The Incomparable Bizarro

Dan Piraro is one of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Here are a few of my favorites.

Okay, this one maybe borrows from Gary Larson's Beware of Doug:

This lady reminds me of a coworker.

In honor of the Literary Workshop: 

Fresh every morning

Poor guy

This morning I wondered why traffic on 408 was so slow... until I saw this poor guy who had driven off the road and was trying to get back up onto the highway. The grassy slopes are steeper than they look. I called it in to 911 because I was sure he was going to need a tow truck.

By the way, the streaking of the lights gives you a good idea of the effect of astigmatism. That pattern is almost exactly what my left eye sees at night without glasses. (The right eye streaks upwards.)

Jephthah's birthday and other photos

My son Jephthah turned 20 on Friday. He designed his own cake, which depicts a Maine island on which he spent two weeks camping with a good friend and her family last summer. (It was a carrot cake, jam-packed with shredded carrots that you could actually see. Delicious.)

The menu he requested included seafood and tropical fruit. I made a salad of papaya (wonderfully ripe, the best I've ever had in the US), guayaba (guava to you gringos; it looks like slices of yellow squash in the photo), and kiwi fruit. I sprinkled it with lime juice to give it zip and to keep the papaya from wilting. We also had pomegranate pips, which I sprinkled on my fruit salad.

This is what my meal looked like. Clockwise from 12:00: sardines, smoked oysters, dressing, salmon fried with onions and garlic, fruit salad sprinkled with pomegranate pips.

A handyman detail: the table is an old door that we installed as a bar when we remodeled the house in 1996. Finish is Varathane Liquid Plastic. It has held up well.

Pansy the cat was in the chair next to me just before the meal began. She's lovely but not usually photogenic. I was lucky:

Her nemesis is Poppy, who loves to torment her. He sleeps really soundly.

This rabbit is kept indoors because she's missing a paw and gets picked on by the other rabbits. I can't remember her name but it starts with P. She sleeps like she's dead. (You can see her open mouth if you look closely.)

There are about 40 chickens at Rebecca's house, which vary greatly in size. The small egg is from a part-bantam hen, and is probably smaller than a standard Medium egg. To put the larger egg in perspective: a Jumbo store egg weighs just over 70 grams. The egg in this picture weighed over 96 grams!

While I was working at the kitchen sink, a couple of guinea fowl hopped up onto the windowsill.

And last of all I will include this photo of my lovely second daughter Hannah (Sadomasochistic_Slinky), taken a few months ago. I finally got it off my phone.

Miscellany from Paul

In June of 1981 I bummed a ride from a guy named Paul, from a camp above Colorado Springs (Bear Trap Ranch) to Aspen, where we were planning to spend the summer with a Christian student group. We hit it off pretty well and enjoyed talking and admiring the spectacular Rockies during the drive. 

Before starting the climb to Independence Pass, Paul put Vivaldi's Four Seasons into his truck stereo, and we zigzagged up the narrow switchback road, through the pass, and down the other side, to the strains of Winter and Spring. As we reached the edge of Aspen and saw the beautiful chalets and cabins and the snow-capped mountain above, both of us were whooping and hollering with delight at the prospect of spending the summer in such a lovely place. It was unforgettable episode in my life.

Paul has been a great friend ever since. We used to keep in touch by mail. He was photographer for my wedding in 1985, and we overlapped in Dallas in 1988-1990 when I was going through linguistics training to join Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics. I used to drop by his office (he's a graphic artist), and invariably I would see some typo that needed correcting in whatever project he was doing at the time. 

We share an eye for details of many kinds, and back when we used to write actual letters, he would send me items that he found amusing. Last week I got a package from him:

The reverse side of the letter was one of the "little things". Paul's still with Wycliffe:

After Paul married Heather, they went to Nairobi, Kenya, where he worked as an artist and later as an administrator.

When I was in Honduras in 1984-1985, and in Costa Rica in the early 1990s, Paul used to send me cassettes of current music. He introduced me to REM, Shaun Colvin, Ian Matthews, Innocence Mission, Sam Phillips, David Wilcox, and many others that I still listen to today. This was part of last week's package:

Paul and Heather's children are a few years younger than mine.

As I mentioned, we both enjoy whimsical details.

Paul's brother shares a similar eye for detail.

If you've read my rants and comments about language, you will appreciate this:

 
Paul's sister lives in Belgium, which is pretty cool. I find the similarity in handwriting (printing) between the three siblings to be very interesting. 

Paul included this map booklet, which is just lovely.

Other odds and ends from Belgium:

And here are two final curiosities: