5-3-11 sunset

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

5-3-11 Tori Tuesday, and tooth tumors. . .

I made it to Tori Tuesday! That's what Vicki calls our standing Tuesday lunches at Los Dos Potrillos. We've missed a month thanks to this surgery and Vic is moving to Arizona at the end of the month, so we're on borrowed time. Now we're culling all the frequent lunch punch cards to figure out how to combine them and get our free lunches before May is over.

Then Bob got home from his oral surgeon appointment with interesting news. He's got a tumor above his unerupted top left wisdom tooth that's going to have to be surgically removed to be biopsied. I say interesting because in the whirlwind of 2011, I don't think anything surprises me anymore. He's also got a supernumerary wisdom tooth on the top right that is so rare the surgeon has seen two cases in twenty years. I think that's what we're going for here. Need surgery? Just be sure to make yourself memorable, unusual, and something your doctor can tell around medical conferences for years to come.

I'm going to run out of bubble wrap soon.

5-2-11 Family Update

The roller coaster  continues with the Mask family.

The back story involved a job for Bob at SHSU. This led Nick to decide he would want to go to SHSU since we were thinking we would be there. The house listing was related to the expectation we would need to be able to move this summer.

So after the insanity of prepping the home, showing the house even during the ongoing recovery from surgery, we aren't selling the house.

Bob is staying where he's at.

And Nick is now going to UNC. That would be the University of Northern Colorado for you non-Coloradoans. Still walking on, still with a bit of scholarship money, and now rooming with one of his best friends and living a little more than an hour from home.

All of this in the space of a weekend.

Please remain seated and keep your arms and legs in at all times . . .

5-2-11 why do the nations rage?

Anyone else remember this?

I was teaching English Composition and part of each student's assignment was to present their argument to the class, usually with a slideshow or video, and prepare for rebuttal.

In 2004 one of my students presented a very graphic argument for the use of torture on suspected terrorists in the "War on Terror." You know who turned out to be one of the most vehement and articulate opponents of his argument? The soldier student who typically said few words to anyone.

I'm having a pretty hard time articulating what I'm getting at this morning, but that moment, along with the story of the American contractors who were killed, mutilated, burned, and hung from the bridge in Iraq keep coming to my mind this morning, especially those video clips where all the civilians in the vicinity of the bodies were shouting nationalistic chants and exulting in the deaths. It was those kinds of scenes that reverberated with my students and made them blood thirsty themselves. Monsters! Gleefully exulting in death!

Ευλογειτε


It's the word first used when the Creator of the Universe made the sabbath holy -- He blessed it.

It's the same word Christ uses in his Sermon on the Mount, bless those who persecute you.

It's the same thought echoed in Romans 12: bless and do not curse.


We don't get it.

We chant and exult and raise our hands in praise of the death of our enemy and wrap ourselves in our nationalistic pride as a defense, because we are the good guys, and they are the monsters, and Christ obviously didn't get it, or He didn't mean what he said, at least not in cases like these, right?

The nations rage on. And so very few of us weep.

5-1-11 Fisher Price

The Chatter Phone has become well-known thanks to his inclusion in the latest Toy Story 3 film. I had one. Every baby had one.

I also had the Fisher Price Change-a-Tune Piano. You flipped the knob to change from The Muffin Man to Pop Goes the Weasel to This Old Man and banged away on the piano keys. Whatever you hit played the next note.

And now? They've reissued them exactly for people like me, who will jump up and down (ok, not really, I was just jumping inside) to see the stickers and hear the sounds that defined some of my earliest toys.

Alas, it's plastic. The original was wood and the music worked off of wound up springs, not batteries. So while it was a bit of a thrill, it was also a bit of a letdown. 

And there's the Record Player, which they didn't have at my store yesterday:

According to this ebay listing, the original musical movement was made in Switzerland. Betcha can't say the same for the reissue. Just listening to the video of that little tinkly sounds takes me back.

And finally, there was the Teaching Clock, which also was once made of wood and wound up on internal clockworks. I think I'm satisfied just having seen the illustrations on them again.

5-1-11 phone pic round-up

Let's see, this is Thursday, I think, when Fisher decided she needed some lovin' even though I was still working.

I took one last picture of the hospital balloons that have been hanging around the bedroom before letting them completely deflate. I also managed to get the flowers replanted in my teacup planters Sat. which means the bedroom is now almost completely "get well" free, as one by one I've said goodbye to all the cheery flowers and gifts sent when I was in the hospital.

Yesterday morning Nick got up and made me a blueberry pancake breakfast and joined me on the bed with his, which he piled high with strawberries and whipped cream.

Then Sammi hopped on, followed by Evan

who kept waiting for someone to drop something.

Then Katy managed to hop herself up with all of the excitement.

So after that rousing company, I got myself downstairs to finally walk out into the backyard after more than three weeks. Oh, yeah, and it snowed overnight, even though it was almost 70° yesterday afternooon.

Watch those ears perk up when the ball comes into view.

And since I'd wandered downstairs in shorts and a t-shirt, I grabbed the only pair of shoes I had on the ground floor and got myself out into the sunshine.

This elicited MUCH excitement.

And just a few steps off the deck was the glorious sunshine.

I almost missed the turning of the tree in the back with its "butterfly" leaves.

The dogs waited as patiently as possible while I enjoyed my tree.

They'd waited more than three weeks, what was a few more minutes?

5-1-11

This is Bob, or, Bobby as he was known until he left Navasota for college. 

This is, in many ways, still Bob.

My friend Jennifer left Bob a note on facebook the other day that amused me. He'd posted a picture of the mountains from his office, which included the parking lot where his Jeep, with its Batman tire cover, faced the viewer. Her reply: "Bob, I love that you are a perpetual child. Gives me a whole new, fresh outlook on all of humanity (emphasis on MAN). Rodney [Jennifer's husband] was born a grown-up, I think."

And it's true. For twenty years Bob has had this childlike quality that can charm anyone, this impulsive, excited spirit and energy. On the flip side, that brings with it impatience, frustration, and irritability where you just want to make him go take a nap. 

Yesterday I blogged about why I love facebook because of all the memories I can share with people from throughout my life. Bob has a slightly different take. What has delighted him lately is finding all these new friends who share his passion for DC superheroes and Comic Cons, drawing and costuming. Finally, he has some friends who can appreciate his interests and encourage him as he takes up drawing again after so many years. 

It has led to some additional wardrobe considerations that make me laugh . . . 

But in return, Bob has loved having some real life models to sketch who help him refine a long dormant skill. And they have been so kind and supportive. He's taken a number of photographs as inspiration his sketching and his models have really enjoyed them, so much so he's sent them the sketches to hang on their walls.

What really got him out of his dormancy?

That would be Sammi. 

Some of her recent work:

She would come to him for advice about drawing and always, without fail, he would encourage to keep at it, keep practicing, show her some of the tricks of the trade. And she would, without fail, turn it back on him and ask him why he didn't practice what he preached.

So now? They're both sketching up a storm and making plans to finally attend a Con together where they can meet some of Bob's new friends in person.

Behold, the power of Facebook. :)