Count Carobula

I am watching my two sons run like madmen around the house, one with a mini-Chewbacca, the other with with a mini-Ewok. Both are singing the Star Wars song. Well, they are not really singing, since there are no words, but they are somehow constructing the melody in a way that is louder than a hum but quieter than a scream.  Speaking of Star Wars songs without words, my wife sang the Ewok “song” (aka “Yub Nub“) in middle school as part of a choir program.  Was this required in the North Thurston School District in mid 1980s?

So my kids are going crazy and it’s about 10 minutes until their bed time. And like many modern parents I would like to blame this on sugary cereal. I would blame everything on those crunchy, high-fructosed-corn-syrup-drenched and “well-balanced” breakfast treats if I could. Global Warming? Blame Captain Crunch. Money problems? Cookie Crisp is the culprit. Failing relationships? Reese’s Puffs.  But of course, my kids didn’t have cereal for dinner, as convenient as that would have been, so I just can’t use it! Darn!

This reminded me of the health kick my mom took our family on when I was a kid. Chocolate was banished by it’s healthier cousin, carob. The healthier relative was later found out to be in no way related to cocoa and it took about a millisecond for my 8-year-old tastebuds to figure that out.  Nevertheless we ate the brown substance (the color being the only similarity I could observe) for quite awhile.  While perusing the healthier food section of the Tumwater or Yelm Hwy Safeways, maybe I will see a Count Chocula alternative with carob and excite my children with my discovery. I am sure they would love it.

Monkey pack him rizla on the sweet dep line

I have no idea what that line means (the title of this entry), but it’s from UB40’s “Red, Red Wine” so it’s got to be fake rastafarian for something, mon.  As much as I like the red elixir, I couldn’t devote a whole song to it. You’d come across as a alcoholic or a lush or something. But if they are Jamaican, they could be singing about other mind-altering plants mentioned more frequently from artists of that Caribbean country.

I finally got tired of waiting for the shipping “season” from Garagiste and drove up to Seattle and picked up the wine that I had ordered that had arrived. They only ship twice a year and given my one-bottle orders, I didn’t feel like it warranted waiting even a month for my paltry 8 pack (although 1 is a magnum).  I had tried to pick them up on a Saturday, but, of course, the I-5 was jammed due to a small accident so I was delayed an hour and arrived 15 minutes after they closed. So, I took a longerish lunch hour (which I made up, thank you) and drove up to get them.

Among the selection was a Australian shiraz, Stickleback 2005. It was nothing special, but it did last over a good 5 days, rather than fallling on its face after day 2.  That’s the problem. I need a roster of inexpensive reds that have enough tannin, structure, personality, terroir, or whatever, to hold it together that long since I, and I alone, am drinking a glass a day of it over the period of week or so.  That bottle was followed by Wrongo Dongo (dumb name but cheap and decent Spanish Monstrell ) which I generally like more, but it was limping at 36 hours.

monastrell, UB40, wine, shiraz, wrongo dongo, stickleback

What’s wrong with being sexist…uhhh, I mean sexy?

Living the life of a temporary single parent has it’s many challenges. At the root of all those challenges is lack of time. There are so many things that I would like to do with and for my kids right now that I just don’t have enough hours in the day to accomplish.

Since my kids were little my wife has always made my kids costumes around Halloween time. I say “Halloween time” because we don’t actually celebrate the holiday, but our church always provides a great way for the kids to dress up and have fun. Call me a overly-cautious, but I am trying to teach my kids to not be afraid, to be strong but not violent and to not allow extreme violence and the “dark side of the world” to be become a source of entertainment, and this particular day contradicts these values I am trying instill- but I digress. She is quite creative and they always look great. The problem is I don’t share this talent, but, of course, that doesn’t mean my sons will agree to skip the festivities. So I did what alot of people do and went out in search of a polyester-based alter-egos for the two of them at our local retail establishments.

We ended up at Party City after fruitless visits to Target and JoAnn Fabric. My kids did find some inexpensive getups, but as I was looking up at the giant wall o’ costumes to choose from (you can view a picture of what they have and they will bring it out from the warehouse in the back), the choices for ladies all had the same thing in common: on any other day other than Halloween if you wear this costume in public you could possibly be mistaken for a stripper running an errand on your lunch break, so pressed for time you didn’t have time to throw on a robe or trenchcoat. Do most ladies want to dress this way that night? I know they many want to look good (and sexy), but I doubt that the average woman would look like the models showing these outfits off in the display photos.

Now many guys may be thinking that this is not something to complain about, but think of it this way. What if the only costumes available to us were ALL shirt-less. Can you imagine the average 30+ aged man showing up at the office as lifegaurd or a Roman gladiator?  Of would if the choice was a doctor, but a shirt-less doctor. Or, you can be a baseball player, but a shirt-less baseball player. Or how about a shirt-less Darth Vader? You get the point. Makes you want start doing more crunches. So getting back to my lack of time issue, if I were a single mother without time to make a costume for myself I would have very few options.

halloween, party city, costumes, darth vader

Is Zero 7 Confused? Am I?

So I drove to Portland some weeks back with my two sons. We had dropped off my wife at the Seattle airport in the wee hours of the morning. She was heading back down to Panama to take care of our daughter who we are adopting. We have had custody of her for 5 months awaiting approval to bring her “home”, taking turns, her and I, going back forth from place to place, sharing in the parental duties in each location. Not sure when we were going to see her again and having the whole day to dwell on this fact, I had the bright idea to head to Oregon to take our minds off the separation, it being the land of no sales tax (good for school clothes shopping for the kids) and the Willamette Valley (good for wine).  I had an urge to sip on some Sokol Blosser pinot noir rose whilst sitting on the back porch on the few remaining nights of Summer, and I did not intend to come home without some.

On the way there I popped in Zero 7 into the car CD player.  Maybe not the best choice when feeling melancholy, but… the song “The Space Between” came on.  The lyrics are, but not limited to:

Now that you’re older
Taking the time to look
Back over your shoulder
On the days confusion took
Now that you’re wiser
Surely you’ve learned to read it
You should know
No surface shines brighter
Than the light that burns beneath it
Never so sure
We always take more
Though we still don’t know what it’s for

While certainly not the deepest words I have ever read, it did get me thinking.  I wonder how many days I would describe as those that confusion took.  Am I living those days right now? Doesn’t hardship reveal how easy it is to become confused or perhaps reveal the confusion just below the surface? We can have ambition and desire and purpose and then you are put in a precarious situation that reveal’s the futility or vanity of it.  The “confusion days” perhaps are not those where you feel “confused”, upset or faithless, but the ones where your efforts were not directed in anything truly important. I would rather God stop and frustrate me and get me on track than to work blissfully hard and happy only to find out it was in vain.  So in my lowest points in this adoption, wanting it to be finished, asking for God’s help, questioning his ability to hear or help me, there are not the confusion days I may have thought them to be.  Maybe they are his way of realigning my very purpose, my view and expectation of him, a means of exposing my confusion to correct it. I think they call that a faith-building exercise. I look forward to seeing the experience “over my shoulder”, that is, over.

zero 7, sokol blosser, faith