My mother has been grieving for weeks over a ring that my dad gave her on April 1 four years ago that she lost recently. She left me the saddest voice mail earlier today, first recapping all the local news (my sister has pneumonia, my dad’s heart doctor appointment here in town is for the 9th, etc.) and then wrapping up the message by saying how she was kinda down today because of the missing…
Programming Note: This week I’m challenging myself to shoot only with my fixed 50mm lens, since I rarely ever use it. Let’s see how long that lasts! March is racing past us at a clip I’m uncomfortable with, and 2009 so far has kicked my ass in ways both good and bad. Last year was complete and all-encompassing madness from March until June, and it seems like that’s going to be the case again this…
If I have but one talent, it is running decent things into the ground until every drop of goodness have been squeezed out of them. It’s a talent and I’ve always had it and I don’t suspect I’ll ever really get tired of flexing it. If brobelfish.com doesn’t get up and running soon, I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself. I spent the day near windows, feeling the breeze and contemplating every molecule of…
Mom says the annual ladybug infestation has begun in earnest. She’s been finding hundreds of them in the basement on the windowsills, in clumps, dead or dying or just plain giving up. She said at first she’d salvage the living ones and put them on her plants to eat the aphids. But they’d defect and end up on the sills again. Eventually they’d end up in the belly of her vacuum cleaner. I got really…
Yesterday was my dad’s 54th birthday. Everyone gathered at the new Mexican restaurant in Saltillo to eat, drink, and yell as loudly as we possibly could about the impossibility of pronouncing basic Mexican words for food. It was a pretty good time, I have to say. Watching the brothers who run the place deal with the avalanche of crazy that comes with my family was fascinating. They were absolute professionals — no orders were botched,…
Evan and his girlfriend Charlotte were in town today so we had lunch at Central BBQ. I goaded him into trying the barbecue chicken nachos. He wrecked his plate quite thoroughly (those damn things are tasty) and then proclaimed that he’d had so much to eat that, later, he’d probably be able to “shit through a screen and never hit a wire.” Which is now officially my favorite thing to say, ever. [Project 365]
They’ve gone and put a Mexican restaurant in the old Grandma’s Kitchen building in downtown Saltillo. My little old Saltillo, pop. 300, with no bank, no school, one gas station, and but one red light (which currently does not work) has a Mexican restaurant now. If the economy keeps tanking and I lose my job and have to move back in with my parents, I will at least be able to drown my sorrows in…
I sojourned to Saltillo for the weekend to visit, and shortly after the big game’s coin toss, the cable on my parents’ nice big huge enormous HD TV froze up, and then kicked out completely. I had the bright idea to try and stream the game on my laptop, but my synapses finally fired and reminded me that no cable = no internet. So we busted out the board games and entertained ourselves. Which is…
I totally forgot that I took these videos on Christmas day. In the first one, my brother’s friend David tries to act like it’s been sooooo long since he played the quads, so he hands the sticks over to Evan. In the second one, you can see (provided you can see anything at all; we played that thing all day and into the night) a pointed lack of children playing the Wii. Also, you’ll notice…
Most years, when you have kids in the family, there’s that one gift that someone gets that just becomes an instant, ridiculous hit with everyone. My nephews got a Wii this year, and I think the grownups were even more excited than the kids were. (My dad watched two seconds of gameplay and said, matter-of-factly, “We’re gonna have to have one of these.”) We passed those controllers around from morning until late into the night.…
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