Storming the Castle (Repeatedly)

I have been dreading this post with a passion: a full week of family in town (Mimi, Grampy, sister Sue, brother-in-law Vic, niece Aubrey and nephew Garrett), with every day packed with some overly-adrenalated activity. This could either be a tome, or an exercise in literary minimalism.

Minimalism it is!

Saturday:
After a rather brutal travel day, the family arrived in Burbank at, like midnight. They are on their own. No way I'm going all the way to Burbank at midnight. That's what rental cars and GPS are for. (In our household unconditional love is off the clock at 10PM.) They had rented a vacation bungalow in Redondo Beach and went there directly, so aside from the phone call in the wee hours saying they'd landed, we didn't get to hang with them.

Sunday:
None of the world travellers are awake enough to go to church with us, so we grouped up at our house for dinner that afternoon along with all of Stacy's family - Grandma, Poppa, Aunt Claudia, Aunt Joyce, Mr. Jay, and honorary Grandma Flo. (16 people in all.)

It was nigh-unto Aubrey's birthday, so we used the gathering to commemorate. Cake and bubbles and hyperactivity!

Thank goodness for beer.
...and sangria.

...oh, and scotch.

Monday:
The games begin in earnest. Disneyland in all its crowd-controlled glory. Spring break has sprung and the Mouse is glutted.

We started with a "character breakfast" where we were fortunate enough to eat French toast and Eggs Benedict while periodically being interrupted by large woodland creatures who insisted upon hugging our children. Fun.

After that it was the park full-bore. The Disney Deathmarch! Lines deterred us not, for we were on a mission. No teacup unridden, no small, singing, ethnic stereotype unheeded, no bathroom unvisited.

It was here that Aubrey battled the forces of evil incarnate and N first began to betray his unorthodox fondness for goats. (We had to ask him several times to stop kissing them.)

Sue and Vic are avid Disney-doers; us, not so much. Our immediate family and Mimi and Grampy were done well before the fireworks, but Sue and Vic and their young-uns had to be forcibly extricated from the park at closing by armed security guards (presumably all wearing cute, cuddly cop costumes, of course). I tried my best to instill my bad attitude on all those around me, but alas, the Happiest Place on Earth^® won out and everyone seemed to tragically have a good time.

Tuesday:
Hardly a day of recovery - a picnic at Redondo Beach with plenty of time to embed our bathing suits with fine-grit sand at the waterline so that the ride home was especially tearful.

Wednesday:
A jaunt to sunny South Central LA, land of USC, gang shooting and (unfortunately) the California Science Center. We got to see a really cool IMAX 3-D movie^* about sea critters - the highlight was watching two cuttlefish mate. Quite fascinating. I guess that's why they call them cuttlefish.

After that it was a brisk walk over to the Natural History Museum where we got to see some pachyderms a la taxiderm, a pretty amazing collection of gem stones, both natural and cut, and got to see real-life paleontologists as they chisel away at an honest-to-goodness real T-rex skeleton recently uncovered. (Tommy the T-rex! Whoo-Hoo!) I have to turn off my sarcasm generator for a moment to admit that it actually was pretty cool.

Do-it-yourself Dinosaur Dig

Once again my immediate family's inherent whimpiness was made evident. Mimi, Grampy, Stacy, L & N and I were walking zombies by 3pm and hit the road for home. Sue and Vic and team burned it up with another couple of hours back in the Science Center.

We all met up later at a Brazilian churrascaria in Redondo with Uncle Ray and Aunt Karla to further explore the animal kingdom with some well-roasted members of the Bovinæ subfamily.

Thursday:
We are officially declared old-fogies. Sue, Vic, Aubrey and Garrett are off to Disneyland for Day 2. Mimi and Grampy, still somewhat catatonic from Day 1, came over and napped at our house all day. It was a good day. Nary a picture taken!

Friday:
Back to the front lines! Disneyland Day 3! (Actually it was California Great Adventure, which we'd never seen.) What can be said that hasn't already been stated?

I'll just leave it with pictures.

California is very considerate to have both my kid's initials within its panoply of letters. Can you imagine the whining and moaning if it were not so?

Saturday #2:
The fam's flight to Atlanta was at 7:00AM out of Burbank. (The unconditional love schedule constraint kicked in again.) Having endured a week of non-stop sugar and adrenalin, L and N moped and cried most of the day. Melt-downs abounded so bedtime was blissfully early.

Let the recovery begin.


^*SIDE NOTE: Just now, as I was putting this page together L saw the photo of the IMAX film poster (which I downloaded from the IMAX website, by the way). She was immediatly all seriousness and furrowed brows, and she glared at me accusingly: "Daddy, they said no flash photography! Why did you take it?"

Digging It with the Primrose Posse

There has been a flurry of activity about the place today. Mimi and Grampy are coming tomorrow, along with Auntie Sue, Uncle Victor and cousins Aubrey and Garrett, and the house is being savagely beaten into cleanly submission. This includes a long-needed overhaul of a couple of our flowerbeds and the planting of some long-coveted citrus trees.

Around 9:00 this morning I loaded up the kids and went to a couple of nurseries and stalked up on chlorophyll. (Stacy stayed home and scrubbed and vacuumed the house in a fevered cleaning frenzy.) I did my shopping without the crippling guilt I usually have buying plants. In years gone by I was sorely oppressed by the sad knowledge that, with the ringing of the cashier's register, any plant purchased by me had formally entered its final days (rarely weeks) of happy vegetative life. It was a rare veggie indeed that still had a sickly green frond at the one month mark. But now, with a wife with a green forearm, and more importantly - an automatic watering system! - my plant purchases actually have a fighting change of maturing beyond the seedling stage.

Stacy, evidently on the Weeders Support and Counseling Hotline

Once we got home it was it was shovels to the dirt! Stacy and L were in charge of the hanging baskets, while N and I assaulted the north flowerbeds. I dug up the weedy stuff we wanted to pitch, while N pulled the leaves off all the things we wanted to keep. For some unexplained reason Stacy's orchids and calla lilies go gang-busters on that side of the house. I actually had to dig up thirty or so calla lily volunteers because they had so taken over the bed. In their place went some hostas, a cyclamid or two, and a healthy sprinkling of primroses.

As we worked the beds we turned over countless earthworms, much to the children's delight. L demanded I alert her to each new worm discovered and on each sighting she would run over and rescue the afflicted invertebrate. She would then take a leaf (hopefully one that N had already pillaged and not a fresh victim), pat a layer of dark dirt on it, and shove the bewildered worm onto it - a worm bed. If I found a particularly small worm we would have to stop all gardening and just dig until a big "mommy worm" could be found to comfort the toddler. As the time went on I noticed N's lips getting dirtier and began to get concerned. I was somewhat, but not fully comforted when I got him to assure me that he wasn't eating the worms, but only kissing them.

At one point N got all excited because he found a worm on his own. He kept it in his tightly clenched fist for an hour, talking to it and letting it eat leaves and other assorted worm appetizers. At some point he decided he needed his hand for something and asked me to hold his worm. What he dropped in my hand, however, was not an earthworm, but some vile, semi-translucent, maggoty larva that he had been cuddling with the whole time. Stacy, fortunately had gone in the house before I made that discovery. She would not have reacted well.

Once the beds were done and my garden gnomes well worn out and in their own flowerbeds, I tucked all the beached earthworms I could find back into the planter and went around to the south yard by myself to do some heavy digging and terraforming. That yard is pretty much out of sight from the street and all the yard areas we generally use, so it has been relegated to be our throw-away yard for the last couple of years. With cinder blocks and old toys and a half-dozen rusting barbeque grills and smokers hiding among the shoulder-high weeds and junk grass, it screams "redneck!"

I've been planning on reclaiming the area for God and country for a while now, and I actually starting digging it up and pulling out the weeds a couple of weeks ago. I buried a couple more hours digging and raking this afternoon and now have it about two-thirds of the way done - done enough to plant the two citrus trees I'd finally let myself buy at the nursery this morning. A semi-dwarf Oro Blanco grapefruit and a dwarf Meyer lemon now grace the cleared stretch, with a newly installed run of the sprinkler system to keep them from going the way of all flora.

Our throw-away yard about a year ago.

Today: Our soon-to-be citrus orchard.

I am trying not to think about how it will be two or three years, at best, before I can expect anything to come of them, but I'm nevertheless quite proud of my soon-to-be monstrous citrus harvests. (The remaining one-third of the yard yet to be cleared will house a navel orange as soon as I can get to it.)

Bloom, baby, bloom! Daddy needs some lemonade!

The Bill of the Ball

Last week L's good friend Gracie gave her a number of very beautiful and elaborate princess dresses. L was thrilled of course.

What did she do with them, you ask?...




I'm going to just chalk this up to Mardi Gras week and the whole Carnival mentality and just assume that this is all perfectly normal and that there's nothing to be worried or concerned about here...

Rest in Pisces

We are sad to report the untimely passing of a beloved family member this morning. McQueen Perkins went to the great fishbowl in the sky in the wee hours of the morning. He is survived by what is assumed to be his sister, Ariel Perkins, though truth be told, no one really knows what the sex of either was, or really, which one went belly-up for that matter. We're all a little surprised the other one hasn't keeled yet too.

But we're all very broken up about it, nonetheless.



Cash donations will be accepted in lieu of flowers.

On the Outs with Brussels Sprouts

N is not a culinary adventure seeker. He likes things he knows and that he knows he likes. He was therefore a little put out by the vegetable of the evening, Brussels sprouts. I tried my hardest to make them as unhealthy as possible, but still couldn't appeal to him. (How can anyone not like Brussels sprouts tossed in onions, garlic, and bits of bacon?!?) Even our recited mantra "Brussels sprouts bring muscles out!" failed to endear him to the little green orbs.

It was only the warning of the loss of an after-dinner cupcake and threat of my muscles coming out that encouraged him to eat a single sample.





L on the other hand, sucked up big time, reminding Stacy and I repeatedly of how she had very obediently eaten all her Brussels sprouts.

Picture This

L wore a familiar dress to church today, so we paused to take a trip down memory lane. The original picture was taken a year ago last week.