the only time we eat mcdonalds is on vacations. to listen to our children it is 51% of the reason they like or agree to go on vacations. we are in the tenth day of vacation and have yet to partake in the golden arches. this has mostly been facilitated by the point that we are staying in places too remote for even ronald to hang out.


the good side of this means you get to encounter some of the most unique and quaint eateries you could ever imagine finding. if there's a downside, it is that such places don't do fast food, but the speed factor is nullified in that these roadside diners are so interesting and full of character, they are every bit as fascinating as the destination.

the family we were staying with were going away for the day. we asked if we should lock up if we left the house.

THEM
we'd prefer not because we don't know where our house keys are.

US
oh.

THEM
actually we're not even sure we have house keys. we didn't realize that until we went on a trip to new mexico.

US
and you left the house open for the weekend.

THEM
no, we left the house open for the week.

US
oh.

i guess that's mountain life.

we're holidaying. it looked like we were going to skip this year and then a few things came up and now we're not. so as i'm able, i'm going to give you glimpses into our days as they happen so in case you are skipping this year's vacation like we planned to, you can live a bit through us.



a vacation ritual of marty's is to get a couple entertainment magazines, like Us, People, or Entertainment Weekly. then during a week of vacation, she'll methodically pour over them until they're entirely tattered and torn. you'd be surprised how comical it is to watch someone attempt to stay abreast of such free-flowing information only once every 12-14 months. for instance, such a discontinuous regiment fosters comments like from her:

i thought she just left him but here it says she's been artificially inseminated. but it doesn't say by who.

man look at this guy. he used to be pudgy. he looks pretty good now. but jeez, i think my treasure trail is more prominent than his.

we checked into the hotel at about 1am and immediately went to sleep. in the morning, we rose and packed getting ready to leave. as soon as the kids realized we were preparing to get back in the car, they freaked out thinking we were leaving without letting them watch any television. marty, reactionist extraordinaire, took the kids out to the lobby, got each of them a travel cereal boxes and marched them back to the room, each of them balancing their milk laden bowls. she then pulled a table to the end of the bed directly in front of the television, lined them up sitting on the foot of the bed, cereals in front of each and grabbed the remote. when she turned the television on, there was an image of an untanned meat-back flexing his oiled muscles in front of the camera sans shirt. that was all that was happening. nothing in the background, no sound, no voice-over, no nothing. just this smirking guy from the waist up. all five of us just sat mesmerized by this image that invaded our room for about ten seconds. then the inanity of the moment hit me and i started belly laughing. what struck me as so funny was not that this was on television (nothing will surprise me there) but that this is the the first glimpse of television my family got dealt on this vacation. after i started laughing, marty depressed the channel button. the next channel had just started credits for some animated dog show. alex immediately said, "oh i love this show" even though i'm quite certain he's never seen it before. so marty set the remote down, got her people magazine out and i opened my laptop and started typing this note. after about ten minutes we looked up to find all three children completely transfixed. bella's cereal was gone. the boys' was untouched. it looked like a scene out of one flew over the cookoo's nest. it took three calls of alex's name for him to even acknowledge anyone else was in the room. there's little doubt that marty and i could have been half way across the state before any of children even noticed or cared they'd been left behind.




and, in case it wasn't apparent enough in the pictures above, alex is wearing a tie. a tie he chose and tied himself.

i received several comments on the awkward family photos site i linked to a few weeks back. one person (thx dionna) even sent me a link to another, similar site.

i find the key factor to success for funny picture sites is not just the picture itself but the commentary the host attaches to a photograph. without the proper wit, the full potential is not met. here's an image/caption example from the site dionna sent my way:


It's a vagina, madam, not a clown car.

i don't know that you're going to do any better than that. if this were the olympics, that would be a solid 10.0. check out his other work.

sorry for the quiet days. i've been away camping. in evidence.

the below picture does not do a good job of showing i haven't showered or seen the indoors for three days but it's true. midway through the first day outdoors i thought i smelled pretty bad. the second day it seemed i wasn't so ripe. and by the third day i thought i smelled downright ok. if you could figure out how to bottle that sort of delusion, you'd be a wealthy soul. this picture also gives a sense (albeit blurrily) how many smores bella ate late into the night around the camp fire where she was one of the circle's favorite tellers of scary stories.



and you have a better chance of spotting bigfoot in the brush than catching alex in a foul mood on a no-work, no-school day.


and give anthony enough dum-dums and a big enough box of books and he could not be more sated, unless you could also get him a breast milk I.V.


and sorry we don't have a picture of marty. she was working too fast and hard to catch on film. moms always get screwed.

and for as good as we are getting at this camping business, the post-camping tick-check i get from marty still stands as the best part of it all.

i can't believe i didn't think of this site first.

although, had i been the one to start it, i'm pretty sure i would have been sated and stopped after uncovering this morsel.


but if i bowed out early then i'd miss out on titling an image "Awklord of the Rings".

saturday anthony, alex, a neighbor boy and i biked up to a local park for some ogre play. when we returned to the house i was approached by bella and a mess of neighborhood girls asking if i would like a spa treatment. slightly startled at the option i asked what the spa treatment entailed. i was told it entailed all sorts of things. things like back rubs, head scratches, uninterrupted reading time (that was a marty suggestion), cuddle time with stuffies (stuffed animals), pet sitting (which i think meant you got to have our hermit crabs sit on you). i asked how much all this cost. bella said six dollars for your pick of one. she then eyed me a little more closely and said it was nine dollars if the person was sweaty.

the spa's front entry


the spa's front entry detail.
the main sing reads, "SPA-GET-AWAY they are awesome because people come often / $3 child / $9 adult / activities: recreation space, stuffies, uninterrupted reading time / come right now (kids will love it!)". the handwritten supplement sign reads, "its free today because its mothers day, so you don't have to pay, so why don't you stay".


this is the first sign/arrow leading upstairs


second directional pointer


the front counter


the register/till


and last but not least, the spa. scary but not in the usual $9 spa kinda scary.

when marty first saw it, she said she felt she knew what people with difficult pets, like marley, must feel like.

moments later she added if anthony were a dog she'd get rid of him.

i asked how she'd do that. via a dog pound or a country road.

she said a pound.

as she started getting into the real messy parts of it, i said i didn't believe her and thought she'd go the country road route.

she didn't respond.

traversing life successfully usually means doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. living in saint louis, there is extra truth in this statement twice a year. the first is doing what needs to be done to stay cool in august and the second is doing what needs to be done to get through allergy season.

click to enlarge

in stumbling upon the latest anthony pic (beach tough), i found the above image of the family at the beach last summer which somehow never got pinned to the wall. and given these teasing glances we're getting at warm weather, it felt doubly right to share now.

the settings on my camera got jacked up and i was trying to get things back to where they should be. to help with the focus settings i called bella and alex up and asked told them i needed to take a couple of pictures and could they stand there for me. this was the result.

bella has always been bright-eyed, but alex was only briefly pudgy

i work on a university campus. it's an old one and has tree lined sidewalks flanked by classic, gothic-stone architecture. it's on the edge of the city border and is fully land-locked by its urban surroundings. yesterday morning while walking to work i saw something quite unexpected. on the school's main quadrangle, amidst fast-walking backpacked students was a young, delicate female deer. the sight stopped my feet.

i watched this deer hesitantly try to pick a path through these unusual environs. it cautiously edged along grassy patches until encountering a walkway. here it would pause looking each way for students and stepping back sheepishly when some would pass. when a break in the traffic would come she would quickly step over the walkway to another large swath of grass on the other side moving to the next walkway.

now the oddest part about this moment for me was that i was the only one to stop and gawk at this deer. others walked briskly by not giving it as much as a glance of acknowledgment. that no one else looked at it, i thought i was hallucinating. when it continued, i thought i may have died in my sleep and this was what the other side of things looked like. regular world just with unexpected shit all around. kind of like a dali painting. after about sixty seconds (and about ten seconds before i screamed, "doesn't anyone else see the deer!") one girl glanced up, did a double take and then effortlessly pulled her phone from her bag, snapped a photo and then kept on walking. after this trend-setter, more students did the same.

i was just glad i wasn't dead.



photo was taken later in the day by a colleague.

no one is going to accuse the bomb pop people of shaving the size of their product from year to year. if anything, the bomb pop may be the only commercial item that is actually getting bigger over time. i recently noticed that breyer's changed the shape of their ice cream containers. i haven't taken the time to compare the ounce count between the old and the new but this move has surely given me the sense that i'm getting less than i used to. so if the container's seeming dimensions are nothing more than a mirage and they aren't ripping me off, the new design choice is a rookie move because it's surely sending the wrong message. lucky for them their rocky road kicks the ass of everyone else's rocky road. and lucky for me bella doesn't like the chocolate covered nuts that are part of the mix and spits hers into my bowl whenever one makes it into her mouth. granted most that i get from her are bitten and broken and come with bonus food debris clinging to them.

it begins with a full-frontal flash of any college co-ed's walking by our house.


then, the freefall.


nothin' but air baby.


the revelry


the recovery


verify audience acknowledgement


the return


wave to the fans


invite your father to disrobe and join you


flex for the cameras


resume


repeat

THE SCENE

THE SMILES

THE SLUGGER

friday was alex's last day of school. i have a tradition that on a kid's last day, i take the day off work, pick them up when they are released and we go out on a special father son/daughter adventure. last year alex and i rode the metro/subway down to the arch and went to the top. this year, i had initially planned on taking alex kite-flying for the day because he's been super keen on trying a new kite he got for his birthday. that was my initial thought but a rainy week dashed those plans. so late in the week i had to scramble to come up with some indoor options. this is what shook out.

alex likes sushi. or rather he has always liked miso soup a bowl of sticky rice with a bottomless dish of soy sauce. this year he actually ate and enjoyed a piece of sushi. it was an ebi (shrimp). he even asked for a second. during our lunch he told me that when i asked him where he wanted to go to lunch he picked sushi because he knew i would like it. i told him that was not what the day was about and he was supposed to pick where he wanted to go. he then told me that he just wanted to go to a place i wanted to go to because that would make him happy. he's too precious for words, even a father's words.



neither alex or i knew anything about speed racer. i've never seen a single episode of the old show and alex hadn't even heard of it. but what made this moment poignant was alex had never seen a movie in a movie theater. in checking the listings the day before it was really the only (age-appropriate) thing that looked worthy of a man's first walk down the dark aisle. other than being greatly distracted by all the video games in the lobby, alex enjoyed his first movie-going experience. we almost lucked into a private viewing but two other folks showed up for the 1pm showing. this prevented alex and i from kicking back like royalty and talking just as if we were in our own living room.



(this was an optional part of the plan given the weather but the clouds broke while we were in the movie making it possible.) my family spends a lot of time at the big city park near our home. this park houses the city zoo, a golf course, museums and lots and lots of green space. there is a complex waterway that runs through the park and there is a boathouse you can rent canoes or paddle-boats from to cruise through the network of ponds. whenever the kids see people out on boats they always ask if we can go and we've always answered, someday. this is because we are usually headed somewhere else in the park and it has never been our destination. on the way there alex kept asking what the next part of the adventure was and i kept responding that it was a surprise. after entering the park, every time we'd pass a place he'd ask if that was it. when i stopped the car in front of the boathouse his eyes lit up and he asked if we were getting a boat to go on the water. i told him that was the plan. i watched him in the rear view mirror as he excitedly looked out on the water and pumped his fist and said, 'yessss!'. that there is called 'price of admission'. being in the boat is way cooler than seeing the boats pass by because you get to wend your way through the various streams and you get to go under the fancy stone bridges and you get to paddle close enough to the sky-rocketing fountains to feel their mist and touch their jets. it was all rather spectacular until i told alex we had to turn back. he wasn't ready. not even close. and, he protested as much saying he wanted to keep exploring. i explained it was time and we had to meet mom, bella and anthony for a night event. slumping in the seat he said with great exasperation that it was still his day and his time.


and this is the unfortunate lesson all parents and children must repeatedly face. the end of fun, innocence and special milestones. fortunately for this memory, the day that actually happened was far better than the day that was originally planned. i don't often get this lucky and because of that i'm quick to know when i do.

last night marty asked me to put the kids down for bed. alex and i got into a battle over his bath. it culminated with him refusing to get out when he was finished. while on crutches i'm a little impotent to put any teeth to threats about removing him physically so i told him if he wouldn't get out he could just go to sleep in there. twenty minutes later i went down to the kitchen where marty was cleaning up.

TROY
i have good news and i have bad news?

MARTY
ok

TROY
the good news is alex is asleep.

MARTY
ok.

TROY
the bad news is he's naked and sleeping in the bathtub.

in the end, i'm not entirely sure who won this grudge match but i do know i don't feel like i'm standing in winners circle.

upon learning that i had photographs of my surgery, a good and dear friend of mine succintly told me that he was boycotting my site until i made them available for viewing. this does seem to be my week for getting slapped about content wise. i've been planning on sharing them but have only recently become mobile enough to work at my desk and reach my scanner. but i am now able and ready to freak you all out. actually, aside from one pic, they're more awe-inspiring than gag-reflex inducing. but, to be kind, i'm hiding them and you have to click to expose each one. additionally, i'm including a gore-meter with each set so you can control your experience, seeing as much or as little of my insides as you'd like. something interesting to note is all of these pictures were taken underwater because that's just how they roll these days. to achieve this they put a turniquit above and below my knee, and then pump it full of water. i guess, this helps them get around a bit easier. it also explains why the images are so crisp.

click on the below headings to display the corresponding image.