2019: Year in Review

This year started and we were about to STRIKE.

Later on, we went to Italy, and later still we went to Orlando. This year I wrote about most of it, most of that, anyway.

These entries probably exhibit the best of this year's writing by me, as judged by me. I'm sure I left some things out, but that's how it goes sometimes. But, the way I got the links, show it going in the reverse direction, with the most recent posts first and ending back in January.

First up was our Kayak Trip in Orange County. Just a beautiful Saturday afternoon family adventure.

Next up is one of my favorite things I've written for this site, about going to help some friends as they had their second kid, aptly titled Answering the Call.

The piece I'm including from the Orlando trip has what I call the Airport Scene, something that really happened that will stick with me forever.

In Italy this June I realized, and later lamented, our species' current near-total Reliance on our Phones.

The reason we went to Italy in the first place is lengthily summarized here: International Pynchon Week 2019

I started this blog, Caliboy In Brooklyn, back in 2009, while living on Halsey, between Malcolm X and Patchen, and this year I discovered a tidbit of history about one of those namesakes: Connecting to CaliboyInBrooklyn's Past.

This is the last piece for this Year in Review, and dates back to January. I've included it because it was the only thing I actually wrote while we were on STRIKE itself: Ruminations While on STRIKE.

Sometimes I think these Year in Review posts are really for me, so I can easily find specific pieces that stick out in my memory.

Happy 2019. Happy 2020.

Two Watching Notes

As the year winds down I just wanted to say a few things about two items I watched recently.

The first: we (Cass and I) finally sat down and watched Cars 2.

In the past I've spoken poorly of Cars 2 without ever having watched it, basing my point of view on the many negative things written about it---beginning with the fact that it's a sequel (that pushes up the Larry the Cable Guy character to front and center) of the worst Pixar movie from their Golden Era (1995-2010).

Having seen it, I can safely say that it still ranks among the bottom of the Pixar movies, but I found myself enjoying it more than I thought I would. Espionage with cars? Mater as the star? At least I got what they were trying to do. I still feel like Cars and Cars 3 are the natural one-two punch story arc for Lightning McQueen, but at least you hear how many Piston Cups he's won by the start of the first sequel (four).

Anyway, it's more mindless than other Pixar fare, but it isn't unwatchable. But, does Pixar even make unwatchable movies?

The second: the Netflix German series Dark.

I can't say enough about this show. If you take Stranger Things, Twin Peaks, and Back to the Future and put them in a blender, you'd get the idea, and this show is that only better than you'd imagine and so much more.

Not to spoil anything, frankly, because if you dare watch it you'll forget that I even mentioned it, but anytime a character turns out to be her own grandmother (and who's mom is also her own grandmother), you know you're onto something fierce.

It mainly takes place in 2019, but then it goes to 1986, and then to 1953, and then to 1920, and then 2052, and then the scenes just play out and the casting is what gives away what year the scene is in.

It's so full of WTF moments and twists and turns and tragedy and icestious issues...it's worth the time.

Decemberween in Santa Monica

Again we stayed "local" for the Dec. 25 gift-day, heading to Santa Monica, gifts in-tow. Our boy is beginning to understand presents and not be as overwhelmed by the scene.

Corrie and I stayed up until the wee-hours of the 24th's night building the "big reveal," the large unwrapped gift that should occupy a youngster as they wait for grandma's arrival with Santa's bounty. Last year it was a train set that seemed to excite his mom more the boy himself. This year the initial reaction was less than exciting, but that changed pretty quickly:

Now he loves his bike.

I took him out to show him how to ride, er, to teach him how to ride, and I realized something: it's quite difficult for uncoordinated young humans to figure out bikes. The pedaling isn't as natural as we think it is, and getting the circular pattern down takes a minute, and then you realize---as dad---that the child may not have the strength to power the craft at exciting speeds yet.

Add to the strange leg action, which apparently needs to be watched by the rider as they figure it out, is the fact that the arms are in control of the steering. If the your eyes are on your legs and the struggles with the pedals, they're certainly not on the road (or sidewalk) in front of you.

This led to some funny moments, with me helping and coaching and praising---and huffing and puffing in a hunched over manner---as we biked around the block in a cutesy Santa Monica neighborhood. We were the official mascots for Christmas Day to the many childless dog-walkers out at the time.

"Awww! Right out of a catalog!" and "I bet that's more fun for you than for him!"

That last one caught my attention, and I looked up. Sweat was beading on my forehead and my back screamed silently beneath my shirt and I said, "Yeah...something like that."

I joke, but it was a pretty great time.

The entire few days with the fam---mom coming in from Arizona, Mike and Zailda coming down from Vancouver---was, like usual, fantastic.

And that's what the season is all about.

Starting December with an Annoying Discovery

Early on in the life of this blog (er, 2009), I made the conscious decision to address this exact topic. My mobile device still won't seem to do it...

There's a tiny birdhouse looking cabinet on a post down the street that's one of the Free Tiny Libraries, a "Take-a-book, Leave-a-book" variety that I mentioned last month or the month before. I've been slowly titrating my excess books into it.

The other day we were walking by and Cass decided to take a look. Since he regularly helped me bring books to it, I liked the idea of him being interested in exploring book-dom.

Instantly he saw something he had to have:

This turns out to be the ninth entry in the Animorphs series, and, if you can't see the title (kudos if you can) it's actually called "The Andalite's Gift."

Not to spend too much time on a specific YA title's backstory, but: the Animorphs are a team of four kids, a hawk, and an alien, that fight other aliens and fend off an invasion. When one of the kids touches an animal, they can turn into that animal. If they stay the animal for two hours or more, they can't change back, which is how a hawk is part of the team (poor Toby). The alien is the "andalite" of the title. (Any fans out there? Did I eff this up?)

Anyway, the reason I know any of this is because I started reading the text to the Boy on that particular Sunday, and whenever it seemed like he wasn't listening anymore and I'd stop reading, he'd holler for me to read it "a'geyonn."

(Really, how kids learn language and in the early times do funky things with vowel sounds could be an entire post...sometimes the short 'a' in 'dad' ends up with three vowel changes, and can sound like "daa-ayy-odd," and each time it's the best thing I've ever heard.)

The annoying part, the part that will lead to me more likely putting the book back than keeping it, is this:

Do you see? DO YOU SEE?

It's a sans-serif font. There are no serifs! WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? AN ENTIRE BOOK?

A subway map; okay. An ad insert in a newspaper; sure. Text messages; of course... (look at me, such an old man...not Uber-ing, knowing what a newspaper is, not communicating fully with emojis...)

Serifs are the tiny horizontal lines that adorn the hard edges of the printed letters of our Latin alphabet...well, most of the printed letters found in book-form blocks of texts. Books, newspapers, magazines, scholarly articles and scientific texts will pretty much, by convention, be printed with serif fonts. The websites I read: serif fonts. My own blogs: I try to see to it that they're serif fonted, but I may not yet be at a hundred percent.

It's just easier on the eyes while being more aesthetic.

Please publishers: DO NOT PUBLISH BOOKS WITH SANS-SERIF FONTS.

Another Clear Sheet Portrait

Here's another beardy-bespectacled portrait of yours truly:

Here's a link to the other two for comparison's sake. I'm feeling like polling my wards to see which they like best.

This one at least has my Sicilian volcanic-rock beaded necklace, a nice detail for such a small picture.

Baseball Attendance and Beach Cities

The title for this is ridiculous, as I have other things I want to say about this topic, I guess, and none of it can be easily reduced to simple post title.

I started looking up some information a few months ago when I was reading an article about an innovative baseball team that has poor attendance numbers.

I looked up the city on Google Maps and thought, That's what I'm looking at? I had no ideas the city looked like that, or that's what was meant when folks wrote about the difficulties of attending a game. Here's an overhead shot:

Despite the looks, this is an east coast beach-side city, and I didn't monkey with the cardinal directions.

Looks can be deceiving, especially with zoom factors, like below. This is the classic "west coast" city of Seattle, but zooming out, look to see how much land is west of the city"

Or being zoomed in too far shows a different problem, like below. The ballpark is almost centered in the frame, but it almost looks like an eat coast city, with the water to the right, or east.

That's San Francisco, with the park on the east side of the peninsula.

How about below?

This coastal city isn't even on an ocean. That's Chicago and Lake Michigan...

Anyway, back to my east coast beach city above. The arrow shows the location of the ballpark:

That's the bottom of the St. Petersburg peninsula in the metropolitan area of Tampa and helping to enclose what's called Tampa Bay. Tampa and St. Pete's is on the on the western side of the Floridian wang peninsula, so that accounts for the look of the city. The team tries to appeal to the baseball fans in Tampa all the way to Orlando, the large swath of central Florida, and counts quite a large number of loyal and oddly rabid fans.

Except the attendance of the Tampa Bay Rays tends to be at the bottom of the list each year.

The culprit is the park's location at the bottom of that peninsula. One player who grew up in nearby Lakeland says that if you draw a half-hour-drive's circle around the stadium, 70% of it would be water.

At least their lease is up in 19 years. Yikes.

My team being the Yankees, I suppose I'm supposed to have a hate-on for the Rays, but I don't. They're plucky and well-run, and have success despite the attendance or national recognition issues.

And, to end on a strange note, they're the only American sports team named solely after a body of water.

See:

• Green Bay is the name of the city as well as the body of water;
• Tampa is the name of the city, and St. Pete is the name of the community on the St. Petersburg peninsula;
• Tampa Bay is the name of the bay itself.

Sources in the Strangest Places

When islands break away from mainlands or are created by vomiting volcanic action in the sea, the life that develops there tends to do weird things. Big animals tend to shrink and tiny animals tend to grow. And this I mean in large-swath explanations. But check this out...have you heard about this?

Between five and ten thousand years ago the dwarf-pachyderms of Crete and possibly other Aegean and Mediterranean islands died out, or were hunted to extinction by enterprising humans. These elephants experienced what tends to happen to large animals on islands, as they saw their average size diminish relative to their African and Indian counterparts.

So, while the elephants themselves disappeared, their skeletons and fossils did not, and, it appears, were found by and subsequently inspired later humans. Check out a skull:

That large hole in the center of the skull is where the air intake would be for the animal's trunk. But, if you were a knowledgeable human at the time, you could be forgiven if you thought it resembled an eye-socket.

Hence: the legend of the cyclops looks to have originated with the skulls of newly extinct dwarf elephants.

How cool is that?

Late Night Editing

The stupid N key on this computer is crapping out, which makes this whole thing annoying...

Anyway, late last night I hit a groove in my attempt to rekindle some of my more creative motivations, and I was up late heavily editing something I wrote in the last pre-9/11 spring or summer.

As my experiment with vanishing a narrator went deeper, as I hemmed and hawed over how best to deliver action sequences, as I deleted the showy shit kids write to announce their triumph over words, I ended up composing one of the weirdest sentences I may have ever written. And in the context of the moment in the narrative it does its job, and it won't be as weird is it will look in a second, fully stripped of context.

But I wrote it. And I stopped and reread it...so, this is where we are...

Here it is, a weird collection of words:

"Five tiny electric tornadoes simultaneously teased out the atomic mist."

It makes full sense in the continuity of the previous and following sentences. Pretty sure, anyway.

Too Much Stuff

On a sleepless night after returning from Italy this past summer, I was messing around on the computer and found a teaching position in Paris at American University, no Ph.D. necessary. I thought long and hard about going after it, and thoughts of moving to Europe coalesced. Is it possible? I mean, of course it's possible. But really, for us, what would it look like.

And then sleep patterns returned to a form of normalcy, and we moved down the street, and that was the eye-opener for me.

Corrie is correct in her declarations that we have too much stuff, that she was feeling oppressed by our old place and the overflowing-ness of our stuff, but each time the word "stuff" has been used, imagine a spicier term, and by "our" stuff, it's generally understood to be "mine."

Like I said, all true.

So when we moved, it was me playing the part of Corrie, as in: WHY DO WE HAVE ALL THIS SHIT? How can we possibly ever entertain the idea of moving overseas when we have so much stuff?

This past weekend we got better organized, and our storage dungeon/writing cave got updated:

But again, the point remains: why do we have all this stuff?

There are boxes of comics, baseball cards, and random collectibles. There are tools and doodads and things meat for scrap-booking, a dozen years in the making (something that's actually Corrie's). There's camping supplies, baby stuff, and artwork---tons of artwork, so much art, and BOOKS!

Damn...I know that I have a helluva library, but it's almost unreasonable to consider moving all those books for the (CH to Oceanaire to Palm St to Bed-Stuy to Dwyce to Wells Branch to 3rd to here) eighth time...

At least we're getting down to the really important books. There's a tiny free library right across the street from us, the one's that look like bird houses, but are for locals to drop-a-book/take-a-book. I've been transferring bits of my library that have been deemed expendable ever since we moved in, living as an only-dropping-a-book patron.

And the books I'm dropping aren't garbage books, either. Here's a batch:

A Raisin in the Sun I got for a high school class, and it remains a classic, but I can't say I've opened it years. The copy of Dante's Inferno I picked up years ago and held onto for so long because it was presented in a page-for-page Italian on the left and an English translation on the right. Devil in the White City is essentially two true stories, one about the famous architect of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 White City creation and an infamous serial killer who preyed on the patrons of that fair. It's good, but I preferred the serial killer story. I'm married to an architect with legit opinions that aren't the same as a 19th century white guy.

I thought I'd written about Sanctuary before, but it's confined to the "go" pile. The Story of O, the original Fifty Shades was a Dollar Bookstore discovery, and I opted to keep Dreams From My Father over Obama's campaign trail book.

I could type ad nauseum about the books I'm trying to get rid of, or why I have them at all, and I'm afraid of boring the few people who actually read this. BUT REALLY, THERE WERE REASONS WHY I HAVE THESE BOOKS.

Here's another set:

Flight of the Iguana is from David Quammen, and is a collection of essays about nature. Catlin's paintings far overshadowed his letters, mainly because of the way he overwrote them and structured them in reverse, but that issue had been corrected in this edition, deftly edited by Peter Mathiessen, who, I learned this summer, was a favorite author Thomas Pynchon. Worse than Watergate...seems quaint today. Max Weber was a pioneer into the discipline called sociology today.

But really...essays on Berlin slums? WWI and WWII were some of the social consequences of his observations, and I have the a more in depth collection of the fantastic paintings from Catlin. The other two were easily parted with.

This sub-title caught me at some point: "Humans of the Sea:"

But John Lilly wrote these two research papers before I was born, and I'm sure in the last forty years more research has been done, and, like Robert Bakker's dinosaur book, the point being argued is mostly part of the current narrative: dolphins are remarkably brilliant and have abilities and sense beyond our comprehension (like how they can relay a three-dimensional image of a scenario from memory to another dolphin, something unknown to Lilly at the time).

In that same vein is the next book, A Sand County Almanac:

This collection of environmental essays helped change the national conversation on conservation efforts. But it was first published in 1949. Only republicans need to be convinced the environment shouldn't be destroyed in the name of money.

Why did I have these books for so long? Why couldn't I ever give them up?

I fear that my own connection to books like these, important but dispensable, is how I've surrounded myself with so much shit...this is the pack-rat mentality.

I'm not a hoarder, exactly, but when it comes to ideas my brain has deemed important, I certainly am one.

And I have a hard time convincing myself that letting go of the proof of these ideas is ever okay. I feel like that's a symptom of a broad issue that's afflicting this country and its culture right now: facts being the enemy.

Anyway, the boring inner turmoil of a languishing intellectual is just that: lots of blah blah blah.

"I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard to be the righteous man." --- Jules Winfield

Arm Day: Ocean Kayaks on a Saturday

We'd been planing for a while to take a day and go play on a boat. After broaching the topic with an adventurous toddler, he'd bring it up each weekend and ask to go "onna boat."

Finally we made the time and made it happen.

We headed down to Sunset Beach in Orange County, a few minutes out of Long Beach on PCH. Technically we were in/on Huntington Beach Harbor, but really it was the rich folks zone, people whose houses are on the water. I tried to capture an overhead picture from Google to get a sense of scale, along with a yellow line showing our progress, in only one direction (since our return trip was simply a backtracking:

We started off at the bottom of the above picture, wove our way from the ritzy neighborhood out to main channel while hugging what amounted to an edge, sprinted across the channel, tried to check out the wetlands, and finally made it to the DO NOT CROSS buoys that separate the fishing and kayaking zone from the military area.

That's about as much as my arms could handle in one direction.

The trip was very, very cool.

In the main channel, while Cass and I were leading our flotilla, about ten yards directly in front of our kayak a large sea lion surfaced to catch a breath. Both the boy and shared a hearty "Whoa!" as the marine animal swam right at us. It dove out of sight about foot off our bow. It seemed like it was as interested in us as we were in it.

We spotted various cormorants diving for fish, but it was hard for Cass to spot them. When he finally would, he would lose it after it dove again, and he was ask, repeatedly, "Dad, where'd duck go?" It was adorable. "See, son, that's a cormorant, not exactly a duck...with dense bones for diving...right there!" And it would be gone and the cycle would repeat.

I wore a life preserver to model good decisions for the boy. His has a Spider-Man design, something he had a difficult time returning after it was all said and done.

We had a difficult time when we made it to the wetlands, since we weren't allowed to disembark. That was likely for the best. The following sign illustrated the tides, I imagine:

Cass was an expert at steering with his paddle, and eventually got good with the paddle motion. He did want to venture further, but the decision was made by ma and pa to turn back. Our trip was for only two hours, which was about the max for parents who don't really spend time at the gym on the shoulder machine.

Cass had a blast, enjoying the whole thing, even when we were forced to face the sun for a few minutes. We snacked for a while, once at the closed inlet and again as we were getting ready to finish up, that time under the bridge close by to where we mustered/landed. That shady snack time was great.

Afterwards Corrie tried to take a selfie with all three of us, while Cass was playing with his oar, and got this neat action shot:

At one point, when we were heading to lunch after finishing up, Corrie mentioned something about how Cass's first boat ride had been a success. I had to remind her that his first boat ride, and actually first two boat rides, were Italian ferries to and from Sicily. We shared a laugh and shrugged and thought, whatta world...

Clear-Sheet Portraits

This seems to only happen when I have a beard...

Back in January, before we were out on the line, someone drew up a portrait of me, all beardy and bespectacled:

And just recently, right as I'm sporting a beard again, another clear-sheet portrait has been done:

I try to tell everyone I'm way more Squidward than Patrick Star...

Answering the Call

As people age and move various times to different locales, people tend to make new friends. That's what I hear, anyway. There are the friends that become surrogate families, the people you strive to see and feel so, so close to even if you see them every other year (at best), and there are the people you see regularly and socially that become that new social network, if you will, that sustains your need for social interaction.

The people outside my family that I spend the most time with are work colleagues. And these people, by and large, I like very much and with whom I am quite friendly. But, we don't make social dates very often, unless it's to a bar once or twice a year. Then we have the parents of kids my kid is friendly with, and, right now, this is probably our closest and most often seen social group. There are some couple friends that we met since moving to Long Beach that I at least see with some regularity, but that's mostly turned into Corrie telling me to go out with the boys every once in a while. They don't have kids.

There's Victor. There's Johnny Dang.

There're the buddies from college whom I love, but rarely see, and oddly, still consider them in the innermost circle of friendship.

And then, for us, there's even the couple we met at the pizza shop who have a daughter a little younger than our boy, and who, because of compatibility with us, have become somewhat of odd, interloping inner-circle folks. Because we're not from LA and have lived far, far away from "home," we tend to "get" foreigners. This particular couple was also not born in LA (he's from London, she's from Canada), but they felt the same love for our neighborhood that Corrie and I discovered. They're very similar to us in age, but a year older on both accounts (he's a year older than me, and she's a year older than Corrie); she works as an executive and he stays home with their daughter, an arrangement that Corrie and I mulled a decade ago.

This young lady, though is pregnant.

Well, was pregnant.

We've both moved in the last few weeks, and now we're even closer than before. We brought up in discussion that, hey, if necessary, if you ever need us to watch your daughter as you head to have the next baby, give us a call. They smiled and thanked us.

A couple weeks go by and we hang out again and they say, well, you know, there are a few days after my (the fella's) brother heads back to London and her sister won't quite be in from Toronto...maybe we could call you if we need?

Of course.

That window just closed. But...

Last night we got a text: "About 7-8 minutes between contractions. Not going anywhere until 3 min between, but if you can't help us, which is cool, now's the time to say so."

I responded: "Ready anytime. I even turned on my ringer."

That was acknowledged, and about two hours later, while Corrie was busy making brownies (don't ask), the text came in informing us that the contractions were at 3 minutes apart, and the time to come over was good.

I went over, had a few words with a paradoxically calm and flustered Londoner, and proceeded to chill on their couch, mostly sleeping, from 10 until 6 am, when Corrie and Cass showed up to spell me, so I could go home and get ready for work.

I was awoken a few times by the daughter, but everything was fine. Also, I realized that's the silver lining with having a child as difficult as the one we have: I FEEL LIKE I CAN HANDLE ANYBODY'S CHILD.

They had a baby boy before noon today, September 20th. I still don't know the new man's name. See, he's not even a young man yet, he's just a new man.

Congratulations Julie and Stephan!

As they were leaving last night, Stephan looked at me and asked, after he had showed me the important things, "So, you okay?" I assured him I was. He turned to Julie and asked, "You okay?"

She smiled and said, "I'll be fine for the next two minutes," with an eyebrow nod that said LET'S GO.

He turned back to me and said, "Hey man, seriously, thanks."

I said, "Thanks? I'm honored to be able to help you out like this. Thank you."

Sometimes it feels like we don't have any friends. And as we joked about the topic (before the Boy was born), we'd name nearly ten people that we would regularly see socially, or at least at parties, and feel comfortable talking to as if we were as close as would be the case had we known each other for far longer than reality states.

We left our hub for friends-as-family---San Luis Obispo---for Brooklyn. Surrounded by the country's largest city, and we essentially only had each other and Marc and Linda. The quick realization in Texas was that it was mostly just the two of us again, and here in Long Beach we'd just been accustomed to not having any friends.

Again, that's an exaggeration, and I know I have people I can rely on to hang out---if I ever called. Hell, my surprise birthday party this year brought out tons of folks from the LA woodwork.

It just felt nice to have people in our lives who felt close enough to us to ask us this favor, and trust us with their daughter.

At work today I beamed the entire time. I started my story with, "So, I slept on my friend's couch last night," and enjoyed the pensive looks and "What happened," line of questioning. I monitored my phone for news of the planet's new addition, and then I showed off the newborn's picture like an uncle. At that time, I didn't even know the sex.

I was not joking about being honored to be a part of their experience.

And I was honored to hold my nephew Norman on the day he was born, back in 2011, months after moving back to California. Sometimes the years between weird happenings helps sharpen the perspective.

Finally Made it Stateside

While in Rome I learned about a certain graphic novel. It was on the last day of the Pynchon Week conference when a speaker's time was spent discussing a German graphic novel that had recently been translated into English:

Named Miller & Pynchon, at it's core it's a graphic retelling of Pynchon's own novel Mason & Dixon. While M&D is nearly 800 pages, this is shy of 180, so what gets cut? How is it cut? Too much to mention, too much to figure out.

The art is great, in its own minimalist and cartoony way.

One neat thing I thought was how they subverted the M&D characters in this piece. Mason is the "boss" and Dixon is the fun-loving Quaker, and here, Pynchon is the character with the Quaker hat, but he's also the "boss."

Another neat thing is how author Leopold Maurer weaves in many anecdotes from many Pynchon novels. This gentleman knows his Pynchon content.

Something else...

I ordered this book pretty much immediately once we got back. Weeks went by. I contacted the seller; they told me that international orders may take longer and to re-contact them if by X date it hadn't arrived.

It had not arrived by their stated date, so I let them know. They apologized and refunded my money.

Months later, after we'd moved to our new place, Corrie had returned from the old place with a tiny, book-sized package. "Did you order something?"

BINGO.

September's Summer-Selfie Spectacular!

When I was younger, and having been gifted a point-and-shoot Cannon camera, I occasionally turned the camera on myself. I did this to try and capture me in the frame with whatever stuff I also wanted in frame, like Mayan ruins or the sweeping forests of the Adirondacks from a high point.

This was back when point-and-shoot cameras were more of a thing, before smart phones killed that market.

Corrie would make fun of me when she looked through my pictures. "Sure gotta lotta pictures of yourself, here," with a hint of condescending malice in her voice. My only response was that it was only because she was off with her SLR camera taking NICE photos, which is insulting because now I'm blaming her like it's her problem.

The term "selfie" hadn't even been added to the common vernacular at that point.

When it did enter the lexicon at-large, I by and large stopped taking that type of picture.

Until I had a kid. And the phones make it so easy to take them. And my kid likes it. And sometimes the pictures turn out pretty nice.

I still only take that type of picture with my boy, but as I scrolled through my pictures to show an old acquaintance some of the Italy stuff, I realized that my and my son's face showed up a lot in my pictures from over there.

So...come up with an alliterative title, and a blog-post is born.

I am going to try and dump a bunch of them here, from our places in Long Beach to our trips to Italy and Florida this summer.

At the Colosseum 

Birthday on the Spanish Steps

AirBnB, Rome

Same; condo in Rome

Otygia Island, Syracuse, Sicily

Father's Day, Syracuse

Syracuse

Same as above, Syracuse

Inside Cave, Syracuse Ruins Park

It was about here that I got self conscious about the sheer volume of selfies...do I have a problem?

Temples at Agrigento 

Same, Temples at Agrigento

Palermo

NOT HAVING FUN, Palermo

Pompeii

Pompeii again

Finally done with the Italy selfies, and the embarrassment of the selfie numbers sets in...

Shady spot, Promenade Park, Long Beach

Ali mural, Long Beach

Newsies Cap, old Apartment

And then we went to Orlando...

Before breakfast, Gertie in the background

At lunch inside the outside at the drive-in

At breakfast, showing off his new Stitch cap

DINOSAURS!

At the arcade, waiting to fly to PHX and on to OKC

Airport chilling

Back to the shady spot at the Promenade Park

Our new apartment

At this point, beyond the mortification of showing all these pictures, I realize that they are tangible artifacts of my adoration and limitless love for my son.