Smile When You Say Cheese

Two pounds of Swiss cheese, the better part of a bottle of sauvignon blanc, and bagettes well past their prime, all coupled over a flaming canister of neon-colored jelly -- you've got yourself an Alpine adventure! All the more so for Mom and Dad with a generous ramakin of German Kirsch on the side for good measure. (Just to help soften the bread, of course.)

I reminded the kids that in Zürich, the first person to lose their bread in the cheese gets to pick up the bill. Makes for much more strategic bread stabbings.

Cajoled and Corolla-ed

Change is hard. It should be deferred whenever possible. I have, for example, deferred getting a new car for approximately 20 years now. It has been a thing of pride for me. I bought my '94 Toyota Corolla when it was a year old and have been basking in transportational status-quo ever since. I would likely be basking for years more if it had been left to me. Unfortunately few things are these days. Stacy has this irrational regard for health and safety - this weird protective urge surrounding, if not me, our children. Potential death and dismemberment seem to really be hot spots for her. Seems a little over the top to me. She also seems to get a little out-of-sorts with the occasional breaking down in more questionable neighborhoods. A small engine fire and you will hear about it for weeks. Some people like the thrill of adventure. Not Stacy. Go figure.

I don't like change, but evidently I don't like Stacy being unhappy even more. Or so she tells me. After much prodding and pretty much having all the calls and appointments set up without my knowledge or consent, I was informed that I was to meet so-and-so at the Toyota dealer at 9:30am sharp on my hard-won Friday off. "Be prepared to go over the features you want and any options you will consider," I was told.

"Things that I like? You mean like familiar In-and-Out stains and driver's side upholstery that has had 20 years to perfectly accommodate my substantial behind?" I tried.

"You know what I mean. And call Stephanie at AutoLand as soon as you're done. She's broking our deal."

“Our deal? Isn't this my car? …I retract that question in light of your withering glare.”

My early morning meeting in that icon of American consumerism went well enough, I guess. A sales guy, who had evidently been read the riot act about being pushy, showed me around the lot and went over the various styles and options. I was stunned to learn that there are more things to consider than just color. I was also far more stunned to hear that the used car selection was pretty sparse – given the economic downturn of the past few years, the vast hordes of the cutting-edge crowds had been forced to give up their tendencies to trade out their cars every two years, so the supply of late-model used cars had pretty well dried up. (Imagine. People considering keeping their cars for a couple of years? What a concept!) The relative scarcity of good used cars had pretty much ensured that the prices for the few decent models available were within spitting range of the new version. Abomination! I have in 46 years never bought a new car. The wholesale plummeting of intrinsic value in the microsecond it takes for that new car to transition from the dealer driveway to the highway blacktop has always been more than I could financially stomach. More change! These are cruel times!

I left the dealers and called the broker, happy to have done my day’s duty and ready to return to my day-off of Minecraft and slovenliness. “So you’ve seen all the cars,” she said. “Great! Be here at 3:00 and we’ll get it all squared away.”

Squared away? All squared away? That sounded a little like haste. In my list of phobias, haste is a not-too-distance runner up to change. “Um. OK,” I said, pretty much resigning any further claims to manhood.

By 3:30 my hand was cramping from all the signatures and a surprisingly small cashier’s check weighed down with a considerable number of 0’s changed hands, considerably lightening my wallet. The dealer dude was there too and the next thing I know he’s tossed me a key and was showing my how to sync my phone with the Bluetooth in the new slate blue Corolla parked out front. Stacy and the kids suddenly appeared from nowhere, like the climax of a bad movie where the entire cast magically converges to the confusion of the befuddled protagonist. I must have blacked out at that point because the next thing I knew I was in the driver’s seat, the key in the ignition and the motor running and I realized I was driving down Crenshaw Blvd. As sound slowly crept back to my ringing ears I realized I was not alone in the car. “Go faster, Daddy! Look, I can roll down the windows, Daddy! Call Mom on your cell phone, Daddy! Can you find something better on the radio, Daddy?”

It was a transformative moment and within a few minutes I’d gotten a grip on myself and realized that not only could I embrace the moment, but that I must embrace the moment. I was driving a new car, in Southern California, and just like all the commercials insist, I was now, defacto, the hottest thing going. In one fell swoop I had transformed into someone hip, cultured, and stunningly good-looking. Hot blond women at red lights looked over at me and blushed and smiled. Other ruggedly hunkish guys in Porches gave me the knowing “well-done” look of a compadre in spirit. As the noise of the kids faded again into the background, I drove cockily home in a Corolla that had just shed 20 years, and I contemplated where I would find a broker to trade in Stacy.

Kicked to the curb.

The Papa and the Paparazzo

Between travelling for work and spending lots of long hours at the office, I've felt like I haven't seen much of the kids the last couple of weeks. This Saturday L had a morning of choir practice lined up, but N was wide open, so I figured it would be a good time to do some one-on-one boy time. I called home from work on Friday and asked Stacy to give N the heads-up that we would go do something on Saturday morning.

Last Christmas I had upgraded my digital camera, and N, being the next in line for a cool hand-me-down, scored my old digital SLR to play with. (L has not been neglected; she acquired my desktop computer for her room when I upgraded that last year.) I was a little anxious about giving a fairly nice and not exactly inexpensive camera to a kid, but I figured I had no further use for it and couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of trying to sell it for the 40 or 50 bucks I might be able to get for it. And at least N intends to be careful with his stuff. He isn’t, mind you, but at least he wants to be. When I called home on Friday I suggested that N get his camera ready and I would get out my new one and we would get up early on Saturday and go out to a park or marsh or somewhere and go shooting.

I got home at an obscene hour, so I didn’t have a chance to confirm the plan with N that night. At 6am Saturday morning I was awakened by a harsh electronic bleating across the hall, and soon I had N tugging on my hand urging me up. “Oh, yeah,” muttered Stacy, rolling over bleary-eyed. “He’s quite excited about it. He was talking about it all night long last night. He said he was going to set his alarm so we wouldn’t waste any time.”

Really? I thought. N can barely be dragged out of bed before eight with a team of Clydesdales.

We dressed and gathered our equipment. The places I’d first considered going to (the Madrona Marsh and the South Coast Botanic Gardens) were not open till 9 or 10am, so I talked N into going out for a fortifying breakfast first. (You need energy to keep that shutter button finger in top form.) N suffered the delay nobly and we loaded out camera bags and headed off to Norm’s around 7am. While waiting for our pancakes we got out the cameras and did some preliminary pre-checks. Batteries were good. Lenses and filters all intact. We briefly went over a few of the various modes and when to use them. We even got a few discrete restaurant test shots in.

We managed to finish our breakfast without getting faux maple syrup all over any high-tech equipment, but we were still a good hour out from being able to get in to any of the gardens of choice. So we drove up the hill to Del Cerro park to kill an hour shooting from the cliffs. We talked about when to use landscape mode, when to use portrait mode. N loved the macro setting that allowed you to get within an inch of a flower and take super-close-up shots. We sat on a bench and switched to our telephoto lenses and tried (fairly unsuccessfully) to shoot a red hawk that was playing in the thermals coming up the cliffs.

You may call this a beetle on a dog turd.  We call it art.

I figured by 9am when the Botanic Gardens opened that N would have had his fill and be ready to go home and play hockey or Minecraft, but no. He was insistent that we go to the gardens. It wasn’t a particularly spectacular day weather wise. It was kinda gray and overcast. Not bad weather for portrait shooting, but not fantastic for flowers and landscapes. But N didn’t care, and the roses at the South Coast Botanic Garden were riotous enough to defy the dreary lighting. I gave him a few pointers and a suggestion here and there on a shot, but really, he just did his thing. By the time we were both mutually tired out we had logged about 300 cumulative photos. I was a little stunned at how nicely done some of his shots turned out. He seems to have an eye for framing and composition, though we hadn’t talked much about that at all.

  

On our way home we stopped at a 7-Eleven for a treat. “Daddy, can I have the super-jumbo Slurpee?” he asked, pointing to the bathtub-sized offering at the far right end of the myriad of cup options.

“No, that’s too big,” I said, directing him to a cup much further down on the smaller end of the continuum. He uncomplainingly filled his half-cherry/half-lemonade Slurpee and sucked away at it contentedly. It wasn’t until we had paid and were getting into the car that he brought it up again.

“Thanks, Dad! This is the biggest Slurpee I’ve ever had! Mommy only lets me get the very smallest one.”

DISCLAIMER: All the pictures above were taken by N,

Unless, of course, they are pictures of N.  

(And OK, the Slurpee pic was from the internet...  Sue me.)