Oh-oh-oh, before I start, here. I would like to announce the fact that I have fixed the Firefox problem (very perplexing). I finally had the time and focus to go through the html/php/css to find the thing that had broken us. Took me a couple of hours, but I nailed it down. If anybody else is having a problem, please yell.
Backtracking. Coupla days after Christmas. I should have called this piece: What We Do For Fun Around Here. But we are so easily satisfied, it would have been title overkill.
Anyway, ya’ll – here we go: you may remember this picture (December 27th – remember December? Last year?) of Laura stuffing the icky green ball up Scooter’s shirt:
This became a philosophical problem for Scooter.
“What hath she done? Why am I shaped so strangely? Why are there tentacles tickling my stomach?”
“Dang! Is there something inside my shirt?” But we know there is because we can see the tiniest piece of the icky ball sticking out down there.
He goes to his father for help. But this is the only kind of help he can expect from people like us. To be fair, Andy does seem distressed for him.
And here we start the family festivities: eight adults sitting around watching Scoots discover the charms of the icky ball.
There was an exotic flavor to the proceedings, thanks to the hat Laura brought back from her year and a half sojourn in Russia – and gave to Murphy. Who has just taken it off Cam and put it on her head. Musical hats. Musical really BIG hats.
Scooter discovers the pleasing attributes of the hat. Fur, not tentacles.
Andy, eating Sophie, the giraffe. I don’t know what Lorri actually calls this giraffe, but she is Sophie now because Wabi named her first.
Actually, this is what entertains me most, quietly watching my son and his children from across the room.
And Murphy, carrying on the family tradition of taking pictures of it.
I know that this image is slightly redundant, but I cannot get enough of any of these three people, and Andy’s face is SO CUTE.
You can see here that Laura probably has some mystical characteristics that seem to make her irresistible to both intelligent, gray haired gentlemen and dogs. (That’s my daddy, there. And Murphy, of course, restraining the small dog. Don’t get the two of them mixed up. Murphy is in the blue, the dog has fur.)
And it seems that Andy just might share that gift.
“Hey, Pipes – you wanna kiss?”
“Why yes, Andy. I think I would love a kiss.”
“Close your eyes, then – ” (Actually, Piper’s tongue looked just like Andy’s one millisecond before the shutter moved. I do not believe there was any actual contact, but it wasn’t for not tryin’. Geneva – hush.)
“Wait,” Andy says. “Where’d you go? Still kissing, here.”
And that is the end of the family entertainment.
Here I am showing you two stars I made, inspired by Lindy‘s beautiful tutorial. If you follow the link you will appreciate how horribly I deviated from the real deal. First of all, there were no ceramics at Michael’s after-all, so I had to use wood, and all my acrylic paints had dried up (my gosh, it was ONLY ten years ago that I last used them), except for maybe three colors. And I’m really bad at string wrangling.
But I spent about four hours (when I should have been getting the house clean for that party) completely absorbed in ruining these things. Then I forgot the last step. But they’re kind of cool. In a really I-hope-this-looks-like-estoeric-art sort of way.
Here is Murphy in an American hat.
And last of all – did I ever show you this? It’s a portrait Gin shot of Max many years ago, and I ran it through a really cool Photoshop action that let me paint it. I’ve always loved it. So there you are.
All done. No meaningful sting. Just – there you are.
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