Friday, October 3, 2025

Schlittler Making Our Night

Seriously...the kid's name is Cam Schlittler. It was fun saying, or trying to say...

On the evening when Corrie headed out to Texas to supervise the construction site there for the next week, I had the Yankees-Red Sox game 3 of their wild card round playing on my laptop.

And some rookie, some flame-throwing kid with an awesome name who grew up a half-hour from Boston, came in and dominated for 8 dazzling innings. His motion was fluid and kept his grip hidden all night. When Boone, the Yankees manager, sent him back out for the 8th inning, I thought back to game 1, when he took Max Fried out when it seemed like it was too early...when Boston folks are happy the pitcher's coming out? And he hasn't thrown that many pitches?

Anyway, Schlittler set a record: 8 innings of no runs and 12 strikeouts with 0 walks...that kind of tells it all. It doesn't come close to the visceral feeling of watching batter after batter flailing away at pitches in the zone, out of the zone (although there were very few of those) and walking back to the bench, befuddled. When I saw a sinker zooming and dropping in the strike zone at 98 mph I thought: tough night for the opposition bats. Fantastic that it's my team making those pitches.

Ever since we moved away from Brooklyn back in 2009 (WAIT---WE LEFT SLO 19 YEARS AGO?), my connection to baseball, and sports at large, has been more tenuous and less, eh, visceral. I've written about many different sports things for this blog, but that's because of the amount of my brain I have dedicated to sports topics rather than the emotional attention I devote to sports...I've not devoted that kind of emotional attention since...2009? When the Yanks won that World Series and we left for Texas the next month?

Watching Eli win a second Super Bowl was definitely cool, even if we watched it Honduras, and of course I was interested in my Yankees last year in the World Series (lol that post was written before Freddie's walk off grand slam), but without reading the newspaper everyday while riding the train, or just drinking a cup of coffee on the stoop, has altered my sporting-emotional-levels, needs, and desires. It's surprisingly easy to care less. Like taking Facebook off your phone.

But still! Have your young kids try to say Schlittler's name! He's freaking awesome! For a storybook night, it was a transportation. And it was great.

Our Kitten Whisperer

Corrie has a nice habit of saying 'Yes' to the animal shelters when they call about fostering kittens. Some times it can have infuriating outcomes---in the short term---like when six kittens all have uncontrollable diarrhea for a week straight. Woof.

But fostering kittens does a few things: it gives the kids the ability to love on baby animals without making the multiyear commitment to having a pet; and it provides Corrie with an overarching structure to fulfilling needs on a daily basis that her brain has been needing since the cancer and chemo and babies and COVID experiences have sapped some focus-ability.

And, while she's obviously the true kitten whisperer, I've got a picture of my son under a pile of either four or five of our last batch of six kittens:


That makes it 14(!) total kittens over the last thirteen months. We even took a quartet to the Cabin. 

Anyway, Cass and Camille have their own, separate relationships with the kittens, and Cass may be a natural kitten whisperer...just like he's a natural athlete, reader, and mathematician...

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Pynchon on the Brain

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon's newest book, is due for release in less than a month. Like Bleeding Edge before it, I'll be heading across town on the release date to get a copy in my hands. 

I was planning on starting a rereading of Vineland on the eve of the release of "One Battle After Another," the PTA movie based loosely on said book.

I'm planning on seeing it either by my onesie or with Corrie, who read most of, if not all, of Vineland back in 2012-ish.

I'm getting a presentation ready to send off for submittal for the International Pynchon Week 2026, which will be held in Dortmund:


Also, since I'm here with these thoughts on the brain, I should mention a few Pynchon-tangential items. First, two books (maybe I'll send Stone Junction along with Norm this Decemberween):


Pynchon wrote the intro to Stone Junction, and Matthiessen was one of Pynchon's favorite authors. I loved both of these books. Stone Junction is a roller coaster of Pynchonian batshittery, while Shadow Country is an unmitigated masterpiece about the nature of America and the ability of literature.

And one last thing, the movie "Under the Silver Lake:"


This was the most-Pynchon-movie that wasn't a Pynchon story that I can remember. Check out the trailer here to make your own determination. I'd like to watch it again and discuss it (didn't I already do that?). In any case, along with PTA's "Inherent Vice," "Under the Silver Lake" exists as a Pynchonian-curio, both happy under the same umbrella.

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Pythagoras Day

I guess calling today "Pythagoras Day" is as good as anything, since it's a mathematically beautiful day. The date, either in the US (9/16/25) or everywhere else in the world (16/9/25), has the common rendition of the year as the sum of the day and the month: 9+16=25. 

I mention Pythagoras because he was a Greek intellectual and school-founder who's name has been attached to an ancient theorem about the sums of the squares of the two smaller sides of a right triangle being the same as the square of the longest side. Remember: a2 + b2 = c2 ?

So, eh, today is like, 32/ 42/ 52, which us math heads find enjoyable.

Thursday, September 11, 2025

From the "Whoa' Files

Um...at the Aquarium of the Pacific...

My boy looks like such a little, er, man. When did this happen?


We all went a bike ride the day before the car accident with Camille, and apparently it was cloudy that afternoon. I remember her looking pretty big for her bike that day, but that bike has since been dumpsterized. And she rides and rides...
 

Thursday, September 4, 2025

Thoughts on Disney's "Wish"

I started this a few days back, and in my rare spare moments returned to the open laptop tab to keep my thoughts going (not unlike my mother's letters, I suppose). I didn't particularly like this movie, but I also don't have the hate-on for this movie. And, I didn't mean for this to turn into a treatise...but here we are.

I finally sat and watched Disney's most recent original story Wish from start to finish. And, since the kids put on Moana 2 while I did kitchen work, we finally caught up to the current time with the Disney animated feature cannon.

It seems to be popular to rip Wish online, and probably in person, too, but I don't spend time talking about these Disney movies to people unrelated to me. Some people like the songs; some people hate the songs...

Wish was written by the Boss-lady of Animation as a celebration of the Disney cannon, and as possibly a wish-upon-a-star origin story...and if that sounds preposterous, it's because it kinda is. 

When I first saw the trailer, I thought the animation of the Alan Tudyk-voiced baby goat (snort)(that's a plus for me) looking 2D while everything else looked 3D...or a mix...?...anyway, I thought it was interesting. I wasn't immediately turned off. If they're trying to celebrate the centennial legacy, a mix of 2D and 3D animation wasn't a terrible idea.

Okay...Rosas is the name of the Mediterranean island kingdom in the movie, and Asha, the heroine, is of Afro-Iberian heritage, marking a first for the studio. She has fair skin, freckles, hazel eyes, and long braids. She's 17 years old and has an interview set up to apprentice with the magical king, Magnifico. This king is voiced by Chris Pine because they needed someone charming and personable, because he's certainly a little off, but it needs to be believable that he could be put in power.

So...so far so good?

Now it starts to go sideways. The magical conceit/magical currency are wishes, core pieces/spiritual fire/manifestations of dreams/whatever you want to call it---your spark, your inner fire, your wish---and once you turn 18 you can hand it over to Magnifico for safe keeping. He'll pull it out of you, where it gets encased in glass, and floats up to join the other wishes he cares for and watches over in the upper levels of the castle. In exchange for handing over your wish, you get to forget what it was, and forget the possible disappointment of never achieving it. Every once in a while, he'll grant a wish, give someone the chance to have their wish granted, and this wish-granting ceremony is what keeps the people excited about this arrangement...I guess...

While handing over your wish doesn't seem mandatory, it seems like everyone in Rosas, once of age, does it. 

And because Magnifico is...not infallible, he decides which wishes are best for Rosas, and the granting of which wishes becomes an issue, because some wishes are deemed too dangerous for Rosas as a whole. Instead of "redistribution of wishes," think more "wants to play guitar for friends." This is where Magnifico's slip shows. The issue is both deep and creepy.

It's this central conflict that I think people complain about when they set up shop of "Eff-Wish Island." It's...weird. 

Something else to mention is that the stakes are, frankly, very low. Asha wants to save her grandpa's wish, and her mom's wish. She's not trying to save the world, or stop an evil king---even if it goes in that direction eventually---her motivation is to make her mom and grandpa happier, since giving up your wish has the unintended consequence of you feeling a bit lost.

There are no love interests for Asha---cool, no problems there, since we have Elsa and Vanellope and Moana and Maribel in the same boat---but her friend list is long, as we essentially don't get to know them. There are seven of them---shout out to Snow White---and while there's potential there, the execution of getting to know them falls short.

One spot the online community was divided on was the music. Some people love the main song and sang it to their newborns (per their own reportage). Some people think the songs are garbage because they're too vague because they were written before the script was done. I thought (1) there were too many songs, but I generally don't like musicals so there's a bias (it did feel like there were a lot); and (2) I couldn't make out the words, so I couldn't tell how generic they were, but I generally struggle with making out the words as it is anyway, so, whatever.

I guess that animation deal---the mix of 2D and 3D animation styles---was not a conscious decision as much as a fight between timing and cost and animation department personnel, which sounds like a "production from hell" issue.

One idea I also wanted to state, and that I told Corrie about when we talked about it, was that in my time working with teenagers, the teenagers by and large would have very little grasp on a dream or a wish or an inner fire that stokes your spirit, a wish to be able to give up for safe keeping once the age of 18 is reached. I think that the belief of the movie, or its writers---that the connection of your dreams/wishes to your drive to be successful---is lost on the core audience. 

The teens I know would not be able to identify with this idea, and won't be able to for a few more years at least. A certain level of maturity is needed to to feel deeply the connection between what drives you and how meaningful it is. Who are you? What do you want to do in this world? How can you get there? How can you motivate yourself to keep the sustained effort needed for that? These teenagers would struggle with every aspect of each of those questions.

In the end, Magnifico realizes what kind of power he can harness if he steals and absorbs the wishes, and the third act conflict is set up.

I never got the sense that it wouldn't work out for Asha; I never felt like the stakes were very dire; I thought the whole premise was supremely weird, and I haven't even mentioned the tiny star character that Asha made appear when she literally wished upon a star; I felt the friends were underdeveloped; and while I harbor no opinion of the quality of the songs, I felt like there were too many.

But, really, I felt like the exact same sentence could be written for Moana 2 (save for the star character). And while I do have some critical issues, I still don't hate the movie. I can see how it may have failed to find an audience, or failed to speak to the audience it was designed to cater to. That happens often in the collaborative arts industry.

One thing I just thought of is it seems like the producers made a movie for the kids that they were 30 years back instead of the kids we have today. Thanks social media!

It is pretty to look at, which is often the case with these movies. Is it worth hating?

Seriously? Masked gestapo gangsters are scooping up brown people off the street and sending them away---for misdemeanors!---and a silly imperfect movie with issues gets you all angry?

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Labor Day 2025

I was invited (for the dozenth year) and attended for the second time, the Wilmington Labor Day Parade. Wilmington is a community near u sin the southland that was absorbed into LA proper and is built, by and large, by the longshoremen.

They're told that attendance in the parade is mandatory. How true that is...eh, anyway, when you unload a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars worth of goods every year, you get some power. And the pride in being part of the organized, unionized worker group, shines through in their days, as in: it's believable that participation in the parade could be mandatory.

Anyway, the first time I went I took Cassius. It was a good time. This time I brought both kids:


But the sun was out, and the air was thick with moisture. When did we move to the Everglades?


As the walking went along, the kids' dedication began to wane.

Prez Cecily was there, too...
As did mine, since I had Camille on my shoulders, and she was wearing a red gown...because what else should you wear to a Labor Day Parade march?


Somewhere along the walk we decided to peel off and head back, having saved a ton of chores for the off-day Monday, Plus, the heat and humidity was a serious drag.

Also, fun observation: I feel like there were far more people involved in the parade than watching the parade. Like...a lot more...between all the different unions and marching bands, it was pretty wild.

Monday, August 25, 2025

Kid's Magazine Cover

I've mentioned before about how many magazines we get (a lot), and the other day one showed up and my eyebrows raised when I saw the cover:


So...we get both Highlights and High Five---essentially the same magazine but for two age groups---as well as Ranger Rick and Ranger Rick Jr...which is basically the same scenario. So, this Ranger Rick Jr, above, has as a center piece article, a profile of different animals with cool head jazz, if you will.

It looks at moose, and roosters, and various beetles, and...well, that cover bird. When I got the magazine out of our mailbox, with the freaking cassowary on the cover, I said, "Whoa!" A cassowary on the cover of a little kid's magazine? 

Cassowaries are generally seen as the most dangerous bird, responsible for many of the serious injuries incurred by birds. Cassowaries, in the wild, rarely encounter humans, but when they do...look the hell out!

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Charm of Yesterday, Convenience of Tomorrow

Ah, yes...


We have a Gallup "spot."


Disney Shenanigans, Part...Something

Now that I got that off my chest...

As we finish up the Disney movies, I'm struck by my Disney+ having most of the special features I would have watched on a DVD. They were cool, and I learned about the stuff that fascinates me. Collaborative art is very different than, say, painting or writing a novel or a poem.

Ever since 2010's Tangled, Disney was back. Toy Story 3 was a masterpiece, and Pixar has been hammering out doubles for a while.

But here are the Mouse releases since:

  • Tangled
  • Wreck it Ralph
  • Frozen
  • Big Hero 6
  • Zootopia
  • Moana
Then the sequels start, with a few original masterpieces sprinkled in:
  • Ralph Breaks the Internet
  • Frozen 2
  • Raya and the Last Dragon
  • Encanto
  • Strange World
  • Wish
  • Moana 2
Really, four originals sandwiched between Ralph, Elsa, and Moana sequels. If we ignore the fact that Moana 2 was originally a television program created for Disney+ (which makes sense if you've seen it: lots of side characters with no real background, uneven animation and baddie characters who oscillate between good and bad, seeming to need more time to develop), then we're looking at:
  • Raya
  • Encanto
  • Strange World
  • Wish
Such an odd quartet. We're going to give Wish another chance (I only saw fifteen percent, maybe); Raya and the Last Dragon is an excellent homage to South-East Asia, lovingly crafted and full of powerful women. It's great! Encanto may be the best Disney film...and I mention that without qualifiers. It's hyperbole...but maybe not. Strange World bombed at the theaters, but that may have had more to do with Disney and France beefing (so it never opened there) and the fact that any anti-homosexual countries (sadly, there are many) would have banned it, so it never got a chance. Anyway, it's beautiful and grand and full of a nostalgic adventure.

Zootopia may be favorite of any of these, but Ralph is interesting, and San Fransokyo is dope, and Elsa, Anna, and Moana have captured many a young person's imagination.

I had/have another time-suck idea about these movies, or these movies vs Pixar vs everyone else...

Are we doing that or are we enacting civics reform by pitchfork and torch?

Monday, August 18, 2025

What...what's going on?

Taking a break from the freak-out about...I dunno, the gestapo roaming around snatching people up, masked and armed...at least they were ran out of parts of here around the Southland, but they've been showing up to immigration courts where judges are supposed to be hearing their asylum cases? This is America?

Yes. This is America, or some nightmare that only the most cynical of us could have imagined. This is the end result of the world Reagan augured and Dubya anchored and now, after years of defunding education and eliminating civics courses and putting up cartoon characters as candidates, we got the worst version of Elmer Fudd---if he were a wife-raping white-supremacist---while one of our political parties has become the shining beacon for bigotry and anger and hate and fear. The other party is barely better, as they take money from the same donors and have been selling us out for the last few decades, too.

Get the pitchforks and Molotov cocktails ready...I wanted to come here and say something about conclusions as we finish up the Disney canon...but...

Every apologist has to be gone, ferreted out. Allies, it goes without saying, have to be gone. Profiteers, too. FUCK ALL OF THEM. 

The work will be difficult but necessary. Is it too late? We all hope not...

AI wants to put 11 (eleven?) links into this tiny polemic...links without my doing, like it wants to, what, make "Reagan" a clickable link? I'll do this myself, thank you very much. 

Will the robots make ferreting out the capital-B, capital-G BAD GUYS from our government easier?

TOGBIADB!

Monday, August 4, 2025

Construction at the Farm

Corrie's designing and building her folks' new house on the Farm. By next summer it should be done. Check out the awesome windows here:


That corner will have two enormous windows. What I really need is a person standing in the frame to give it scale. Maybe later.

Some scenes are pretty beautiful around here, just like at the Cabin, like:


Other times, you're like: where are my kids? And then you find them, together, both wearing safety glasses, one reading vintage Archie comics to the other:


Roadrunners and horny toads and barn owls...and coyotes and turkeys and deer...it's always something magical out here in panhandle Texas.

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

REO Speedwagon!

I'm not always sure where names for rock bands come from. The Doobie Brothers seems obvious enough, and I do know about Steely Dan, but today, at the Farm, I took a picture of the old truck you pass by on the way to the parking area and, well, click to enlarge so you can see for yourself:


Maybe even then you can't see it. But it's an REO Speedwagon! I didn't even know that was this kind of a thing.

Anyway...small world.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

Cabin Trip 2025

Back in 2021, it was Fire Season, but this year, after last year's fire season, where we feared that much of the surrounding forest and maybe even the cabins themselves were lost, was different. There wasn't smoke in the air, like back in 2021; the air was clear and warm and smelling just like we all remember: pine forrest. The fire last year did not destroy the Cabin, nor did burn all the surrounding wilderness, but it did get very close.

The Gouge
A large gouge, it looked like, was first burned and then cleared, so it looks like a stumpy clearing, along the road the Cabin's on (HWY 172). This dense forest, and much of the surrounding forest, has been burned. I'll revisit this sadness at the end.

I took a few establishing pictures of the upstairs, as I was in a nostalgic mood and thankful my kids are probably starting to remember things like the smells and the sounds of the squeaky stairwell.

Camille chose the big bed in the room

Cass chose the Boss Bed by the stairs

I generally liked the alcove bed...
Anyway...

Corrie has a multiyear plan to do all of the hikes in Lassen Volcanic Park, which is awesome. We never really did too many hikes beyond Bumpass Hell when I was a kid. We saw Hot Rock and Sulfur Works, but real hiking wasn't exactly my family's activity. At least I don't remember. I remember being told, with my brother, to go head to the woods and not to return for a few hours. Reading and traipsing around the forest, that's what much of our time at Mill Creek was like.

But each year we're up here---me and Corrie and the kids---we do ever more hikes, working opur way through the park's many trails.

The first day we went to the park, Lassen National Volcanic Park, we drove in our usual gate, the south-east entrance, and drove around to the Cold Boiling Lake hike. 

We stopped for photo ops at Helen Lake, still with significant ice coverage, even as it was June 28th:


That volcano takes fantastic pictures, by the by.

The Cold Boiling Lake is a lake that is swimmable---as all lakes in the park are swimmable, except the ones that are heavy with geo-thermal activity, and swimming in them will likely result in you being dead.

The Cold Boiling Lake has some vents underneath that have been venting carbon dioxide in small amounts, so the water isn't any warmer, but the surface bubbles in spots, like it's boiling. So...cool, I guess?

The hike, though, was kind of a bummer, in the following sense:


It had been ravaged by the fires the year before. There was no shade, which we understand and all, but look above! How quaint and secluded and surrounded by wilderness would that hike have been? How long will it take to look that way again? 100 years? 200?

Anyway, the lake was pristine and beautiful:


The next day we went to the park (er, the next day), we drove on to Summit Lake, did the trail around it, and then the kids got in and swam around. It was a rather glorious and warm day.


Here Corrie is with the kids as I finished the last fifth of the walk, got the car, and drove over to the beach zone:


It was a campground with a Day Use area, and that's where I parked the second time, moving from one Day Use spot to another. We decided to all come back and swim together as a family a few days later.

The next Park trip we decided to drive into the park from Chester, the town 20+ miles away to the east. It drives up the Warner Valley and branches off to two separate southeast entrances, one for Juniper Lake and one for Warner Valley. 

Since the Juniper Lake region, with four easy going hikes we were looking forward to, was fully shut down due to fire, we went with Warner Valley and the mostly chill Boiling Sulfur Lake hike.

The drive was pretty and unassuming, and shocking how well it was preserved, as the fire hit much of the environs. In the beginning of the walk, the water features were slamming:


And the little boardwalk was very nice, transporting you to a Ghibli movie:


But the fire scars were serious:


Can you imagine how dense and beautiful and awesome this hike was twenty months ago? In that picture, you wouldn't see any blue sky. 

This lake (with Lassen in the background) is one you would not want to swim in:


The sulfur steam coming off it were powerful, and keeping upwind---weather permitting---was the plan.

Not every trip was to Lassen Park. Some were to our little slice of Mill Creek. The fire made the hike down to the creek stones easier, and then we traipsed around the water:


It was the next day at that same location, when we saw river otters. In my 45 years of going to this place, I never even heard that we had a specie of river otter in North America. But on this day, we saw a family taking a baby out for a swimming lesson, only for the baby to nearly get washed away. It was magical. (The baby was definitely safe, in case anyone's concerned.)

Another park trip had us doing the Paradise Meadow hike, and then planning on heading back to Summit Lake to swim.

We stopped again at Helen Lake to throw snowballs (and rocks) onto the ice:


Paradise Meadow was a hike that was untouched by fire:


It's pretty, and not very long, but mostly up the entire time:


You follow a creek that oscillates between tumbling and rushing:


But it's all so beautiful:


Near the end there was a clearing in the woods. Itw as smallish and covered in ponderosa pine needles, and I thought to myself: It's nice, and all, but all that walking up for this? But the path kept going, so I just kept going. It turned off to the right, and a green glow pushed into the woods:


And when you get through those last trees, the high marshy plateau was breathtaking:


We tried to keep it mellow for the 4th of July. I took the following picture explaining the rather robust backstory for Candyland, a game we played multiple times an evening:


When we were kids, my brother and I would put peanuts in the shell on the deck bannister to lure the bluejays. They would fly down, spy us with cocked heads, and happily snatch up the peanuts. Sometimes we'd even shoot them with water pistols, but they never stopped coming.

I always wondered why our bluejays did not look like the bluejays on the logo of the baseball team. Ours had black faces and not a shred of white anywhere. When I looked it up, it turns out they're Stellar Jays, named for a guy named Stellar. That's what we get on this side of the country.

But, a few years ago, we saw zero jays. Our last trip, in 2023: zero jays. It was sad. You couldn't even hear the call.

This trip I heard the call a few times, and even snapped a picture of one out the window at the kitchen sink:


They weren't everywhere like when we were kids, but it was nice to see them around, even if it was just a brief view.

One of the activities we'd do as kids during this time of year was head to the pancake breakfast. Down at the general store/resort, they would set up large griddle tops outside and spend hours making pancakes, raising money for the volunteer fire department. I remember it being well attended as a kid, and again, this year, it was well attended:


They even had a parade, woith firefighters and kids on bikes and, visible below, the great Lady's Kazoo Concerto:


The kids even got to give a high-five to Smokey Bear:


(Cass sure looks like he's enjoying himself...)

Our next trip to the park would be our last, and we made sure to stop at some of the easy-to-get-to classics we'd skipped so far, like Sulfur Works:

The video is more telling...

Fumarole
The ice at Helen Lake had receded quite a bit, too:


We finally drove around to Hot Rock:


And parked at Manzanita Lake, at the northern entrance on the main road. We hiked around the lake and then decided to kayak it if they had available kayaks.

See? He enjoyed some stuff...
This volcano just doesn't take a bad picture! Along the Manzanita Lake hike:



And from the kayak:


Cass and I shared one kayak, and Corrie and Camille had the other. I was nervous about capsizing, but everything went okay. I was really only scared the car fob wouldn't work; the lake is, like, four feet deep for over 80% of the surface.


Another tradition we keep up was the "Stump Picture." A huge tree had been cut down in the '60s, and my mom and her siblings and cousins had their pictures taken on the new stump. Years later, in the '80s, the tradition was kept up, as the stump aged. Now, the stump is just a soft memory of it's former mighty status, and we can only fit a single kid on it:




We found another stump, though, of a possibly 250 year old tree. This was in the Gouge area close to the Cabin.


The bark was as thick as Cass's hand in some places:


This was part of the Dealing with Fire and an Ever Changing Climate section of the trip. It was basically an ongoing situation, but the reality has never been so close. The smoky air in '21 was certainly real, but the woods close by seemed protected and off limits. But not now. 

The piles of heavy timber sit past the Gouge, both within a mile of the Cabin. They seem to come from the clearing of burned trees down the way, in the area of the road closure on HWY 172. This old growth lumber will provide some good wood for construction purposes, but it all needs to be trucked away to the fancy new lumber mills:


Boggles the imagination...


Cass and his stack:


These are some big, former trees:


I didn't want to end this on the FIRE part, a downer. When I was writing the into, days back, I put the pictures down here at the end and figured I'd leave it until it was time.

Now that it's time, I want to talk about something else. Anything else, really. 

We brought the kids' bikes, and they rode like crazy. Cass got a flat halfway through our visit, so later Camille would ride alone on the street for fifty feet in both directions. We painted watercolors and played games. We read books and enjoyed good cooking. We never pulled the television out, and we never handed out the tablets.

In fact, the kids never even asked. No TV, no phone, and no service for our digital devices. For 11 days, my kids got the true 1987 experience. And they loved it.