The overnight snow was a bust, just 10 cm as measured on my porch. So, I’ll remember another snow day, in March 1999, when my wife and daughter made a snow heart for me in the […]
Category: People
Mittens and Shoes
This afternoon, on what turned out to be an uncharacteristically summer-like day, I walked toward the veterinarian’s office to see if Mittens the stray survived her fender bender. Turns out the real bender—chug-alug-lug—was the man who first came to our door about the car-struck cat. He walked back from the direction of the vet’s, in socks. No shoes! Sure the day was warm, but not for going down the street in socks.
Turns out he drank up overnight and someone stole his shoes and jacket, or so he claimed, during a blackout. “Could you help me out?” he pleaded. I felt somewhat entangled because of yesterday’s goodwill with the cat. The guy said he couldn’t go back to his “woman” without shoes. I decided to be generous, and gave him a good pair that I don’t wear anymore. He took the shoes and disappeared. I had my misgivings, because sometimes some people take advantage of generosity.
The Stake Knife
Last night, while washing supper dishes, I saw that someone had left a steak knife point-side up in the strainer. I saw it more as stake knife, as I would never let the point standup like that.
See, when I was a third (maybe fourth) grader, a knife accident left an indelible mark on my psyche and on the body of my youngest sister.
Gramps and Digicams
It’s mixing-and-matching time—pulling together elements of the last post (on digital prints) and the next-to-the-last (about my father-in-law).
I have used digital cameras for a long time, at least as far back as 1997. The photo of my daughter and her grandfather was taken in late 1998 with a digital camera I can’t recall. I suspect that it was Kodak’s then top-of-the-line 1.6 megapixel shooter, which sold for more than a thousand bucks. A year later, I moved up to Canon’s PowerShot S20, a lightweight (for the time), full-featured 3-megapixel digital camera.
Simply Amazing
My father-in-law visited over the last two-and-half days. I didn’t spend as much time with him as I wanted to, because of my work schedule. That’s too bad, because my wife’s father is an amazing man.
He’s 83, still spry, alert, and interested in continuing to grow and mature his character. He flew out to Philadelphia and drove down to Washington for the visit. Later, he braved the pelting rain (more than five inches fell in the Washington, D.C. area over the last two days) to drive back to Philadelphia, before going onto New York and then back to California.
LOL
I witnessed the clash of the old and new worlds while driving the other day. The cause: lol. To my 11-year old daughter, lol means “laughing out loud,” because of her use of instant messaging. […]
Snow Day
Work blogging has sapped my personal blogging interest, so things have languished here. But I’m looking to generate renewed enthusiasm, and so more posts.
Big week here in Washington, with the presidential inauguration. My wife got a free ticket from the church leader to one of the events, on Tuesday; Bush and Cheney families in attendance.
A Summer Story
A cold November day is good time to reminisce about summer past—and to point out that behind every picture is a good story. So, what’s with my daughter and the bird?
On July 6 my wife and I picked up a Styrofoam giant glider plane at the local toy store, which my daughter and I took it out for an evening fly across the back yard. But my daughter’s throw put the plane across the fence and in the neighbor’s lot behind ours. So she and I had to walk round the block. Along the way, as we sheepishly shortcut past some condos, we caught a flash of feathers before a load SMACK of birdie hitting a window.
A Good Match
I have a really cool digital camera (Canon EOS 20D), and I am testing a remarkable photo printer (Epson Stylus Photo 2200). But two of the photos that matter most are cheap quality, taken at a photo booth in Virginia Beach, Va. For some memories—maybe all of them—context matters most.
Blog Break
I am working on another blog right now, while my 40+ wife dances to Fountain of Wayne’s “Stacey’s Mom.” She can move. It’s a fun song, too.