Father's Day delights

I probably should not have let Jane take that empty wipes package to bed with her. Crinkle crinkle. Crinkle crinkle. Crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle. Crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle crinkle wow that really is awfully crinkly. Crinkle.

How are you?

Today was Father's Day. Happy Father's Day, Steve! You will never, ever cause your daughter even a moment of embarrassment.

Later we went down to the beach and made Jane cry by letting her fall on her face in the surf. That was good, because I'd been feeling we were in a rut, not giving her enough new experiences, and falling face down into the vast unforgiving sea was definitely fresh and novel. 

Then we thought it might be nice to form some slightly less traumatic associations with the ocean, so we carried her downshore a bit to observe the natural wonders. "Ooh! Beach wrack! Look! A skate park!" 

(Park Review: "The Santa Barbara Skate Park is a fun spot with a cool layout. It's easy to get speed and there is some fun obstacles to hit like the stairs and the pyramid. This skatepark sits right on the beach so it makes for a good day of hangin out checkin out the hotties while grinding ledges.")

("Do you think Jane will grow up to be a skate rat?" "Well, maybe if we're very lucky, and very, very good.")

Our destination was a bridge where Steve had previously seen a baby raccoon, or so he reported. The plan was to walk to this bridge, stand on it, observe the lack of a baby raccoon, and return home.

So imagine my infinite delight when we arrived at the bridge and looked down into the—I don't know, actually, what you would call it: a sort of walled trench with water at the bottom—and saw multiple families of adorable California ground squirrels frolicking about. Lots of them were bitty little juveniles, who chased each other up and down, cuteness pouring off them in waves.

We spent five gleeful minutes admiring their quick-moving tiny completeness, although Jane, recovering from the torments of the Pacific, remained sweetly oblivious. The squirrels, no longer babies but not full-sized, popped in and out of their burrows in the sand-and-rock walls, occasionally chittering to one another. If only we spoke squirrel, we could surely have heard, "Check out this ledge grind" and "Major hottie at nine o'clock" and "Daaaad! Please! Go back in the burrow and pretend you don't know me."

Comments

[finn]

Beach wrack! "Wrack is a name aften gien tae sindry fresh or saut-watter algae, in parteecular see algae that's been wuishen on tae the shore sic as dilse, slake, ware an tang." I repeat: beach wrack!

Next year maybe you can teach Jane about the littoral zone.

[ben]

What is this, some kind of metaphor?

[redfox]

They were squirrels -- real squirrels. And there were thousands!

Finn: I would like to figure out a way to frame the littoral zone as a Hakim Bey construction.