Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Today was a good day.

Yesterday, on the other hand, was less good. Just one of its low points, in brief:

Jane was very hungry, and very excited as she saw her plate coming to the table, so happy oh dinner oh yay it's coming oh gladness oh joy!

and then I put the plate down and she saw that it contained nothing but unadulterated VEGETABLES, in fact, because I am insane and certainly overreached myself in my hopes for what she would be willing to eat, nothing but OKRA. 

The look of shock, disappointment, and betrayal on her face as she burst into heartbroken sobs was I think unparalleled in her young life.

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."

An innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term.

Today I was bustling around, feeling happy. Jane was being particularly cheerful and serene, thanks to a combination of the liberal application of cheese and the end of her latest bout of teething. The sun was shining, I'd gotten some chores done, school's out for the summer, tra la la di la la. 

Jane and I were toddling around together at the edge of our tiny yard when a teenaged girl walked up and said, "Excuse me, can I use your bathroom?"

"Sorry," I said. And then, instead of saying something true, like "my hands are full with the baby," or "my husband is on a business call inside," I said, "It's not my house."

WHY? What imp of the perverse possessed me? 

"Oh," she said, "I thought you lived around here," as I thought, WHAT THE FUCK and WHY DID YOU SAY THAT and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, smiling feebly, until she went away. Now I imagine she will probably spend the next year seeing me around town and thinking, "There goes that horrible woman who lied to me instead of just letting me pee."

Outstanding success. Maybe you could tell me something incomprehensible and/or stupid you did recently, to make me feel better.

(But probably not, because that kind of naked request for comments rarely works, does it? And all the less so when you add it to the end of your post a day after you posted it in the first place.)

The southernmost bridge in New York is called the "Outerbridge Crossing" because they didn't have the stones to call it the "Outerbridge Bridge".

You will be happy to know that at least seven people have been named "Outerbridge Horsey" in the history of mankind. Or, as the Wikipedia entry "Outerbridge Horsey" puts it: "There were at least seven Outerbridge Horseys." 

Nathanial Horsey (born 12 Oct 1689 at Manokin, Somerset County, Maryland) married Martha Outerbridge in Accomack, Virginia. Among their children was Outerbridge Horsey who was born in 1715. 

And the rest, my chickens, is history. Steve discovered the existence of the Outerbridge Horseys (or perhaps the Outerbridges Horsey) several days ago, and the joy has suffused the entire week at our house. Outerbridge Horsey! 

If the Outerbridge Horsey line can just keep things going for one more generation, there will be an Outerbridge Horsey VIII, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I AM OUTERBRIDGE THE EIGHTH I AM

OUTERBRIDGE THE EIGHTH I AM I AM

I GOT MARRIED TO THE WIDOW NEXT DOOR

SHE'D BEEN MARRIED SEVEN TIMES BEFORE

AND EVERY ONE WAS AN OUTERBRIDGE

WHICH REALLY SEEMS EXCEEDINGLY UNLIKELY.

Also this week, Jane learned which end of a pencil writes on things, and I learned that she has no interest in watching me draw anything. We all learned, once again, that Santa Barbara's streets do not have adequate drainage to deal with rainy days.

Then I learned that the 1.38" of rain so far this June has made it the wettest June in recorded history (beginning, in this case, in 1941), which I guess is why they didn't bother to put in very many storm drains.

In 1941, Outerbridge Horsey VI was serving as the State Department's Vice-Counsel in Budapest. Maybe he was looking out the window at a rainy day, doodling idly (with the correct end of a pencil) and dreaming of the day he could drive over the Outerbridge Crossing and return home. 

Autocomplete.

Found in the drafts folder of my gmail account:

To: eyh <eyh>, hggfFffnb pd <hggfFffnb pd>

Cc: ee <ee>

Subject: (no subject)

E

Sent from my iPad 

Do you think this is more indicitive of a general, cross-medium embrace of minimalism or of Dada?