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Our last day there we went to Ecola State park, which while also sounding vaguely like a non-lethal intestinal bug was apparently the place we went last time to take our family photo. It's high up over the beach and quite pretty. Wheeling gulls and ocean-wind swept vistas and the like. There's a rather involved drive where you follow a twisted road. I'm sure it was laid down before any sort of laws were passed about turning radius, minimum shoulder width, and all things that make the average North American road not make you want to grip your steering wheel white-knuckled. At all times, anyways. I was constantly reminded of professional drivers: truck drivers, delivery drivers, and any and all who have to operate multi-ton vehicles in anything more tricky than the Bonneville Salt Flats --who have a sixth sense where their vehicle is, bringing their tire within an eighth of an inch to the curb or building or small child running for her red ball -- apparently without worr...

On the fourth day we went to the tourist city, Seaside. Where all the distractions that appear cheap and absurd in your adult's eyes will hopefully be magical to the kids. The tourist boardwalk . Replete with what I assume to be reconditioned rides from carnivals that have long since folded, merry-go-round, saltwater taffy shops, t-shirts shops that show their political bent a little too readily, an arcade, of all things. Oh, and the standard small train ride that raptures every boy and some girls below a certain age. An age that, I think  Owl Jr has sadly passed. Actually, we steered him well clear of it because we only have so much energy to wait in so many lineups. It was all the way across the street, for god's sake, I used up all my overachieving in high-school. There were bumper cars though. A ride I always preferred in my youth, favouring a ride in which I had some say in the matter notwithstanding the 22 year old 11th grader who seemed expert in all things mildly vi...

Pacific Northwest Beaches aren't usually the type where all the men are in euro-speedos and all the women in two-pieces that fit with varying degrees of accuracy. It's more like a warmer version of what I think everyone thinks of New England. With better sand and more neutral accents. We went to another beach at Ecola Park. Which was supposedly 'less windy'.  'Less windy' than the opening scenes to 1996 disaster movie "Twister", the last time Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton were remotely relevant, is not 'not windy'. Also, by meterogical fate, the wind WAS blowing directly onto the beach. Nobody was digging out their loved ones from suddenly appearing sand dunes, but nobody was peaceably perusing a newspaper, either. Everyone mills about in Gore-Tex or capris and strolls up and down taking a sudden interest in tidal wild-life and various sub-species of gulls. There are also surfers. Pacific North West Coast surfers, to be exact, in their S...

We got a place at Cannon Beach, not Seaside, where we stayed previously. It was by lack of planning, but we ended up liking Cannon Beach more. There is a spurious commercialism, a worn-out carnie atmosphere with Seaside. It has a generally charming crassness but it can start to show through over time, only to be expected of a town that manufactures delight one season every year. The tired local kids who must wither at the sight of more and more tourists invading their town. Rebelling against everything that kids rebel against every year, but set up against the blare of souvenir shops and saltwater taffy makes it particularly dismal. The young people, with their loud music and cat calls and impossible displays of athleticism on the beaches, unsustainable choice of cars,  and general aura of invincibility that grates anyone who isn't them. I'm not sure at what point people are emulating what they see on spring-break themed movies and TV, and at what point it's the other ...

I'm not sure if going a second time makes a trip to a certain area a 'tradition' yet or not. But going to the Oregon coast, seems, in my  memory, something that my parents did with us more than once, so it's close enough to tradition for me to call it one. Second generation immigrants can't be picky about such things. In any case we went to the Oregon Coast again, this time to Cannon Beach, isntead of Seaside. Not because one is more tasteful and less bustly than the other and we prefer our beach visits contemplative if not outright Thoreauesque but because we planned late and that's where Mrs. Owl was able to find a beach house. A house near the beach. We are not of the tax bracket where beach house is both literal and figurative. I get lulled into a a sense of ease when Mrs. Owl tells me it's a 6 hour drive. Doesn't seem so horrible. But it's 6 hours as the crow drives. If the crow didn't have kids and bathroom breaks and the border and e...

(Draft written 2014) I have long hair. Typical nerd with a ponytail look. There really is no justifying it, other than I quite like it. Mrs. Owl loathes it, my children are indifferent but THEIR friends find it somewhat disconcerting. I've gotten quite used to the vacant stares that slowly fill with horror as little children see me. A daddy? With MOMMY HAIR!? Sure I'm injecting just a little weirdness into their lives. It's also my perquisite as a nerd who works at nerdly things for work. It's our wan squeal of rebellion against the Man, never mind that we work for him and have to fill out TPS reports and attend meetings and file whatever document report thing business type people need. Never mind I have a mortgage like many people and go to work for the majority of my life like even more people and look forward, ashamedly, to whatever smidge of novelty is planned in the office come Friday. I get to wear my hair long though! Yeah! *throws Jude Nelson's half-glov...

It's a little known fact, well, known only to parents, that parenthood consists of facing and planning for obscene horrors. Yes, there is all the schmaltzy stuff that gets posted on your Facebook wall or gets chain-mailed from your mother or aunt or whatever (eventually all coming from a devout but curiously bigoted church lady in Nebraska) , but there is that other thing. Especially true for dads, I'm guessing. Evolutionarily it's dad's job to keep everyone from being consumed completely by a random sabre toothed tigers (I want to say T-Rexes of Velociraptors but for some reason feel compelled to adhere to scientific accuracy when spouting out a hyperbole (and weaker, but still strong, is the revulsion of using sabre toothed tigers, which I'm sure I've used before)). Not that this can't be mom's job, but she was likely much busier rearing the children and feeding them and whatnot. Where was I? Oh yes, horrors. One of these horrors is swimming, i...

It was the last thing his mother gave him before she was shot dead in broad daylight for standing up to El Jefe AND city hall. It reminds him of the infinite fragility of planet Earth, with its whorls and eddies of life and  the gusts of inequities visited upon the weak and the strong; the shuddering tidal wave of death that evens everything in the end. Also IT TASTES FUNNY. He was the runner-up to represent 7UP for their Hong Kong sub regional ad campaign 3 years in a row and just cant. Let it. Go. It reminds him of the last clown to ever tease him. He' s a recovering alcoholic whose poison of choice was tequila. He was the last surviving member of an all-dog around the world sailing expedition, all of who, except for him, died of scurvy. He's part of a Labour Union Iniative for Mtn Dogs and is sitting in solidarity for oppressed and exploited citrus workers of Southern California. He has canine onset diabetes and this is the closest he'll ever get to nuzzling all ...

Owl Jr. is of a decided picky bent when it comes to eating. Plain carbs, yes. Chicken strips and fries, yes. Gravy on chicken? NO. He's the sort of boy who eats apples all day long and polishes it off with a long tall drink of juice. And like any First World parent I worry about him eating enough. Tale as old as the post-industrialization-enabled abundance of food driving sprawling urbanization and  a dangerous reliance on genetically invariant foodstocks. It's funny because I was never a picky eater. I was more like Owlet. Undiscriminating, enthusiastic, and like Owlet, maybe just a touch... dense for my age (not that she knows). Owl Jr. is just a ball of yelling screaming, jittery energy. He doesn't go anywhere, he bounces, he jostles, he judders. So, so, so, I gotta, like a grandmother from country that is resolutely trying to get into the EU, fatten him up. He does like pancakes, of all things. I stuff it with blueberries and chocolate chips and I cram him with the...

(Draft written in 2014-05) Owl Jr. is now 5, Owlet 7. I of course want to share with them all the nostalgia of my youth, the Transformers, the Star Wars, the whatever line of toys pushed by a transnational corporation thinly veiled as a Saturday morning cartoon. And it's not just nostalgia. For better, I think , TV made a lot of me. Heroism, sacrifice, friendship, noble acts, greater good. All these nebulous concepts were taught to me through Optimus Prime, She-Ra, Luke Skywalker, GI Joe's "AND NOW YOU KNOW (and knowing's half the battle)" messages, Commander Adama (was there ever an episode where Commander Adama wasn't willing to sacrifice his son for the good of the fleet? Genesis 22:5 amirite fellas!?). It's also a weird rebellion against the Disney channelization of youth. The  Ascendency of the Upper Middle Class Precocious Youth with All the Wisecracking Answers. Wizards of Waverly Place is all that is wrong with TV programming, basically. I want ...

My parents came from hot countries, where the smell of uncatalytic-converted exhaust under the oppression of humidity make nostalgia. Countries where far too many people usually carrying far too many infants lash themselves to vehicles that could nominally be called motorcycles. If a 250cc Honda breaking every Federal Vehicle Safety Standard (and some yet to be written) while careening between two larger buses (with not so much blind spots as blind panoramas) could be called  a motorcycle. Car maintenance was not a well-covered subject. I can still remember my dad showing me that when the oil was low, you just add another quart. It's quite alright, feel free to recoil visibly from the screen. It wasn't until I had my own car that I learned about things like timing belts and oil changes and all sorts of filters. So now, of course, I get regular oil changes. There are things that cause aggravation, however. Sitting in the car, having the oil technician explain all sorts o...

As a challenge, for the questionable glory, just to say I Did That on my death bed, and, most importantly, to have a free pass on having to do cleanup or *shudder* outdoor activities (maybe even sports!), I offered to do all the cooking. For 17 people. For two days.  To make it somewhat manageable I squished breakfast and lunch into a meal I  like to call Very Late Breakfast. And dinners were all dishes I'd done before, just on a much grander scale. With so many burners and ovens going it's a game of efficiency, the  "What can I have going at the same time as the other thing while at the same time being something that I don't have to worry about burning oh god I forgot that other thing now everything is late by three hours" game.  I ended up like Rainman, counting out numbers to myself and staring at the clock. Sauteeing one thing while counting down the time for something else to finish in that pan over there. It was, for a certain slightly n...