this is water, this is water, this is water...

c is for christmas

Cookie Monster, public television’s kid friendly version of a crazy eyed street junkie, is the oldest ornament on our tree.  He was purchased from the Odd Lots on Olentangy River road in the late 80’s, and he adorned my first ever post-liberation, scavenged-from-a-parking-lot Christmas tree and every Christmas tree since.  He came in a multi-pack of similar ornaments, chosen based on price and without regard to appearance or aesthetic considerations. Unfortunately, all of the other ornaments from that era have been lost to time and long string of moves, but Cookie Monster lives on.

It is good to see you again old boy. You have survived where others have fallen. You are an inspiration to us all. Merry Christmas!

gratuitous picture of two generations of sneakers fighting evil, spreading kindness, struggling against the madness, embracing joy, collecting wonders, seeking more

Some kids in her class have neon chucks, but Finn wanted blue like mine.

new new sneaker day

New sneaker day was about five months ago.  Unfortunately the new sneakers self destructed in a manner unrelated to wear or exposure to unfavorable conditions and totally related to manufacturing deficiencies.  I took them back to the local shoe store where I purchased them with low expectations because of the amount of time that had passed.  I was pleasantly surprised when they swapped them out with a new pair without any hesitation at all.  Thank you abbadabba for your palindromonymic shoe selling goodness.

blue oreo pancakes

Thursday is pancake day for the girls. If we didn’t have summer oreos for camp lunches this week, I would have been making leftover halloween sprinkles pancakes.  I have made oreo pancakes before but I think this is the first time the pancakes have been blue.

summer edition chocolate sandwich cookies with blue stuf or foreshadowing

The girls are in a daycamp at a local nature preserve this week.  The name of the camp is creepy crawlies and the girls get to spend five and a half hours every day taking hikes, playing in a creek, catching bugs (and apparently some baby salamanders), doing bug related crafts and generally having a fun time outside.

Some special treats have been acquired for the purpose of providing some vacation type packed lunch treats as well as at least partially complying with normative lunchbox composition principles. All members of the mumblelard family share a congenital weakness for the chocolate sandwich cookies that share two vowels with the great state of Ohio, so any cookies not used for packed lunch purposes will not remain in the pantry for long.

stationery surprise

…and then without comment, after a long and unexplained abscence, they returned, just like the bees will one day.  Now they are blue and they have five squares per inch instead of four, but some change is good. Let’s hope the bees will fare as well.

polaroidjesus:

Jasper

Jasper is wearing his Screaming Trees tshirt while holding a mason jar of berry blue kool aid and what was probably Popov vodka. He was a cool kid, soft spoken but hilarious once he got going.

Key elements to a successful kool aid party were:

1. No air conditioning.
2. Multiple pitchers of free drinks readily available at all times.
3. It is fun to drink blue stuff.
4. The first few pitchers were pretty weak but each subsequent pitcher got stronger as judgement and good sense grew weaker.

Blue jays are bullies. They harass the chickadees and titmice and drive them away from the bird seed.  Fortunately, the large lumbering mourning doves usually come along and drive them away and all of the smaller birds come back.  Regrettably, the mourning doves were not celebrated on one of Meemaws drinking glasses.

New Sneaker Day

The old pair still has some life left but the soles are worn and getting slick. They are definitely in the best shape of any pair I have had to replace.  An interrogation of my memory with some corroboration from outside sources puts this at my fifth pair since I made the cutover from black to navy about 20 years ago.  The new ones feel stiff and foreign like church shoes.  I can’t remember how long it takes for that to go away.

Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan performing Aeryn’s funeral ceremony in “Season of Death”

Zhaan is portrayed by Virginia Hey who also played the Warrior Woman in “The Road Warrior”

Virginia Hey left the series soon after this episode because the blue paint was causing kidney problems and because of the social stress of keeping her eyebrows and head shaved for over two years.

brerfly:

We got some plastic animals for the girls to play with in the bathtub about 4 years ago.  Most are easily recognizable - ring tailed lemur, tree sloth, armidillo - but this one baffles us.  When asked by the girls what kind of animal this is, I answered, “a blueback.”  I did not expect them to remember this name for 4 years…  Recently Fallie asked me if bluebacks are real.  I tried to direct her to something else and said maybe, but she suggested looking on the internet.  Her google search was “are blue backs real.”  Of course this brought up, “did you mean are blue balls real.”  The girls were cracking up for days - they have seen blue balls, who wouldn’t believe in blue balls, why couldn’t a toy ball be blue?  I told K this story on our way to a family dinner at his aunt and uncle’s house, where the girls’ great grandparents would be visiting, as well as many other family memebers.  I had to bribe them to stop talking about blue balls before we entered the house.  Hilarious, but totally inappropriate and (almost) mortifying at the same time.

brerfly:

Fallie’s bottle cap snake

Light blue bottlecaps are relatively rare and Fallie took all of them much to Andy’s chagrin.

Welcome to the gun show.  Now with more blue.

Please do not stay long as her patience is wearing thin.  Any additional pictures will cost you dearly.  She got to wear the vintage dragonfly pin to school in exchange for this one.