Mud-day, Mud-day, So Good to Me

Did YOUR school have a Mud Day!?!

N is so lucky. After a year of trying to keep the dirt off them, on his last day of school N's preschool teachers gave up all pretense and opened the flood gates. Or rather the mud gates... Mud, mud and more mud - all for the wallowing.

L, by virtue of having a "Sea Turtle" Room Mom for a mother, got to sneak in an join in the muck and mire. The normally non-dirt-averse kids seemed a little taken-aback at first and reluctantly stuck a toe in here or there. Eventually L took her role as bad-influence seriously and plunged into the pool head first. A drove of piglets followed frantically and soon the pools were bubbling, writhing pits of plastered preschoolers.

End-of-the-day hose down.

Cubby clean-out before the mud bath.

Some rare sibling cuddles.

Additional N-tries

A couple of days ago N and I were out on a Daddy/son errand. We were driving and N asked to play a CD that Stacy kept in the stereo. I don't remember what it was now, but it was something I knew and when it got to the chorus I belted it out to the windshield. On completion of the song I heard a discrete "ah-hem" from the car seat behind me that would have been a credit to the most judicious butler. "Daddy," he ventured ever so tactfully after I encouraged him. "when you do that it makes it sound like I don't want it to sound."



Tonight during dinner conversation Stacy made some reference to something that happened while N was "still in Mommy's tummy." This fascinated him and he wanted to hear more stories of his in-utero days.
Stacy told him how, while he was still in her tummy Daddy used to get right up to her tummy and talk to him. "Really?" he said, amazed. "What did he say?"

Every once in a while inspiration will strike like a lightning bolt from the blue and the perfect response will be on the tip of your tongue with no planning or forethought.

"What did he say?" asked N.

"Clean your womb!"

Go Doyyers, Go!

N's fifth birthday was last week and L's is a little over a week away, so one of our family birthday treats was to take them to their first L.A. Dodgers game, or the "Doyyers" as the team is affectionately or not-so-affectionately called by the locals. It was something we'd wanted to do for a while, and when we happened to score some tickets at a fund raiser for the kids' school it all came together nicely.

The team has had a pretty dismal season so far with lots of bad press. A Giant's fan was attacked and beaten practically to death on opening day; the celebrity divorce case of the team's owners, Frank and Jamie McCourt and the growing gang presence and association with the team has been dragging the team down in both reputation, attendance and financial stability. The drama as been such a public spectacle that in April baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced that the MLB would be seizing control of the team due to "deep concerns for the finances and operations" of the Dodgers. Given those cheery circumstances and the current 4-game losing streak, Saturday evening we hit the freeway to Dodger Stadium, joining the couple dozen other Angelenos still willing to watch, and caught the 7:10 game with the Houston Astros.

But once you get in a baseball stadium the murders in the parking lot all seem to fade away. Don't get me wrong, the game was truly abysmal (Dodgers died 0-7 to make it a 5-game losing streak), but it was wonderful time anyway. N brought his foam Dodgers hand and L her Dodgers hat and both immediately jumped into the cheering and yelling. Neighbors on all sides were liberally whacked with the foam hand multiple times in N's exuberance. I spent most of the game trying to explain the goings-on of the game to N, which is ironic, given I can't usually tell a home run from a touchdown. By the end of the night he seemed to grasp that a good pitch that the batter missed was a strike, and a bad pitch the batter let go by was a ball. (And while I'm on the subject, N's pitch during "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" was better than anything we saw on the field.) N did have a tough time keeping score though. He kept looking at the digital clock on the marquee and could not be convinced that it wasn't 8 to 32. It seemed the opposing team would score another run every minute, which actually wasn't too far from the truth.

Some particularly memorable moments:
- I got 1.2 sips of my $10 beer before N knocked it down the seats in front of us
- Stacy was particularly amused when the organist started playing music from Phantom of the Opera. A veritable calliope jauntily playing "Music of the Night" at double tempo was something neither of us expected.
- We got one large soda for the kids to share, but I made the mistake of not watching N for 10 seconds and L ended up with bupkis.
- Stacy bought a bag of peanuts from the vendor. Evidently we've never explained to N that you have to shell peanuts. Much spitting and many tears.

As we progressed to the 7th inning stretch, the excitement did not flag, but unfortunately took on that manic, kinetic quality that signifies a way-overtired kid. N was relocated to my lap to spare the neighbors bruises and lacerations. The foam Dodger fist was calmly placed in the beer puddle under the seats for similar reasons. L was thirsty. N was hungry. The Dodgers were losing. And Daddy was still grumpy about his beer. We survived to sing "God Bless America," but then left our Dodger dog wrapper and peanut shell bedecked seats behind and headed for the doors. That's when the tears started in earnest for L remembered that she's seen a cotton candy vendor a kilometer away and decided that was all that could make her life complete.

A city defeated

A Bard, a Brie and a Baguette

Last night was the formal opening of the 14th season of Shakespeare by the Sea; they presented the first of the year's two selections, "Much Ado About Nothing" at Point Fermin Park in San Pedro. "King Lear" will be assuming the throne in a couple of weeks. Catching the performance was the culmination of many years of pledges and promises.

Every year we have a summer get-together with our good friends Troy and Brittany Martin who live up in the rarefied air north of Monterrey. They travel down to the L.A. area to spend time with Troy's family and work the beaches. (Troy life-guards.) Troy and I are kindred spirits of sorts and have evolved an annual ritual where we sit around with good food, plenty of wine, and mounds of stinky cheeses and discuss philosophy, literature, theology and culture in general. We are very intellectual and it's all very high-brow of us. Now that we're both married with burgeoning families, the event is family-friendly with a lot more food, a little less wine, and a lots of interruptions in the brilliant analysis to kiss skinned knees, to wipe up spilled Kool-ade, and to admire interesting bugs and leaves brought by for our inspection. Thank goodness our kids have adopted the same sick fascination with rank dairy-products, so our get-togethers still feature plenty fruit of the cow.

Every year we have stated emphatically that we needed to get together and go to Shakespeare by the Sea, but every year there's some scheduling snafu that prevents it. Until this year. We finally got to go and get our fill of Elizabethan rabble-rousing, and since it's held in a park at 8pm, there was plenty of opportunity for a pre-show picnic. The Bard and stinky cheeses! What more could you ask for? Forsooth, there is nothing!

Our times with Troy and Brittany are so rare and so fun that we tend to get engrossed in the conversations and forget about all else. We brought a camera to the park with us, but no one had the presence of mind to actually take any pictures. The show runs from 8:00pm to a little after 10:00, so the kids are pretty wiped by the end of it, but it is gratifying to watch the entire brood locked into the show, eyes fixed on the stage, laughing and giggling when everyone else does, and taken-aback when the big dramatic scenes hit. I expected the kids would eventually get bored and sack out on Mommy or Daddy's lap, but the entire Martin/Perkins set were engaged to the merry end. (It was a comedy, after all.) We had some grumps in the church service this morning, but at least the evening went pretty darn smooth.

One additional benefit of the events last night was that when I was picking up the bovine aromatics for the evening, I picked up a few extra hunks of my old Swiss favorites - Emmentaler and Gruyer. Tonight they got shredded and drowned in some exceedingly cheap white wine and two rather suspicious kids got to slurp up the resulting goo on chunks of day-old baguette. N seemed perfectly happy piercing his little bread cubes on his fondue fork and swirling it around the molten lava, but that seems to be the extent of his interest. His plate had a dozen cheesy blobs lying uneaten and forlorn on it when we finally wrapped up the meal.

Funion with the Grunion

Yesterday we told the kids they had to go to bed early; we had a big surprise waiting for them that would require them to be up in the wee hours of the night. This of course, insured that absolutely no sleeping actually took place at 7:00pm when we put them down - rather yielding instead a thinly veiled buzz of chatter and electricity bundled under bedclothes. Eventually the appointed hour of mystery arrived and the well-rested children (Not!) were loaded into the car with blankets, jackets and flashlights, and we set off on our way to our surprise destination. L and N were vibrating with anticipation as we hit the Harbor Freeway and drove in the dark down toward the sleeping realms of San Pedro. They didn't quite know what to expect when we pulled into the parking lot of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium at the shore of the harbor.

California has its fair share of natural profundities. Among the organic oddities are a small silvery fish not unlike a sardine. These fish, the California grunion, are particularly noteworthy for their California swinger sex life. Each spring, for two or three nights following the full or new moon, these otherwise mild-mannered and respectable fish, fling themselves upon the sandy beaches of So Cal where they wile away twenty minutes of slithering, sliding conjugal bliss before making the flop of shame back to the anonymous depths of the sea. (What happens on the seashore, stays on the seashore.) Grunion runs, as they are called, are so precisely timed that they can be predicted to with an hour - it's one of those freaky things of nature where the animal kingdom slyly lets us know that they are much more on top of the situation than we gave them credit for, and that we should be worried because they probably have something else more sinister up their sleeves. (Or scales, as the case may be.)

We got to the site a good hour or two before the predicted run because the aquarium had all kinds of exhibits and demos for the grunion-uninitiated. We saw a movie clearly made in the 50's where the crisp, big-voiced narrator over a jaunty soundtrack described very matter-of-factly, in details that made us squirm like our focus fish, all the gory intricacies of the fishy fantasy, using words like "spawn" and "milt." Feeling a little dirty, we then went through some of the museum exhibits and displays where we continued to fail to shake the imagery from the movie.

In the courtyard awaiting the big event.

One demo held out in the courtyard was particularly fascinating. Each group was given a little baby-food jar with what looked to be a small clump of sand in it. These were sandy grunion eggs, we were told. A volunteer came by with a pitcher of sea water and poured a little in each jar. We examined the brew, which looked pretty much like what a lump of sand soaked in water would be expected to look. "Agitate your jars gently," we were told. The docent demonstrated covering the jar and swirling it, surprisingly ungentlely, for the crowd. "Now look at it." We did and as the swirling sand slowly subsided all of a sudden all these tiny little translucent commas began to spring out and dart around. It looked, if I can harken back to another 50's video allusion, much like the microscope view of what they probably showed you in the much-too-candid sex-ed videos of the day, if you catch my drift. Again, I felt a little dirty, but at least it was a fascinating sense of moral corruption.

Baby grunion.

While we were exploring one of L's favorite classmates, K, and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka, arrived, the meeting having been prearranged by the Mom's earlier that day. While the kids orbited us in celestial frenzy we adults waited expectantly as the night deepened and unspeakable things began happening on the beaches outside.

The Tanakas and the Perkins

A great white, clearly biting off more than he can chew.

Eventually the moment of truth arrived and the docents lead us down to the beach in the near pitch dark. We were lined up on the sand a few feet from the tideline and were told to keep all our flashlights off and our jumping about to a minimum. (We complied with the flashlight part.) They wanted to let the run build, because evidently the fish are a little shy. Wouldn't you be? Every few minutes they said, "OK, turn on your flashlights!" and everyone would flood the beach to be greeted with a scene worthy of Imperial Rome at its most decadent. The beach was full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of small silvery wigglies getting their fishy groove on.

Pretend you can actually see hundreds of silver shapes writhing in utter abandon.

Grunion are evidently considered a delicacy. The spawning season had actually been going on since April, but tonight was the first night in which the fishing season opened for people who actually wanted to catch and eat the little buggers. The law, which restricts the season to June, allows you to catch all you want (provided you have a license if you are over 16), but you have to do so by hand. So there were quite a lot of people there with buckets and a few with napkins around their necks. After the run had built to a peak the docents turned us loose and there was a wild stampede to the beach with folks pulling writhing romantics from their affairs and plopping them into their buckets anticlimactically. L and N and K plunged into the fray with the rest of them and quickly scored handfuls of the shameful spawners. (They were all subsequently spared and told to return to the sea and sin no more.) N was a particularly formidable hunter/gatherer and would dart suddenly off in some dark direction and return back smiling and dripping with his hands full of fish. If we had any video I'd submit it as an audition for the next iteration of The Deadliest Catch.

All in all it didn't take too long for the beach to be cleared of everything except wet sandy children, leaving only the long fussy trudge to our respective cars to complete the evening. Striped and dusted, the kids were piled into their booster seats and covered with a blanket where they relived the thrills and spills of the evening while we waited to escape the parking gridlock. For some reason, probably L.A. county budget cuts, they only had a single parking attendant taking the tickets and parking fees at the front entrance. With hundreds of cars, all jockeying for position, not unlike the sex-starved fauna of earlier, getting out of the lot was a major ordeal. The park rangers, trying to stem a riot, drove through the parking lots announcing that the wait for the gate would be 45 minutes. They were being optimistic. We parked the car, turned off the lights and put back our seats and just watched all the best and worst of humanity unfold in the writhing lines of cars trying to get out of the parking lot 30 seconds earlier than one another. The kids seemed only briefly interested in the social commentary and soon found other more productive things to do with their time.

Bluebells and Greenbacks

Last year L's school had a fund raiser event and I donated a custom oil painting for their silent auction - I would paint the winning bidder an oil painting of anything they wanted.  The painting ended up bringing in $100 and the winner ended up being the parents of one of Stacy's piano students (small world).  It took them a couple months to decide what they wanted me to paint, but eventually they found a subject and I slaved away for another couple of months and wrapped it up this week!

Here's the original source picture.

I offered another custom oil painting for this year's auction and this time it went for $125.  The winners haven't contacted me yet, so the future subject is still a big mystery.  With my luck the winners will probably want a black velvet Elvis.