"have you met my ex-wife?"

that's the line my dad has used countless times in the past to make in-laws laugh and relative strangers feel uncomfortable. that's the line he used today when his nurse came in to check on him. that's the same nurse we would later learn is the mother of a girl i once dated which led to me making akward conversation and feeling relatively uncomfortable.

chalk it up to our famed y-chromosone and our unwillingness to treat serious stuff too seriously. for the first time today i heard the story about how my dad (and his friend john (who was my junior high principal)) arrived back from their long trip to india in the early seventies. keeping in mind that he hadn't seen his wife (my mother (not his nurse) in six weeks, and could have possibly gone through a beattles-esque rebirth during that time, donned the traditional indian robe and head piece he'd bought there, in the airport bathroom. my mom failed to recognize the skinnier, tanner indian man who looked like her husband. But of course her mother (my grandmother (his in-law)) picked him out of the crowd i'm sure with relative bewilderment.

another revelation by dad concerned the previously mentioned post-op yard trenching therapy session. why he didn't dislocate his new shoulder, he did cut up a few sprinkler system pipes which he had to fix and relocate. doing so required hours of crouching which led to his knee surgery a year later and made his legs constantly fall asleep. now he believes that that same poor circulation caused the current clots.

again, he is feeling fine but is still confined to his hospital room. furthermore, today he discovered room service and with it their nice selection of ice cream. i promise i'll tell his donkey delivery story soon.

m.a.t.

my dad went into the hospital late last night because of a blood clot in his leg. a CAT scan revealed that he had further clotting in his lungs. considering all this, he's not in pain and is more annoyed by the fact that he has to sleep on his back until it clears up. hell he can't be anywhere but his back for the next few days. at first i was quick to point out his poor diet of red meat and ice cream, but it's more likely hereditary or caused by cancer. the tests haven't come back yet.

because of this, he's having to back out saturday of his first wedding in thirty whatever years of photographing weddings. possibly the saturday after that too. he had asked me to shoot this weekend's, but he found a replacement. an old coworker of his back from when he first started off.

it's nice to see that he's confident enough in me to take over one wedding. however i definitely don't feel ready to take over the family part time business and hopefully he's not ready to give it up. after all, this is the same man who two days after having replacement shoulder surgery, rented a gasoline powered trencher and tore up the back yard.

turn and face the strain

once again, it all changes. my life got flip turned upsidedown. three times this week i step outside of casa myrtle and actually make friends here and now it's time for them to leave. it's in between sad and annoying. soon enough too, the fall semester starts up and i lose any of the few casual summer visits that i've had anyway. in adulthood there is no summer, just hotter workdays.

even if i don't see any human faces outside of the cast of everybody loves raymond, there's always my love for correspondence. within the last few days i've gotten letters/emails/postcards/phone calls from austin, malibu, boston, vancouver, san fransisco, tehran, london, barcelona, paris, and seabrook, texas of all places. actually i think it's easier to be friends if you never have to meet face to face, which is why the upcoming weeks scare the hell out of me.

christmas in july and the porkchop shaped stocking

a cool front came through and my family was in town bearing random gifts of cranberry juice, tortilla chips, and porkchops. honestly i love porkchops as much as anyone else who eats porkchops, but now i have enough to make anyone who eats porkchops very sick of eating porkchops very soon. and this is right as i'm starting to eat less meat anyway so i'll have to put that on hold for a while.

i introduced them to all things lf including my office and us "accidentally" coming across 5 or 6 buildings across downtown. it's great when we're just walking along and my mom points out jokingly "is that yours too?" and i say yes. oh and my dad elaborated on his donkey at the strip club story for the inlaws. one day i'll tell you.

if you'll excuse me it's a blistery 81 degrees outside and my mittens are primed for sledding and snowball skirmishes. ta ta.

the ice cream man cometh (steve, willy, and kevin too)

i had been hearing his rendition of the entertainer outside for a few weeks now, but it wasn't until i saw his tricked out special school bus painted blue that i understood. furthermore, i drove by what i guess was his house the other night cause i spotted the 300 pound hairy backed (how did i know he was hairy?) mexican man clearing out his ice cream inventory shirtless (that's how i knew) and maybe doing a little dance.

my next favorite character is fifty cent steve. i call him that cause he looks like a steve and keeps asking me in my front yard for change to make a phone call. he's a waifish hippy type, looking a month unwashed so i guess he's calling his stock broker.

i chose willy's barber shop from the yellowpages yet the description didn't tell me that i'd be the only white kid amongst three 60 year old men chatting in spanish over the piped in selena dance numbers. turns out willy himself is is an seventy year old, 8 times married, world war II dischargee, whose youngest son is 17. after showing me miguel's prom picture, willy proceeded to give advice to my generation including what to do with those wild girls who wear the short skirts and the thongs.

maybe not my favorite but definitely the most talkative is kiosk kevin. he called out to me from his european frangrance booth at the mall only to ask what i was shopping for. that led to discussing my office's dress code, to discussing architecture in general, to comparing the interior of nearby abercrombie and fitch to that of historic russian cathedrals. no kidding. in the end, i think i convinced him to be an architect. i like san antonio.

"you picked the wrong city"

the more i think about it the more i loved london. at any given second there's a million things going on and you can't possibly perceive everything all at once. in effect you find your little nitch somewhere in there and go about life knowing that nitch passionately well. it's hard to stop something so big and diverse and that quick on its feet.

i'm glad all my friends there are safe and well.

as for san antonio, it's been very hot. my attempt at eating lunch at alamo plaza was shortened by 102 degrees of pure fahrenheit. and it's been staying in the hundreds up until 8pm sometimes. i did spot a few strikes of lightning last night yet found even fewer drops of rain on my car this morning, so i think i'll basically be staying high and dry here until one of my neighbors leaves a sprinkler on and unattended.

le tour de tejas

i'll call it the great extended indepence weekend of reccuring themes 2005.

canada day friday started with me going to cycle world again to buy bike tubes and soon after figuring out that new tubes also refuse to fill up. after drowning my flat tire sorrows in a two-for-one pizza deal from pizza classics, i find myself with nick and others on our way to hang out with the real world austin cast at some san antonio bar that i forget the name of. for legal reasons, plans changed at the last second which was fine since i hadn't seen the show and could generally care less for the show. the plan change involved us and dissolved real world groupies hanging out in line for popular downtown gay dance club. me not being gay and nick not being gay and neither of us having homosexual worthy dance moves, back out at the last second and called it a canada day night soon after.

saturday morning i downed a few more pieces of my wonderful discount pizza, which was cold seeing as i still didn't have a microwave, and threw my discount bike tubes in my trunk. third trip in a week to cycle world discovered that my pump bought in trip one and not the tubes bought in trip two was the problem. also being in a bike shop that often makes you catch lance fever and almost makes you almost want to buy a yellow wrist band. from there i was out of town. i stopped in austin to pick up jennifer, picked up a bit more of the lance vibe with banners draped everywhere, and picked up some austin nostalgia seeing as i hadn't been back since i moved out. our ride to conroe involved jen warning me not to see war of the worlds, agreeing that the real world was the stupiest thing ever, and her repeatedly ejecting my ben folds cd i had just bought at cheapos. at home i soon discovered that my nephew's 6th birthday involved not surprisingly a pizza party. four more pieces of pizza accomplished my mom and i decided to check out the new conroe theater and see the only late showing which of course was war of the worlds. in an even later showing back at the house i was about asleep when an hour and a half showing of real world austin came on. i mean, come on, i was feeling all nostalgic for atx so how could i resist?

the late owlness and all day pizza diet apparently put me out until 12:30pm on sunday which may be the latest i've ever slept. a chat with dad over mom's pork roast lunch attempted to teach me that i should never go near another gay dance club. soon after my mom and i were off to watch fireworks at my aunt's lake house and my dad was off to photograph a wedding that i would later find out was done by a gay preacher who proceeded to take advantage of the first slow dance of the recpetion with his partner. my dad didn't tell me if he took a picture. oh, and at my aunt had luckliy just cooked a nice big pork roast for dinner.

america day monday was pretty unique seeing as it involved cliff diving with david and tacos and gretchen all back in austin - though jennifer is still a music nazi on the way back. oh yeah, i jammed my knee into some rock climbing out of the water and gretchen jammed her knee through a glass pane in her door and so we were both sitting there pretty gimp with various amounts of blood coming out of both of us. the late drive last night involved the windows rolled down, fireworks going off all the way down I-35, ben folds playing loudly on the speakers, and my parent's 30 year old wedding present microwave nesteled in the back seat alongside a new bike pump and a pair of inflated schwinn tires.

today i overslept and ate warm leftover pizza.