Why Don't I Blog?

I remember back when I was still married to the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster, I'd see blog posts with titles along the lines of "Why I Blog."

I was new to the concept myself, so I read a lot of these in an effort to figure out what sort of freak show I had signed up for.

I signed up for it, though. Did I ever. It seemed, in a way, like technology had created a niche I had been born for.

Over 2500 posts later, I find myself past my daughter's mid-January birthday having not blogged stuff from before Christmas.

It's a dramatic shift. But life is full of dramatic adjustments these days.

I've accumulated a stockpile of photos I took out of the blog-it instinct, such as this one taken at church with my new phone. I never thought I wanted a smart phone. Corinna thought I'd be pissed off with the thing, in fact, but it promptly grafted itself to my consciousness.

Anyway, the answer to why I haven't gotten around to these things is I got sort of distracted by moving, the holidays, and so on. The process of moving two households into one, the one being the smaller house, has created an effect best described as Hoarder Palace. I have a lot of sorting out left to do.

But I miss this outlet for such things as Max visiting Santa.

Max is getting old, and we'll likely adopt another dog soon so he can help train his replacement. He gets cold easily in the winter, and besides being a love hound, he knows it's warmer in bed with someone. If you ask him to get off the bed, he'll jump down and immediately look up to see if he can be invited back.

He's not proud, he'll get in bed with anyone. He's in his golden years, what would you do?

For that matter, Max was the star of the show at my Mom's for Christmas. I was against bringing him, wasn't sure Mom would want him in the house. But not only was she down with it, my nephew was an instant fan.

He was adorable running after Max chattering, 'Bow wow bow wow bow wow!'

It was a fabulous Christmas all the way around. The way the custody arrangement works, every other year we each get the major holidays and this was the odd year for me. Meaning we did a full Christmas on Christmas Eve at my Mom's, a full Christmas on Boxing Day at my Dad's, and in between, my ex got to have a full Christmas on Christmas with the girls.

As I explained to a friend, divorce and remarriage has been pretty good to my kids.

I guess a Christmas present to me from my kids, when we got to my Mom's she'd made fried chicken at Em's request. You can take your Christmas ham and stuff it up your Christmas turkey's ass, the fried chicken was the bomb.

It was our first Christmas in Westheight. With all the chaos of moving and whatnot, I didn't get my outside lights up really, and it's almost February and the tree is still up, but as long as you understand the concept you can pass the class, right?

Oh, and me and Corinna got whistles from the girls.

All Lit Up

The other night, I hadn't gotten to bike commute as much as I'd like and then we had some ridunculously unseasonable warm weather. So I caught part of the Brookside Ride on the way home from work and six or seven riders showed up with the Vegas Strip between their legs.

I want Christmas lights like this just for visibility, I'd ride with them year round.

Hamburguesas

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburguesa

We had hamburguesas for dinner. They were hamburgers except we live in a neighborhood with an awful lot of Mexican immigrants and the attendant Spanglish signage. As far as I can tell, what separates hamburgers from hamburguesas is avocado if it's the take-out joint around the corner. The distinction is something less than semantic elsewhere.

The cheese melted over the patties was queso fresco, so maybe that's a distinction, too. The one pictured was light on avocado but included green bell pepper.

Homes Tour (Welcome to My New Neighborhood)

Who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day? Or so the children's song goes...

This is going to sound weird, but years ago, I thought I might live here. I was still married, in fact, to the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster, when I crashed on a couch after a homebrew competition in the Westheight neighborhood.

I remember at the time, I was reading 'Steal This Book' and it had a line about how smoking a cigar and hanging a picture of Che Guevera on the wall didn't make you a revolutionary.

My host opened the door with an enormous stogie clenched in his teeth and a framed portrait of Che behind him.

I was impressed with the neighborhood at the time, though. A lot like the Old Northeast of KCMO I used to inhabit, but with a wider mix of house sizes and styles. Some prairie school in the mix, and mansions (Senator Darby's house that could accommodate a Presidential motorcade without interruption in its garage) alongside three bedroom bungalows.

Imagine my surprise when I was riding home one evening to my new fiancé's house and ran into Chef Dan.

Or the day of the Westhight homes tour: he'd done an ice carving on the porch of the third house.

One of the charms of this particular homes tour, it's not all architectural monstrosities. The Darby house is the last one on the tour, and most are three bedroom affairs.

Tastefully done and historically preserved, but homes regular folks could live in. Including homes with some of the best forgotten ideas of modern architecture.

Including the most awesome basement/den in a ten mile area, though I have no pictures of it because it's owner posted a warning against all forms of electronics outside the hi-fi he keeps in an old GE oven.

It's a mutt neighborhood, I suppose. A few big houses, some smaller houses, prairie school mixed with neo-Romantic and whatnot.

But then, that's the charm of it.

And I flat out loved this one bedroom in the Senator Darby house. Not really pink, these walls were Pantone Magenta.

I think I want to paint our bedroom that color now. I said at the time that I didn't know how I could sleep in such a bright room, but the room's owner said when the lights were out it looked like a deep red and was very soothing.

Winter Choir Concert

Em had a fantastic winter choir concert the night after the Jellybean Conspiracy.

Including a far-too-sexy-for-their-age 'Santa Baby' number. It was actually quite wonderful.

The Jellybean Conspiracy

GEHS put on this play, and I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew that the production included a lot of 'special needs' kids, including my own daughter, and the advanced rep class.

It's a play that deals very directly and deftly with the real world, the stress, unexpected delights, impossible family crises, and societal issues you're in for if there is a kid in your family with Down syndrome, mental retardation, autism, or one of a bunch of other diagnosable, identifiable differences that take them off the regular citizen assembly line.

Because that's what school is designed to be: an assembly line generating industry-standard taxpayers who will, among other things, pay the property taxes that support the schools manufacturing the next generation of the same.

The historical tendency was to favor the norm above all. If someone deviated to the upper end of specific prized functions, that was next in line. Gifted ed programs cost a bit more money, sure, but you were producing the student equivalent of highly productive industrial equipment that makes bigger and better products possible.

The monkey wrench in this model is kids like my youngest daughter, who cost a lot more to educate, and who might not turn into a juggernaut of tax revenue.

Wow, that's a cynical view of education, isn't it? I'll have to think about whether I think it's entirely accurate, but it feels about right.

Anyway, real reforms to this machine have been made, going back several decades, and in my experience to mostly positive effect. Kids like Mo are included in so much more than they were when I was a kid, including this play.

One of the dividends this pays is I can see how differently the so-called 'typical' peers she has think of her, treat her, and interact with her compared with anyone in my age group.

I thought the play did a great job, too, of explaining to the outside world what it can be like within a family: I still have in a trunk the Winnie the Pooh bear I carried when I was a toddler. He only has one ear because I wore the other one off rubbing it on my cheek (and the remaining one is pretty worn, too). Mo's sister had a bear that was a big deal to her, but we don't have that keepsake because, many years ago, someone didn't pay enough attention to where the scissors were and they fell, along with Louis the Bear in to the wrong hands.

That's just one incident, but it's the kind of thing that wears on a family.

The flip side of that is just as important, and it's not neglected in the Jellybean Conspiracy. I was told in advance that Mo was loving the microphone, and it was true. The chorus line 'I'm proud to be a jellybean' that was said in unison by the cast, was repeated after a second's delay by Mo every time. Loud.

A friend of mine said, in the lobby, that she was stealing the show, but there was another girl I thought did even more so. Far from having stage fright, she recognized friend in the audience, broke character and signed a phone to her hear and said, 'Oh, hey! Call me!'

Oh, and the event was emceed by Brian Busby.

Totem / Moods

Quite the long break from blogging for me. The dates don't tell the whole story, either: I took this picture almost a week before my last published post, so we're really talking almost a month off.

Things are not situated entirely, but I am ensconced in the comfort of my new man cave. The movie quote that comes to mind, "I got my Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi and I got my Black Jack gum here..."

Except in my case it's Boulevard Pale Ale, and upstairs is some queso fresco and leftover grilled chicken.

I shot this totem in the lobby waiting for Mo's play, the Jellybean Conspiracy, to start back on December 9.

They were also selling my daughter's art. They had some on display, but she's teamed up with a classmate, and she paints watercolor textures, and he cuts them out and mounts them. Then they pair them with announcement envelopes and sell them as stationery.

I bought five of these cards before I realized I was paying for art I could simply steal from my child.

Or commission simply by putting paints and paper on the table and letting her go at it. Which is what we've been doing the past couple of weeks. And she's been digging it, absolutely burning through the art supplies.

It's good stuff. I used a bunch of them as backgrounds for the family calendar this year and couldn't figure out why I didn't think to do so sooner.