Little black cat

I know I brought this up once already -- this adorable black cat thing -- but when you have the amazing fortune to get to know one of the mom's on the team, who just happens to be a professional photographer, you feel compelled to share.

Or at least I do.

The lip!!

Seriously, the lip is killing me!

Possibly the cutest photo ever. Bill was an awesome coach. 
The girls all loved him.

That's my girl ;)

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF: Images by Giselle Photography

Happy Mother's Day!

I don't know about you people, but me myself personally, I've got myself a prizewinnah:

Seriously.

Even way back when, surrounded by scads of little girls, she looked fabulous.

Sorry Jacquie.

Oh, there you are.

Seriously fabulous. Even when Mom was inches away from giving birth, and I was therefore inches away from *not* being the baby any more . . . and I held that position for 3 years -- longer than anybody else except for Jacquie, who still holds it, decades later -- Mom still looked fabulous.

Hello my name is Joe.

Sometimes, even a Mom needs lifting up.

Thank you, Mom, for being ever-fabulous . . .

. . . way back when . . .

. . . recently . . . 

. . . and now.

where the pets go

Did you know that we have ourselves a great ballpark here in San Diego?

We do. It's called Petco Park. 

Petco. Where the Pets Go.

One day last week, my boy had a field trip to none other than Petco Park for a day game, and the school asked us to pick our kids up from the park. I wrote right on the permission slip "I'll be at the game!" Because if I have to go downtown to pick up my kid from the ballpark at 4:00 on a Wednesday, I'm going to the damn game.

My family was a veritable mish mosh of mixed messages about who could go, who wanted to go, who had to go, etc. I ignored them, and bought 2 tickets. I originally went for the park passes, basically a general admission ticket to get you in the park to walk around or sit in the grass, but then I saw that the uppers cost the same and I remembered how much my ass likes a seat beneath it, so I went for these:

Front row upper deck, $15

I love those seats, no one in front of you to drop your peanut shells all over, clear view of the game and the whole park and our beautiful city, sun shining brightly at your back but not in your eyes. Ahhhh.

I had been in touch with Beth's mom Pat when planning the outing, knowing that she is a fixture at most games. She had texted me that morning to confirm that I was coming, and graciously offered to buy me a beer at the game. It was 8:30 am and my reply was: "I'm thirsty already."  We touched base  in an early inning and I said that Bill was on his way downtown, and we'd love to meet for a beer once he arrived.

It was the world's best day and the world's worst game, so by the time Bill arrived it was the 6th inning and the Padres were stinking it up to high heaven. We happily departed to Pat's fancy season ticket holder oasis and picked up a couple of cold stellas and cokes, as appropriate.

Then we followed Pat back to HER seats

and parked it for the remainder

They were great seats. At one point an usher leaned over to talk to me and I thought we were getting kicked out, but she just asked if I wanted to be spritzed by her refreshing spray bottle. Yes please!

Oh, but one of our pitchers was the biggest weirdo:

zoom in. wtf? he did that before every throw

After the game we grabbed the trolley back to home

Where I discovered the mark that the warm sun had left on my dumb self

Good thing I'm not wearing a backless dress to a certain wedding NEXT WEEKEND or anything.

Sigh.

Later that night, the kids and I set out to purchase gifts for our favorite little devil dog who would be turning 8 the very next day. Guess where we went? PETCO! I know.  We had a surprising amount of fun there.

First there were the phallic playthings

   Then there were the birds

and the bobble headed lizards

But the real fun came when volunteers arrived to take out the homeless kitty kats for free play time in giant portable cages that they set up right in the middle of the store. My kids were smitten for the kittens, natch. We spent ages petting them through the wire grates and dropping down dangling toys for them to pounce upon hilariously. I got bored, natch. I went to pay for our wares then called out to my peeps to join me at the exit. When they didn't respond, I went looking for them

Found 'em. Mykle pointed out that my girl is holding an imaginary cat

now she's reaching out to the invisible cat

If an invisible cat bites you, does your wrist bleed?

It does, but that doesn't stop anyone from picking up a volunteer application

Petco. It's where the pets go.

Aftershocks

A lot of serendipitous things have been happening to me lately. My weirdness journal is filling up. It's been truly weird and awesome.

Yesterday I woke up thinking about a woman I know who's on a great adventure - I had been dreaming of her. Earlier this year this woman asked for 3 months off work, and was granted her request. So she flew away to check out the world. She had been posting fairly regularly to Facebook these last couple of months, and I was enjoying traveling vicariously through her. But not recently.

So a bit later at work, once I attended to things that needed immediate attending to, I logged into Facebook to check her out, only I didn't even need to. The third post showing in my Facebook feed was hers. And it was a link to this:

https://medium.com/@laurenvilders/aftershocks-ebd700b08697

Please read it. You'll be glad you did.

Pretty powerful, right? An experience that will no doubt change her life in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Of course she IS one of the lucky ones. Very lucky, in fact, considering these are the numbers according to the BBC today: The 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Nepal is now known to have killed more than 7,500 people and injured more than 14,500.

That's a lot of people, dead and injured. And of course there are millions in need of water, food, and aid, more than 100,000 homes destroyed, thousands living in  makeshift camps, many many children separated from their parents and now reports of incredibly unscrupulous human traffickers funneling displaced young women into the international sex trade (on a larger scale than normal). Chaos. Suffering. Confusion.

A lot of healing and help is currently needed in that corner of the world. I donated to Waves for Water, a less well known charity that is working to provide as much clean drinking water to the people in Nepal as possible. Hopefully you gave to a nonprofit of your choice that is doing good work there was well.

But my friend's post was not a call to donate, it was a call to do something more radical than help financially with the immediate crisis resulting from the seismic shifting of this embattled earth of ours, it was a call to acknowledge the underlying vulnerability and fragility we all live with, even though we mostly pretend it isn't there. It was a call to recognize this in each other. To remember that there are myriad smaller battles that people fight every day, whether it be depression, alcoholism, prejudice, poverty, chronic pain, grief, or just a general feeling of unfulfillment or disconnect.

My friend is right: "life is too short to be anything short of fiercely compassionate. Because you never really know where that person just came from. Because we only ever have a partial view."

We Have This

We have this.

 Finally, we have this.

 This!

And we have Mistah, out in the backyard, documenting This.

Oh! And we have this!

(And yes. The answer to your question is yes I am awesome.)

And also, back to Mistah, we have, well, we have Mistah, who makes this . . .

. . . and takes photos like this.

We have this.

Finally, we have this.

pancake

What do you do when your Westy gets a flat?
 

Her first pancake!

It was so tragic. I swear I had a photo of how it looked before this, note that this is already jacked up off of the rim. It had been sitting in a desolate puddle of angst and woe after a fateful trip to the super bumpy fiesta island over spring break. I'm so tired of apologizing for my bad photography, though! Use your imagination. Geez.


Anyway.

What do you do when your Westy has a flat? You contact Ellie, of course. And Ellie immediately responds with a slew of encouraging and empathetic texts, followed by a 6 page document from her "do it yourself repairs" bible to illustrate just exactly what to do next.

The manual was so great! So helpful! So straightforward and logical and divine. We immediately set to work, just a few weeks later.

The miracle is that we found the jack. and it was the old-timey jack that you just pop into the jack-hole and crank clockwise to lift the ol' girl right off her haunches.

The plan was simple: just unscrew the bolt from the spare tire hidey hole thing to see what we had to work with, then either change the mo-fo or drive to the tire store before replacing the flat.

Houston, we have a problem.

We called Mr. Man. He came, he saw, he conquered.

He was all: "Are you sure you want me to use this jack thing?"

Do your thang, Mr. Man

zoot zoot

We were so happy to find that the spare was in perfect condition and Mr. Man plumped her up with air and we were good to go. We piled right in for a joyride, natch.

You guys all wish you had an Ellie sister, don't you?

You do have AAA though, right?

It was a dark, dark moment when we realized what we'd done. Mr. Man with his friendly disposition and encyclopedic knowledge of all things auto had just signed off on our service call and driven away. And our girl was all "rrrrrRRRRRrrrrrr" but no start. Permission to call granted, sister.

I answered the phone with: "There's a happy ending"

See the thing about Westy is that she is a strapping, unstoppable beast, but sometimes she just doesn't feel like starting.

But sometimes she does...

A while later I was having a happy moment with my boy, and recognizing that those particular moments have been somewhat scarce as of late, I acknowledged my gratitude and thought...

Imma try the westy.

And she started right up.

I tried to honk the horn in celebratory joy, but sometimes westy just doesn't want to honk.

She's always down for a joyride, though.

The joy is palpable!

Aw, Westy.