Half the time he was directing us to the La Brea Tide Pools.  Then it was the La Brea Tad Poles.  Regardless, at any little spot of innocent mud in the grass he would shrink back, deadly afraid of joining the George C. Page collection.  I told him that he didn't have to worry; that I'd smeared the bottom of his shoes with canola oil before we left, but that didn't seem to comfort him.  I think he was worried about becoming extinct.

An unfortunately common sight:  A life and death struggle played
out in front of the thoroughly unconcerned traffic of Wilshire Blvd.

L was able to determine incontrovertibly that it was
the Daddy Mammoth that got stuck in the tar.
Don't know how she did it.  There were no anatomical
indicators that I could discern...

A hunt-frenzied L trying to chase me
into a pit so she can score her kill.

One of the pits, No. 91, is an active excavation site and responsible for hundreds and hundreds of bones recovered.  No one was actually working when we swung by, but you could see some of the skeletons marked that they were currently extracting.  (Including a giant sloth.)

By the end of the afternoon Stacy was feeling a little "tarred,"  (Ha ha!  Get it?  Tarred?  Haw Haw!) so we reboarded our fossil-burner and followed the ubiquitous asphalt slurries back down to the South Bay.  It was one of those stunningly bright almost-winter days where the late afternoon light seems to make everything seem just a little nicer than you know it really is.  I almost found L.A. pretty on our way home.  Almost.

Homeside Hauntings

Stace told me I have to post the Halloween pictures before Thanksgiving. Her obedient chronicler complies...



As per our gradually solidifying tradition, we generally wait until Halloween day to massacre our pumpkins.

  

Is it just me, or does the one on the right look a little like Nancy Pelosi?

Then we must make our mandatory red-carpet appearance at Grandma Flo's:

Then its home for an early swamp-monster macaroni dinner:

Again, the one on the right:  Nancy Pelosi?

Then the call to stations - make-up and wardrobe!  STAT!:

Stacy has her cowardly ears on now.

Soon it was show time!  L's friend from school, R, came over with her daddy Mark.  We pretended R was the good witch Glinda, but she wasn't too keen on us co-opting her Sleeping Beauty costume for our nefarious purposes.

Then we went to check out the Lord's wardrobes next door.  They always put on a good show.

And finally Aunt Claudia perched the dragon on top of the car (to guard the pathway to candy) while she established herself at the door, and we set off to haul in the booty.  

The rest of the evening was far too terrifying to document here.  (That, and we didn't bring the camera.)

Some Serious Gift Boxes

While this may indeed be true, they sure do come with a whole lot of extraneous packaging...

The Halloween Hype-Up

Our pre-Halloween excursions this year involved:

1) Building a spooky haunted gingerbread house with Aunt Claudia.
2) Visiting the local pumpkin patch.

Below you will find a plethora of exciting and dramatic photos of the events. (At least I hope the photos are exciting and dramatic, as my retelling will likely be neither.)


The High-Calorie Haunted House

Master architect Claudia surveys the engineering schematics.

Stacy supervises the cheap sub-contracted
construction labor (all paid under the table).

We suspect this one was pilfering lots of the decorative hardware for his own uses.

Got kind of aggressive toward the end.  I don't think we'll hire them again.

Even the job sup seemed a little concerned about the subs.

The Land of Ubiquitous Squash

What other purpose could they possibly have
had in mind for a hay-bail runway?

Zenyatta really regrets not winning that last race now!

Yes, that is a pony.  Like we wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

Gramlynne with her usual animal magnetism.
You just know she's wondering if they can do agility.

The rash started showing up about 5 hours later...

The fingers were eventually recovered in stomach #3.

I will pass up the opportunity to make a "stalker" reference.

Poor goats.  Would you want to live with
roosters perched perpetually over you?

Note how it specifically
does not preclude great
aunts...