Web Commentary for boys! Fire stealth combat car!

If you want to read what this awful blog post is about, action your clicker finger here to transform into blogging power. Be a hero!

So the above images are supposed to teach you about "reinforcing gender stereotypes" and the language in kids' commercials, but all it really did was make me want a t-shirt with all the "boy words" on it. Ultimate! Stealth! Ninja! Mega!

Also, my favorite line from the article is as follows: I hyphenated words that were meant to stay together, like "special forces" and "killer boots." So, today I learned that the words "killer" and "boots" were meant to stay together, which is awesome, but which also makes me disappointed in my own boots, as they have a demonstrated lack of killing power.

I also learned that "Reinforces Gender Stereotypes" apparently means the same thing as "understands an audience." I mean, it's not exactly nefarious to advertise BATTLE POWER ROBOTS to boys watching a show called ROBOTIC POWER BATTLE.

Well, it might be nefarious, but it's not nefariously sexist.

I think The Swede would totally watch a show called "Friendship Magic Fun Party." The Boo would practice his karate moves on her until she changed it back to Battling Robots or Raceway Ninjas or Blue's Clues. Then Jen would unplug the {EXPLETIVE DELETED BECAUSE MY MOM READS THIS} television and tape the sign with the big red X on the front which means "there will be no more television until our children stop being such obvious gender stereotypes." I'll be sitting in the other room, watching sports on the big television and eating a giant turkey leg.

New Composting Bin in Faculty Lounge!

As most (3 out of the 5 of you that read this blog) of you know, I'm teaching a class at one of the universities here in Portland, so I'm on the faculty distribution list for emails. Yesterday, I received an email from the business school with the following header:

New Composting Bin in Faculty Lounge!

Now, I know what you're thinking - only ONE exclamation point? That's right. In Portland, this sort of game-changing news only merits the single exclamation point. It's a difficult adjustment for me to make, because, being from the South, I tend to get WAY over-excited about the prospect of a new composting bin. Like, at least 4 or 5 exclamation points excited, so I have to back it way down to a one exclamation point level, with maybe a touch more excitement, which I excuse by noting that the header is in Title Case rather than Sentence case.

So, the email has been a wild ride already, and I haven't even opened it yet. Then, I open it, and the first sentence kills the whole experience for me. After the greeting, it begins "I have some exciting news regarding our waste diversion efforts this quarter."

And here's the problem. You know when you go to the theater and they show you a preview of a movie and there's just way too much in the preview and then you feel like it spoiled the movie for you because you know how it's going to end?

Yeah, email writer, I KNOW what the (reasonably, Scott, reasonably) exciting news regarding our waste diversion efforts this quarter is. You've already told me. Sure, the email contains important details (it's got a foot pedal and a lid, YAWN), but there's no anticipation. No buildup. I already know about New Composting Bin in Faculty Lounge!

But wait.

At the end of the email, there's hope.

"If things go well with this new bin, we will look at getting 2 more for the other kitchen areas in the building."

A possible sequel. Well played, email writer, well played.

It's like at the end of Flash Gordon after (SPOILER ALERT) Ming gets run through by the sharp point at the front of a space ship and then he's dead and his ring is laying on the floor and then it says THE END on the screen and then a hand that looks like Ming's picks the ring up and you hear Ming's laugh and a question mark appears so it's all "THE END?" But it was actually THE END because there was no sequel to the Flash Gordon movie even though it was so very awesome. But I never understood why they made these long sharp tips on the front of the spaceships. Like they were DESIGNED to run people through, bayonet-style. I mean, that seems like a very inefficient way for a spaceship equipped with lasers to kill people.

Left unsaid is what happens if things DO NOT go well with this new bin. Like, if they go awry. Horrifically awry.

Well, Portland isn't perfect

Ok, so the Boo and I were walking to Sunnyside Environmental School to pick up Shelton yesterday. It's about a kilometer from our house to Shelton's school. And yes, I denote distances in metric terms now.

The Boo, pictured pre-rampage.

It's kind of a long walk for the little fella, so he likes to mix in some running and some karate chops and some side kicks to keep things interesting. Sometimes he falls a little behind, but I just yell "Ketchup" and he comes running. Um...not because he loves ketchup, well, he DOES love ketchup, but it's because "ketchup" sounds like, nevermind just watch Pulp Fiction.

So, we're walking down the sidewalk, and I catch an adult voice saying something that sounds like "Do you HAVE to walk on the flowers?" I turn around and see a guy with a look on his face of I-can't-believe-I-live-in-such-a-world. Meanwhile, The Boo is oblivious that the guy even asked him a question. He's just walking along and has obviously brushed up against some flowers that were sort of hanging over the sidewalk. I look at the guy and say "Excuse me?"

Now, here I must interject that I didn't say "EXCUUUUUSE ME?" in a challenging sort of way, but simply "Excuse me?" in a way to signify to this guy that I wasn't sure I understood exactly what he had said. SPOILER ALERT: I was completely in the right here.

I'm tired of calling this guy "the guy," so I'll call him Belty McShorts as he was wearing a t-shirt tucked into his shorts and a belt. He also had stupid facial hair, which isn't important to the story, but this is my blog so I can be as petty as I want.

So, I say "Excuse me" and Belty looks up at me and says "I asked HIM if he HAD to walk on the flowers." He says this like I'm rudely intruding on the conversation he's having with my pre-kindergarten-aged son.

For lack of something else to say, as I am a bit nonplussed, I reply "He's five."

Belty starts to go into his whole thing with "That's no excuse for walking..." but I interrupt with "No, I mean he's five, so he's not going to understand your rhetorical question." It's Belty's turn to be nonplussed, but he manages to croak out "What?"

Now it's MY turn to lecture, so I say "He's five, so he's not going to understand the purpose of your clever sarcasm. He won't get that you're trying to be mean to him." Meanwhile, The Boo has just kept on walking, so I turn to catch up with him, leaving Belty to fire his parting shot, which was "Don't have any more children."

Ok, so, I have to admit that my immediate instinct was to go home, make a baby with my lovely wife, wait four or five months, get an ultrasound that clearly shows the baby (maybe one of those fancy 3D ultrasounds, go all James Cameron on him), knock on Belty's door and be all "Boo-yah! Another kid that will trample your flowers in five years, Belty!" Then I remembered that Jen and I have decided that two children are a gracious plenty and that spite probably isn't a good enough reason to have a third.

Not the victim.

The Chimney Foot

You know when it's sort of cold in your bedroom and so you get under a ton of covers but then you get a little too warm but you don't want to get out from under the covers so you stick your foot out of the covers to try to reach some sort of equilibrium? This is called "The Chimney Foot," and The Boo makes use of its unique thermodynamics on a nightly basis.

The Chimney Foot in action. No, that is not a trick of perspective,
The Boo's foot is really that huge.

Having this tiny practitioner in the house has allowed me to study The Chimney Foot, leading to one particularly counter-intuitive finding: somehow, The Chimney Foot is much, much warmer than the rest of the body. You would expect it to be cooler due to its contact with the frigid outside world, but I actually made a grilled cheese sandwich (not pictured) on The Boo's Chimney Foot.

The Saturday Market

On Saturdays in the Spring and Summer by the Willamette River, which runs through Portland seperating the East (where we are) from the West (where downtown Portland is), there is a sort of arts and crafts festival, where people come together to sell baby slings, rocks painted to look like Oregon landmarks and homemade didgeridoos.

There's also festival foods, so Swedish and Boo each had their first taste of Elephant Ears. The wetnaps afterward were also a huge hit.

Anyway, we had a "Portland Moment," which I captured on our Flip and will share with you now.




If you're having trouble soaking all of that in, I'll explain that clip. It is a man riding in circles on a unicycle playing the bagpipes. Of course, he is wearing what can only be called a "Cargo Kilt" and a t-shirt that says "Keep Portland Weird." This sort of thing is called a "Portland Moment."

Another example of a Portland Moment is when we realized that one of the Boo's male teachers is named "Thimble."

Hearing that someone is named "Thimble" always leads to the following sort of conversation:

Me: Thimble?
Other person: Yes.
Me: Really? Thimble?
Other person: Yes. Thimble.
Me: Like, Thimble. As in the thimble thing?
Other person: THIMBLE. Yes.
Me: Wow. Thimble. Thhhhhimble. Thimble. Thim. Bull. Thimble.

That last little bit is my repeating the word over and over again in different ways to make my brain understand the fact that there is a human being named Thimble. Anyway, I met Thimble and he's a good guy and I think his name might suit him, but that may just be because he jumped in front of a huge needle to save me from being poked.

Anyway, Shelton gets bored while shopping for didgeridoos, so she likes to run and play in the park:

And Hughston likes to try to figure out why anyone would voluntarily listen to bagpipe music:


And I try to compose a lovely picture with cherry blossoms in the foreground and young people laying around enjoying their youngness in the fuzzy background and it turns out almost perfect except I didn't notice one little twig hanging down that blocks the girl sitting up and ruins the whole shot.

Flashback - The Flight to Portland

Ok, I'm going to do some flashbacks of what's happened so far, but, being flashbacks, they won't tell the entire story about how all of our stuff got into a truck or how Jennifer kept handing me new boxes to try to cram onto the truck even though there was no more room on the truck, but I will show the picture of me standing on the back of the truck in my pajama bottoms after finally closing the back of the truck.

And here it is.


This picture is pretty pointless because of what it doesn't show: namely all our stuff behind those big boards and the intense hostility between me and the picture taker, who had been making me carry out boxes all morning to stuff into a full truck that she seemed to think magically expanded based on her increasing urgency that "This has to go, too!"

This is how I got even with her, and it wasn't really even that hard.

See, Jen and the kids were going to Portland on December 30, 2009, and since they weren't coming back, they got one-way tickets on Delta. Since I needed to come back to finish dealing with the house and wrap up some work-related stuff, so I got a round trip ticket.

On US Air.

Which meant that while we all (Nixon included, but not the cats) had to head to the airport at 5:30am, I would be seperating from them and traveling alone. Gloriously, comfortably alone. Alone to eat what I wanted, when I wanted. Alone to read or listen to my iPod or wander or sleep. Happy. Alone.

Meanwhile, my lovely bride sent me this text message before she even got on the first plane:
"I am at the gate in line for a seat assignment. I am Miss Misery and I want a divorce. Security people were really nice but that was the worst ordeal ever. I blame you."

Jen single-handedly had to run the Orange Alert Choo-Choo Train through the security checkpoint. Her and two children means three carry-ons, 6 shoes, three jackets and two DVD players. That's bad enough, but what really sent her over the edge was that she had forgotten the tablespoon of water in each of the two water bottles she had brought for the kids. Disposing of that water in an airport is somewhat akin to disposing of spent nuclear rods.

My connecting flight was delayed for two hours in Denver. I nearly wept with joy.

George the cat expresses an opinion

So, our cat George has a urinary tract infection, so, since Jen is working at an office in Lake Oswego and I am working from home, dealing with the sick cat was left up to me. If you are as unfamiliar with the workings of a cat's urethra as I wish I were, then you might not know that these sort of things can be quite serious for a male cat. In fact, George has actually, in the past, developed crystals in his urine that have blocked up his tiny cat junk. If untreated, I imagine that this could cause him to swell up and explode like a particularly grisly, ammonia-odored water balloon. We can't have that happen; we'd almost certainly lose the security deposit on the rental house.

So, all I had to do on Friday morning was corral the cat, put him the crate that he despises more than anything, and get him to the vet office a mile and a half away without a car. So, I put on my nice, "C'mere Georgie" voice, immediately signaling to the cat, who has known me for 11 years, that I was going to do something awful to him. One crash-riddled chase scene later, George is trapped in the bathroom, and I'm off to get the crate.

This is as close as George will allow me to get to him now, because

he thinks he is the victim in this story. Cats are jerks.

The only way to get George into the crate is to turn the thing on it's end, pick up George and drop him head first into the crate. It is at this point that I find out that George's infection hasn't progressed to the point of a blockage, because he...

Well, look, I mean, nobody wants to get peed on by anything, ever. I'll grant that. Once you're being peed on, who or what is actually DOING the peeing is pretty much beside the point. You're being peed on. The rest is just degrees of increased horror. But a cat peeing on you is just unacceptable. There's also volume to take into account, which, in this case, was surprisingly prodigious. And what do say when your cat pees on you while you're trying to help him get well?

If you're as quick-witted and pithy as I am, you probably say something like "Dude, you just peed on me." And that type of snappy dialogue, whoever is reading this, is why they are creating a sitcom based on my life.

After my shower (not a euphemism for what I just described, but an actual shower), I put the crate containing George on the back of my bicycle and rode to the vet, eliciting weird looks because George yowled the entire way. Yes, I have a miserable, screaming cat on the back of my bicycle. WHATEVER. Don't you dare judge me, Portland. You're PLENTY weird yourself.

I wish I could say that I carefully avoided as many bumps as I could during the trip, but I'm apparently too petty to resist my need for revenge against an ill 18 pound cat for even a few minutes.

What? We have a blog?

Ok, so if you've come here looking for information about our trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, then you're really not keeping up. That was like a year and a half ago. So, while you were putting off reading our blog, we've loaded up a house worth of stuff, three animals and two kids and moved 2600 miles away from Atlanta to Portland, OR. That'll teach you.

So, the blog has a new title, and I think I'm going to start writing it again. I've got a couple of months worth of stuff to catch up on, so I'll mix in some flashbacks to the moving process and the beginning of the year. It'll be like Lost, but instead of a smoke monster, there's just a horrible, untraceable smell in the kitchen. Sometimes. But more on that later.

Anyway, this post is the inflection point in this blog. Earlier posts are about Vancouver, which you might recognize from the Games of the Broken Torch Olympiad. Later posts are about Portland, which you may recognize as being the home of Beverly Cleary.

No, that's a bear in a bee costume.

At the corner of Robson and Thurlow, there exists a strange phenomenon that I've never seen before.


It's hard to see here, but if you click on the picture to enlarge, you'll see that there are Starbucks on two of the four corners of this intersection. I'm sure this is pretty well-traveled comedy ground (you know, "I went to a Starbucks and they were building another Starbucks inside it har har har.") but I couldn't help but think of the scene in Best in Show where Parker Posey and her boyfriend are talking about how they met and she says, "We met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks but we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street from each other."

This scene ends with the awesome line "We are so lucky. We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs."

Canadian Scott

So, I was walking down Robson Street the day before yesterday, and I saw a guy in a suit holding a sign that said "FREE HUGS." The price sounded right, so I hugged the guy. Now, I'm not going to sit here and blog that it was the best hug I've ever gotten, but you get what you pay for.

Jennifer didn't believe that I hugged the guy with the "Free Hugs" sign, because, well, she says I'm not the type of person that hugs people I know, much less strangers on the street. I calmly explained to her that AMERICAN Scott doesn't hug people, um, ever. CANADIAN Scott will take a free hug from a quasi-sketchy looking dude on the street with a handmade sign.

Canadian Scott also has an infallible sense of direction.

Lord Stanley Park

When you first walk into Stanley Park, you see a statue of Lord Stanley checking to see if it's raining.

This is, of course, if you enter Stanley Park at the entrance near the statue. If you enter somewhere else, you'll just see some trees and maybe a raccoon that's been fed by tourists so often that they'll just walk up to you with their tiny little hands out and follow you for half an hour. The homeless in Vancouver will just sit there and tell you to have a nice day when you walk past, but the raccoons don't take no for an answer.

Anyway, Jen took the kids for a full day in the park, including a visit to the aquarium to see a 10 day old Beluga whale. At least, that's what they told me they did. I haven't seen a single picture of a whale or an otter, so maybe they just sat on the fountain outside our building and drank $12 pints of maple syrup.


The kids have highly advanced balancing skills. It didn't take them very long to do this, either.


At one of the playgrounds in the park they were giving driving lessons to kids. The kids had to pedal these little carts around a course, following directions on street signs and parking correctly. This was apparently much more fun than it sounds. I wasn't there, but I found it hard to believe - it's not like the kids wake up every morning begging me to design and create street signs for them to obey. Anyway, Hughston can't really pedal, so the 7 car was a huge disappointment for the fans.


If you click on the picture above to enlarge it, you'll see that my daughter has plowed over a stop sign.

Women drivers! Am I right?


After a long day, it wasn't hard to get the kids to sleep.

The Swedish, CEO.

So, I have been informed by two female members of my family that the people back stateside are very disappointed by my work ethic with regard to this blog. So, to answer two key questions in everyone's mind - no, I haven't updated the blog in a week and yes, we are still in Canada.

This week has seen a marked increase in The Swedish's entrepreneurial impulses. She may have the idea that Vancouver is absurdly expensive for some reason ($12 for a pint of maple syrup? This is Canada! Can't we just twist the faucet labeled "M" on the sink and get as much maple syrup as we want?). So, her mind has been hard at work looking for business opportunities. Her first idea was to sell her sketches, but even a cursory review of the art market in Vancouver suggests that it's highly competitive. Without even being told, she quickly discovered the key to starting a business - find a problem and solve it.

Has this ever happened to you?


You know the story. You're swinging or simply hanging on some monkey bars by a yacht club, and, to your horrible embarrassment, you keep slipping and falling. Are you lacking arm strength? No. Some sort of mental block? Perhaps, but it's probably more basic.

Shelton calls her invention "Sanditizer." (TRADEMARK PENDING) You might think that this sounds like some sand-based cleanser for sterilizing your hands, but you would be mistaken, as this stuff is disgusting and horrible, and if you put it on your hands expecting them to be somehow cleaner afterwards, your life will be filled with bitter regret. It is a mixture of dirt, sand, water, pulverized rock (also known as sand) and sugar. There is also a bit of perfume (homemade perfume, no less) in there to please your nostrils.

Sanditizer (TRADEMARK PENDING) allows you to get a better grip on playground equipment, making it a significant player in the $4 billion+ (that's a made up number) games and toys market. So, if Shelton can capture only 1% of this market, she'll have a $40 million company. And because it's just a bunch of crap in a ziplock bag, profit margin should be attractive.



You can't argue with results, though. Get your orders in early.

From sea to shining sea.

Happy Independence Day!



Today, we rented a car and drove to West Vancouver to a provincial park. It was the first time since we've been here that either Jennifer or me had driven, and it was easily the most stressful hour that we've had in the last two weeks. There was traffic, uncertainty as to where we were going, and two children in the backseat demanding food and entertainment. So driving was awful and I was grouchy and Jennifer was totally making fun of me. Don't poke the bear, Jennifer.

But, when we got there, it was a beautiful park on Caufield Cove.


There were some seriously steep climbs, but Shelton refused all safety ropes and freeclimbed the whole thing. Besides, it was mostly water below her, so Jen and I felt like everything was cool.


Shelton, Hughston and I lined up and searched every inch of the beach, CSI-style. Sadly, we were unable to find any feet washed up on the shore. A couple of hands and a chin. That's it. What a gyp.



It's the whole family in a picture! I'm bending down because I had set the timer on the camera and didn't remember whether or not I had framed the picture with enough room for my head. I guess I had. I'll edit this picture and revise history later.

Uu Kanata, salagijauquna!

Tuesday, July 1 was Canada Day in Canada, which is why I've posted the last line of the Canadian national anthem (Inuktitut lyrics). I can't pronounce any of it, but I'm impressed by the sheer number of "A"s and "U"s.

Canada Day is like July 4th in the U.S., except 3 days earlier and 100% less independence from England.


Jen and Shelton had a picture taken with a couple of high ranking members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and three other officers (obviously undercover). It's the hard work and dedication of these fine gentlemen that allows Vancouver to remain safe.



Both Shelton and Hughston got maple leaf temporary tattoos. This may or may not classify them as enemy combatants according to the Patriot Act.


Shelton also got a little quality time with a oscillating fan. She was doing the whole "Luke, I AM your father" bit. Oddly enough, this may be the first time she's ever seen a fan like this. Many places in Vancouver don't have central air. In Atlanta, a plastic fan like this would melt into a sticky puddle in our house if it didn't have central air.





Jen went with Shelton and her friends to see the fireworks. There were a lot of people down by the water to watch them, but the fireworks show didn't start until 10:30pm because that's when it gets dark, so Hughston slept at home and I watched the fireworks from our porch.

After 15 minutes or so, the fireworks just sort of stopped for a bit, and people started wandering off, but Jen was insisting "No, no, we can't leave yet. There hasn't been the Grand Finale." But people wandered off just the same and no Grand Finale ever came. Jen was horrified, and I totally sympathized with her. After all, it's hardly a proper fireworks show if the last thirty seconds don't consist of as many explosions as the previous 15 minutes. But, of course, this is chauvinistic thinking. In Canada, that would be way too exciting and too much excitement is considered impolite.

Oh, Canada, we stand on guard for theeeeeeee!

Oh, this? This is my falcon.

We took Hughston and Shelton and her new friends to the little park with the fountain that kids can play in. They also had these little cones there that would hover and fly like pixies. Who knew there was so much magic in Canada?



It's really amazing to see Shelton have so much fun.


Hughston had a great time too.


Sometimes he tires of the paparazzi hassling him in public.


I think Angelina Jolie handles the press the exact same way.

Later in the day, there was a guy in the park with his pet peregrine falcon.

Shelton, as usual, had a multitude of questions for the guy with the falcon, including, "What would happen if you hit the falcon?*" This seems like a strange question to ask, unless you stop to consider the fact that this man is walking his pet falcon in a Vancouver park.


*The answer is, of course, "We try not to hit the falcon."

Just some pictures.

Stanley Park, Lost Lagoon area.



This one is arty, right? I squatted to take this picture. Hacks just point and click, artists WORK to fulfill their vision.

This could be on a postcard or on the top of a cake or in a blog.

But we would eat Kraft dinners, we'd just eat more.

So, Shelton's two new friends were in our condo around dinnertime, so I decided to feed them. My question seemed simple enough, "Do you girls like macaroni and cheese?"

Their response, "What's macaroni and cheese?"

I stood there for a second, with no idea how to respond to this question. First of all, what sort of country is this that 6 and 8 year old girls don't know what macaroni and cheese is? Secondly, how do you answer a question that already includes the answer as part of the question? It's cheese and macaroni, but not necessarily in that order, except the macaroni and cheese that I'm referring to doesn't exactly have cheese in it.

Our kids eat macaroni and cheese at least twice a week. Food purists would tell you that macaroni and cheese is a SIDE and not a MAIN COURSE. These people are probably elitists and possibly even tenured university professors and can therefore be dismissed as fey and as having more education than sense.

When I was younger, my mom would go out of town occasionally, leaving me to the mercy of my father's gastronomic atrocities. He put ham cubes in the macaroni and cheese.

What's goin on?

Yesterday was a beautiful day. So, naturally, Jen and I took the kids to a Gay Pride festival.

That's not exactly how it happened. We went to a park, and the playground was sectioned off from the festive festival by a huge rainbow flag.


Apparently, this event is a pretty big deal. It had some very well-known sponsors, including one of the casinos in Vancouver. AND HSBC, which really shouldn't matter but has had the effect of making me much more nervous while I'm hanging out in the den with the blinds open. In my head, I know that the HSBC building knows I'm straight and wouldn't like, you know, LEER at me, but I've started wearing long pants during the day.

These were the hosts of the festival. It's important to go to this type of stuff to shatter the stereotypes that you build up in your head about groups of people. For example, I had always just assumed that gay guys had impeccable senses of style. But it turns out that they will show up at an important, well-sponsored festival that they are hosting in a floor length denim skirt.




The entertainment at the festival consisted almost entirely of people of one gender dressing up as the other gender and lip-synching to music. This was horribly offensive to me, not because I have a huge problem with people in drag, but because I have a huge problem being asked to applaud for people who have no discernible talent.

These are girls dressed up as guys. Notice the short hair and thin beards and mustaches. MANLY! They didn't even dance or lip-synch. They mostly just strutted around and pushed each other, which is actually pretty much spot-on for how guys act, except we like to have snacks.


Shelton and Hughston didn't notice what was going on on the other side of the colorful flag. Shelton likes the monkey bars.


I tried to write a little caption for this picture, but given the subject of the majority of this post, I couldn't bring myself to type one. I'm open to suggestions.

It's dark.

It gets dark in Vancouver at about 10:30pm. I'm not sure when it gets light, but I do know that it's light at 5:15 in the morning, because that's when Hughston climbs in bed with Jen and me and decides to practice his stage whisper. "DADDY," he whispers deafeningly, "ARE YOU ASLEEP?"

This is the view from out balcony at night. You know when you go on vacation with your friends and you set up this picture of everyone and it's perfect and everyone is smiling and then you look at the picture later and some goof has snuck into the picture and it just ruins the entire thing and your memory of this perfect moment is forever spoiled because the image of that idiot in the picture is permanently seared into your brain?

Yeah. That's the HSBC building in the lower left hand corner of the picture.

I call the balcony the "porch" most of the time. This is because I can never escape the fact that I was born in Montgomery, Alabama.

Jen took the kids to Granville Island today. Shelton picked up two friends in the park yesterday. If it weren't for her, we would probably never meet anyone anymore. Shelton is named after one of my grandmothers. This turned out to be appropriate because both of them have no problem holding hour long conversations with complete strangers.


That's Shelton with her two new friends. All three of them are bitter now because they only got to spend 13 hours with each other today and weren't allowed to have a sleepover. Did I mention that they met yesterday?

Hughston got an ice cream cone, too. He shouted Jennifer down when she asked for a bite, but he had no problem at all feeding half of it to the pigeons. Kids are jerks.

Interesting Vancouver facts: The letter "Z" is pronounced "Zed." "Soccer" is pronounced "football." "Football" is pronounced "American football." "A bunch of grown men in ridiculous uniforms that would get destroyed by an average 4A high school in Georgia" is pronounced "Canadian football."

I would like to get credit for not stooping to making the obvious "Zed Zed Top" joke.

In Canada, milk comes in bags.

So, Monday comes around and the business of living in Vancouver, rather than vacationing in Vancouver, starts up. While I was working in my tiny office with the great view, Jen took the kids to the Stanley Park aquarium. Since I wasn't there and only have pictures and Jen is off shopping for long sleeved shirts and milk, I'm going to make up what happened.


This is a bird. No one knows the name of it, but it's an interesting bird. You know how flamingos get their pink color from eating shellfish? This mystery bird's diet consists entirely of Twizzlers. In Canada, Twizzlers are called "Nibs" and they are far tastier than their American counterpart. I know, I had trouble believing that, too, because Twizzlers are awesome.


This seal has been indicted by a grand jury for removing people's feet and dragging them to shore all over Vancouver. Neighboring seals have described him as "quiet" and "standoffish."



At the Vancouver Aquarium, they take you to the bottom of the ocean in one of those little clear plastic helmets that the squirrel on Spongebob wears. They were running low because of the upcoming Olympics, so Shelton and Hughston had to share.

Shelton, Jen and Hughston also played on the playground and ate a picnic lunch in Stanley Park, but since I wasn't there and there aren't any pictures, let's just say that they met David Duchovny and Shelton learned to do a backflip off the swings.

After dinner, we decided to go for a walk down to the water. The weather has been amazing - about 68 to 70 degree during the day. I'm not good at converting to Centigrade, but I believe that's about Q%^ degrees. It cools off in the late afternoon, but, well, just look.


Shelton got right into this fountain. I had to adjust the colors in this picture to change her lips from blue to pink. I may be a bad parent who allows his kid to play in freezing cold water in a chilly Canadian city, but I'm good at Photoshop.





Hughston never quite made it into the water, but he was more than happy to strip to the waist in public. Throughout the video, you can see various Canadians walking around in semi-heavy coats.

I'll put this together for you, because I'm a fine narrator. My children are from Atlanta, where it is 98 degrees (that's 3.14159 degrees Centigrade I think) in June, and they are playing in a fountain. Canadians, who, according to legend, live in igloos with polar bears, are bundled up and huddling together for warmth.

Also, 98 Degrees is a pop band. They're from Los Angeles.

Interesting fact about Vancouver: The City of Vancouver was one of the first cities to declare that it is a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in 1983. So, unlike the kids in Atlanta romping about in the summer months, Shelton and Hughston will not be happening upon nuclear weapons, possibly hurting themselves and millions of others. Jealous?