Periodically.org

It was finally time to make our way back to Owlet and Mrs. Owl. It's a tricky thing toddlers, the Terrible Twos. That explosions of impotent rage are just under the surface most of the time, but it's something that I've come to empathize with. Imagine if you, after months and months of not really having an opinion about anything, suddenly, are YOU. You with all your preferences and ideas and wants. Now imagine that you need to communicate with an unreasonably large human who has complete and utter control over everything you do. Now imagine you can't quite speak English. Or can, perfectly, clearly, succinctly, but either the Ginormous Human has defective ears or you must, at all times, speak with your mouth filled with marbles. I can see where the rage comes from. These episodes usually arise when the activity changes, especially if I'm taking Owl Jr. from an activity he likes, aimlessly following tire tracks, to one he might not like, joining up with the family...

The rental house was a few blocks from the ocean, so not a beach house perse, but a close-enough-to-the-beach house. Which was fine by me. If you get one right on the beach (so I tell myself), you'd have to start driving cars with leases that could be confused with a mortgage,  have opinions about European soccer leagues, test cricket, various exchanges, and how often, or if you ever, press your chinos (you'd have to have chinos as well, come to think of it). You'd be Upper Class, or Comfortable, as the Upper Class like to think of themselves. And I can't, I won't, have that. And not just because I can't afford it, not in the slightest. It's a principles thing. The house itself was not the seedy, somewhat charming dive I expected it to be. It was rather done up and not altogether horrible. Which it had every right to be. As far as I'm concerned, these neglected, often empty houses have every expectation to be utterly run down and just this side of co...

I find I'm trying to reconstruct my childhood in my vacations. Not purposely, but out of habit. To that end i took the family to the Oregon coast, to experience the beach as I experienced it: chilly, windy, and with far too much Gore-Tex™. It's summer vacation as experienced by a son of immigrants. How were they to know a proper vacation was at a multi-billion dollar ride park festooned with anthopomorphic domestic animals, professionally-created childhood-focussed-grouped animated imagination avatars and other copyright protected IP? They wouldn't. There is also the small problem of my parents being under the intermittent delusion that they enjoy the outdoors. (Memories of camping, such as it was, is dominated by twenty year old canvas tents that I now know smelled overwhelmingly of mildew with brief notes of a hardy, devastating killer mold; short-lived fires that were constructed with the quixotic idea that a roaring blaze could be had from warming rather large, da...