Bugs, Hugs, Lugs, Fossils, and Jugs

Bugs

Another eventful, yet non-eventful week has passed.  It never seems like many things have happened, yet I take over 100 pictures each day, I mean, week.  After the Soap Box Derby, where I did reasonably well, we did some serious swimming and hanging out on the back porch.  Soon, a VERY large katydid joined us for 2-3 hours.  He was SOOOOO cool, climbing on us and posing for pics.  I'm  getting to where I like bugs.  I believe it is a Green Leaf Katydid.

Another fun bug I found today while doing laundry was this red-headed centipede.  Luckily, the pesticide that I spray for scorpions had almost killed it, but not before I suffered a mild stroke, peed my pants, and cried a little.  We've decided to start storing the heinous insects that we capture in jars so we can freak out our guests and cringe inside our own skins on a regular basis.  This one was 8-9 inches long and ugly as sin.  I hope its soul burns in hell, if it has one, as it took one of my remaining 9 lives away today.

Lugs

Summer is here and has been here or a few months.  Though the calendar only has us 4 days into summer, Central Texas is soooo ambitious that it's been blazing hot for months.  This is one of the many blessings we have here, besides enormous bugs, a variety of venomous serpents, high property taxes, and drought.  Oh My!!!

I'm trying to plan a kayak fishing and camping trip for this weekend.  Being a stay at home dad is glorious, and I'm happy for the opportunity to not have to punch a clock, but there is something to be said for water cooler talk, guy talk, dirt, fish, a little blood, campfire, and tomfoolery.  I got the Jeep ready for what might go down next weekend and I think she's ready.  She needs a name.  

Hugs, Fossils, Etc

My kid is cute.  There's just not much getting around it, nor is there anything else to say.  He just is.  He got my extra charming personality and Cristina's calm demeanor.  And he got a whole lotta cute.  And sweet.  And soft.  And sweet.  And a little bit of pink.  He needs to stay this sweet and predictable forever.  Though, he needs to walk and learn the business end of a shovel and a rake to lessen my burden.  Until then, all he has to do is be as sweet as he is and we won't sell him to the Chinese.

Friday, we headed to town for a big day at the Memorial Museum on UT's campus.  We looked at some dinosaur fossils with his big pal Fritz and his parents, Freddy and Kerston.

Afterward, we strolled down to La Condesa and ate with Jerry, Susan, and Kevin(and their friends who shall go name-forgotten).  Susan doesn't like Christopher, or babies in general, but I think that she will catch on.  :)   

 

Saturday, I went to San Antonio with the Boober(official nickname) to see my longtime friend, Shawn, and his family.  He has a beautiful daughter that turned 7 recently and we got to visit with his wife and younger daughter.  Here's the Boober with Shawn's sister, Erin.  Since Daddy got some new Wayfarers this week, the Boob got some new shades to match.  He seems to like wearing them, and he looks amazingly cool.

Jugs

Those who know me well know that I have a contempt for pools.  Particularly, pools that I have to own and maintain.  There is no such thing as a pool that is low maintenance or no maintenance, and like all else, planned obsolescence is a big part of pool ownership.  Things break, and when the do, they break in threes.  Or fours.  Or alls.  

However, the beautiful thing about a pool(besides skinny dipping after mowing and having another 3rd world problem to complain about) is seeing your beautiful family enjoy your hard work.  We had some friends come over today and enjoy my hard work and when they left, Cristina and Boober enjoyed my hard work.  I did, also.  Three or four times.    Hard work.  It was 106 today and it felt like approximately "bowels of hell and blowdryers."  Another shout out for Central Texas.  We thought about living in a blazing inferno on the bottom of a volcano, but thought it might be hotter here.  We were right(as always).  

When we moved to Louisiana about 1,000 years ago, people would say, among other things, "it's not the heat, it's the humidity."  I hated them for that.  This is why:  It is the heat.  It's just plain hot.  You are wrong.  It's so hot here that it makes me want to move to a cold place where I can complain about the cold winters.  Humidity is awful and it is your penance for sinning and having good football teams, but the heat is what it is.  It's hot. Dang hot.  99 is hot.  92 is hot.  106 is hot.  Humidity is just adding insult to injury.  And when people from TX complain about the humidity, I quickly refer them to the humidity in Louisiana, where they quickly quip about the heat/humidity conundrum, and subsequently, my head explodes into a flame of crawfish and chiptotle pepper confetti and I just want to shoot stuff like Yosemite Sam.  

But I digress.

Look how cute my kid and wife are!

 Yes.  This makes my sun rise and set each day!

 Boober is 150 shades lighter than I am, and as such, is much softer.

Stuff

It finally struck me today that I am a 32 year old man who is the father to a person.  A cute, pink-like person who needs me to tell him the stuff that he needs to know.  An impressionable person who needs me to let him know how things work.  That bugs are there and they are big.  Real big.  That the world is fairly nasty and how to navigate it with grace and style.  That you really need to wear black belts with black shoes, as well as brown, and so on.  That one nice suit is better than not.  That he'll regret the things that he never did far more than the things that he actually did.  To not tell him about politics, but rather ideas.  To tell him not how to do things, but, rather, how things ought to be.  To teach him that Philips heads are vastly superior to flats and that a owning a good set of sockets and ratchets are as important as the teachings of Plato and Shakespeare.  That knowing about the Allman Brothers will likely impact his life more than Mozart.  And how to do basic maintenance of a car.  By the time he can drive, under current law, it will be 2028.  By then cars will likely be run off of unicorn farts and tears of a lost generation, but hopefully, his old, tan, wrinkly dad will still have this old Jeep to teach him the ways of the old generation.  And maybe he can help me change out spark plug 4, which requires the removal of the AC compressor on that old Jeep.

Anyway, today I learned how to tie two new knots between my kayak and Jeep.  I also committed to learning to play banjo, but this soon shall pass, for I am busy with life and its responsibilities.  Maybe he will learn, as well as learning a second language, and I will languish and envy in my ineptitude and ignorance.  Even then, a parent can wallow in the pride that they, as their elders did, created something better and greater than themselves.  Until then, I will continue to change diapers, wipe puddles of drool, and dress him in overalls and Star Wars shirts that remind me of a simpler time when all I needed was someone to do these things for me!

Keep Moving

There has been a simple message that keeps popping up in my day-to-day routine, "Keep Moving".  Traffic signs, polite customer service messages at retailers, etc, and one day it recently hit home for me.  Kids constantly keep moving and learning.  Almost every day.  They do it, and that is their nature.  The human nature.  We adults tend to stop and dig a deep rut and blame time.  But it seems that you don't find time to do the things you really need to do, you make the time.  You have to make the time to keep moving, like the crazy critter currently in my gutter as I type who is striving to reach it to my roof to make me keep moving.  To kill more scary stuff.

It's true, you have to keep moving.  To keep moving in life, love, work, etc, etc, etc, and to keep growing.  I don't sit down, ever, unless I'm typing, and even then, I'm often standing.  But it's true.  Move.  Do stuff.  Cancel your cable, make time to do the stuff that makes life worth living.  This saying taunts me, and I've been thinking about tattooing this on my forearm so that every time I waste the time it took to do something worthwhile, I am visually reminded to keep moving.  Keep Moving.  I was hoping to find a correlation to this with my favorite movie, A River Runs Through it, but alas, there may be none.