Squirrel watching with the special cousins, Berkeley, CA.
After our traditional first-Sunday-of-the-year brunch with the special aunt, uncle, and cousins (who?), we watched a squirrel shimmy up a pole on our porch and lower itself down onto the bird feeder (thus) and, more impressively, cantilever itself over to the bird feeder (thus). After several years in this locale, during most of which I’ve actively (sometimes stupidly) courted these little buggers, we’ve never seen one so imaginative.
Oscar Grant III.
Google his name, if you need to, and then get back to me.
Another young black man killed in police custody. This time it was in the wee hours of the new year, in a subway station I’ve ridden through since high school. The evidence that he was (a) unarmed, and (b) shot through the back, while he was on his stomach, is clearly overwhelming. Â Witness cellphone video accounts were on the internet within hours of the shooting.
In the pre-dawn hour this morning, after my four-year-old daughter slipped into our bed after a nightmare, I could not stop thinking about young Mr. Grant, and the fact that his daughter is the exact same age as mine. Â Years from now, they very well could show up to the same stadium for a high school ball game (our school districts are adjacent). Â If I knew more about his family, I’d say they could also very well show up to the same large hall for a college entrance exam. Â Maybe one will be short a sharpened #2 pencil, and the other will have an extra to lend.
Later this morning, when my son was done with his pre-dawn nursing and had crawled over to cuddle with me, I held him, and continued to think about Oscar Grant. Â In another twenty years, when my son grows to be as old as Mr. Grant was when he was shot, there will be one humungous, consequential difference between the two of them. Â Even if my son is involved in a brawl on a subway train following a New Year’s celebration, and he is among those rounded up and cuffed on a subway platform, unarmed and face down, after all that, he will be white and face down, not black.
From a half a year ago. It boggles the mind how fast time passes.
[It also boggles the mind how it is that every time I try to post something -- this is attempt #3 this week -- the right sidebar goes Maverickey again. No "/div" silver bullet this time. But I'm too frustrated not to post it anyhow. Let the sidebar take the hindmost.] [Further update: closed open tags from way back the first time the sidebar went Maverickey. I'm not going to ask them how they opened up again on their own. We're just going to agree on a strained truce.]
Allow me to treat you to a cellphone photo of one of my all-time favorite pursuits: a hardware store visit with one or both of the offspring. Consider it a humble place-holder here ’til I round up time to actually write something. Always easier said than done.
We are in aisle 51B: garden implements. Baba’s in 7th heaven. Boychild is too, since we are scooting through the store with him head first, me piloting (or rather careering) the craft from its nose end. He’s kind of like the decorative object at the prow of a ship. It’s the preferred mode of hardware store locomotion, if a bit unpredictable, since the steering mechanism of a grocery cart is basically the omnidirectional front two wheels, rear ones fixed. Whatever.
Whenever there’s an empty aisle, he announces, “Ready… set… GO!” And of course off we go. Unless Baba finds something she needs to examine, and she stops the craft. This is a high-risk activity (browsing), since in such cases he is nearly always struck with the impulse to lean over, pluck something out of the cart, and fling it. As depicted above.
Fortunately for us, he’s still in diapers. His sister and I let ourselves be a bit too carried away with the hardware store fun one time, and I have lived to regret it. Details here.
Courtesy our chum AnnZ. Â We had a groovy light bouncey jobbie off to the side, catching and reflecting the late afternoon sun on our porch just now. Â Other than that, nothin’ fancy.
Yes, that’s a roof in the background there; yes, we live in an attic, what of it. Â We like to call it an atelier, anyhow.
This is posted for no other reason but a sense of joyous celebration that I fixed the broke sidebar (simply add “/div” and stir!). Â Goddess knows how it happened in the first place, but it happened from up in the mountains, and the mountains are a mysterious place.
When time permits, and I hope it does tonight or tomorrow, I’ll share an account of my blackeye peas buying junket last night, and how it renewed my New Year’s optimism. Â Which has sorely been in need of renewal.
May you all be suitably renewed, too. Â No time like the present.
© 2005-2011 Lesbian Dad | Custom Design Work by: Plaid House Designs | site map |
Stumping for some friends
So I’ve been in not so fine fettle lately. I could go on about my woes (have done so in a sentence or three following that first one, multiple times, and fortunately for all of us I keep scootching the cursor back over them in fits of discretion). Really they can be summed up with two words: current events. That’ll do. Detailing could include: current events, LGBT civil equality battle/violence against women/racist police violence/overall climate crisis sub-files. Menopause just makes the impact of events, good and bad, more — how shall I put it? — intense.
All of the above has led to my utterly misplacing my mojo, and even when I think I’ve found it, I lose it again just as quickly. When and if I do find it for good, all’s I can do is hope I’ll remember how to get it working again. For the mojo misplacement (and the consequent sluggish LD content) I apologize to those of you comrades both seen and unseen, known and un.
But LD content is not the only casualty of the MIA mojo. Several chums — both of whom I esteem highly, read daily, and even met in person after first meeting them on the internets! — are coming to the end of their Weblog Awards roller coaster rides, and all’s I’ve done is gone and voted for them daily. Another chum reminded me that it wouldn’t hurt for me to at least plug them a teensy bit here, and I must say I heartily agree. I feel a bit like Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, and my guardian angel Clarence just emailed me and pointed out one of the dire consequences of my keeping the covers pulled up to my chin and my typing fingers away from the internet.
Continue Reading →