Hola mister soto

Since befriending them after suffering the losses of babies, the mother and father of this tiny man have been two of our closest allies in the long journey to bring children into our homes. Together, we have celebrated the births of baby jane and little man soto while grieving those lost before them. It's always difficult knowing that there are other moms and dads who still have yet to bring a little one home, but today we celebrate and welcome this gorgeous child into this wondrous, glorious mystery called life.

Hola danny.

Hold on blue sleeves

The week's end was a nonstop carnival of the celebration all culminating in the grandiose eightieth birthday gathering in honour of one Louis Virgil Rockey, Junior. Here's to eighty more Junior!

The preceding night was a thirty-year celebration of epic proportions for baby brother Jere. Here is a classic from the Olan Mills "blue" period. Brother Jere was still a wild-eyed newborn and my mother had recently joined the Marx brothers for a season. I'm told those brows were actually drawn into the photo.

Some will make arguments in favor of the advancements in computer-assisted photo editing, but i say look to the eyebrows.

Behold their majesty!

I'd be remiss to not mention year thirty-eight for Mom and Pop Rockey! The thirty-eight special. This is where the title of today's post comes into play. None too long ago i was discussing the .38 Special song "hold on loosely" which i had misinterpreted as a song making a plea to a character named "blue sleeves" to "hold on!"

Now, almost by some cosmic happenstance, I look at this family photo of a husband and wife with their two young sons all dressed in blue and i sigh that misunderstood lyric which finally finds its place in my family lineage...

Hold on blue sleeves. Don't let go.

Now how much

The sun's been hangin' out a bit longer each day. I think she just wants to be friends, but i think i oughta place it safe and take it slow for a while. Baby jane sure loves the company not to mention the extended rendezvous with the neighborhood swingset. Spring seeems to have become synonymous with purging the homestead of unnecessary attachments. It is a time for saying goodbye to those things which have alas become expendable. These are the moments when i am incredibly grateful for scanners...

Hmmm...

Let us now cleanse the pallet with another photo of baby jane with her sweet ride....

Besides all that, the recent purging and such has cleared some work space in the mustard room. Perhaps it is time to begin a new season of imagery for the renovation of forgotten wears. Here's a guy we've seen before who is finally being realized. Soon to be available for wearing and sharing. Possible title: "the hunter becomes the haunted." It totally sounded better in my clouded imagination.

p.s. Are we saving daylight or is daylight saving us?

Earlier varieties

Last year, the janes and i purchased some heirloom tomatoes from a local grower of fine tomatoes. We let the seeds ferment and meticulously removed/cleaned each seed before hiding them away from the world until just last week. After a few good days soaking in the sunlight upon our window sill, BEHOLD!

Also, in honour of St. Paddy's day, my buddy and i got kicked out of a liquor store parking lot while enjoying a delicious irish stout beneath the glare of the late afternoon sun.

Pinguistic background distinction

Rare is the case when i do not find stop-motion animation endearing. It is quite simply magic. Magic is great. You know what else is great? Yup, penguins. Imagine my sheer delight when we stumbled upon Pingu, the clay animation import from switzerland, while browsing netflix instant viewing options. Olivia has never sat mesmerized by anything on a screen for that long without being distracted or bored. After six consecutive 5-minute episodes our family has become borderline obsessed with the antics of this adolescent penguin who, along with his family and friends, speak a gibberish penguin dialect not unlike that of our friends at comedy sportz.

Upon further research i discovered even more fascinating information regarding this apparently controversial series which was produced by the pygos group. According to that expounder of great knowledge, wikipedia:

A few episodes of the show were removed from rotation or edited due to perceived offensive material. One episode was Pingu's Lavatory Story, which contained graphic depictions of uncensored urination and alcoholic references. Pygos was unable to censor the urine, leading to the banning of the episode in 1990, the year it was produced. 

I know, right? And if that isn't enough to make you quit your job and get on the Pingu bus, check out was else this darling little animated powerhouse delivered us... 

Before you say anything else, you're welcome.

Or else what?

I could think of myself a victim of my own folly if not for grace and mercy. I find or rather have found myself time and time again torn between listening to your voice and giving in to the illusion of such. My condition demands confession. It may be more for myself to die to those wrong perceptions than anything else. I guess for a very long time we have tried to manufacture a freedom in regards to living in your love instead of simply living at first in that freedom.

I am in a place where i feel somewhat yet not utterly alone. Perhaps we (and by we i mean me) have allowed ourselves to be placed beneath the tyranny of the expectations of our man-made institutions rather than found at the feet of grace listening for the voice belonging to only you. I'm coming to the realization that this letter could be thus far defined by the rathers. Is 'rather' the word which best describes my existence thus far? That may be a bit melodramatic. However, I can't deny that i've spent a great deal of my life declaring, whether by word or by deed, that i'd rather my predicament look a bit different. I am speaking of purely selfish things here. Sometimes these desires are rooted in the depths of complex emotions. Often they are strictly self-serving and trivial.

I imagine a great deal of folks who talk of or claim allegiance to Jesus find themselves compromising that devotion for their own ambitions. If we are living in that space between Christ's victory and the healing of all things then what does that mean for the church? What does that mean for those who align themselves with Jesus? What does that mean for you and me? Where do our stories fit into God's story? The thing is that the more i think about those questions, the more i believe that the answers mean a great deal. They matter a great deal, not because we are all destined to be gameshow contestants or rock stars or astronauts, but because our stories are a part of God's story. They matter because our stories are connected. Your story and my story fit together into the story of God's love and creation and redemption and recreation of all things.

We should matter to one another in ways that we often don't allow ourselves to matter to one another.

(photo credit: zack bent)

What you see is not an orb

What you are seeing is real. This is a picture of real people and not unpeople or phantom orbs bouncing from plane to plane. This has recently become a topic of great concern for those whom consider themselves members of the prestigious but non-exclusive group of pseudo scientists collectively known as Ghostonians. Leave your orbs at the door please. We scoff at at your reflective light spots.

Srsly though. The previous photo was snapped prior to a hallway pizza party in celebration of Papaw's new leg. We got to watch him take several steps from his room at the rehab house to the front porch for a breath of fresh sunshine.

On a quasi-unrelated note, our daughter has a rather keen ability to sense a dog within at least a thirty yard radius.

Well i'll be.

Ooooooh sheeeeeeit

Mostly i've been listening to a whole lot of the Velvet Underground lately. Then what i did was listen to Beck's record club take on the entire TVU & Nico album. What happened next was that i dug pretty hard on what Beck accomplished with the likes of Wilco, Leslie Feist and Jamie Lidell, etc. which just so happened to be reimagining Skip Spence's opus Oar. I then decided to revisit Spence's original recording and was particularly captivated by the haunting vocals and instrumentation of "Weighted Down" on my way home from the Strange Brew. Upon arriving home i happened upon the video of the record club's version again...

Yes y'all. Yes.

Brewing

The dawning of a new era in crafting fine beverages for the public has arrived. As i was settling in, i was pleasantly surprised by two young ladies whom i miss participating with in the daily routine of slinging coffee at hurried customers to the end of fattening the wallets of others.

Sigh.

Together, we gathered behind the fish tanks discussing half-lizards encased in ice cream sandwiches, sugar-induced water retention and the like. More importantly a collective formed to out-ghost-hunt those other poor excuse for ghost-hunters. Boo indeed.

Ideas are in the hopper including but not limited to:

• casting pods
• sesame substitution
• purging 'n' shelving
• cutting ties

As usual, there are no guarantees. However, here are a couple sure to be shortly realized...

Tile and all

(Clockwise from upper left: wet saw, simian jammies, tiled in, corner coffee)

For the past so and so days, we've been constructing a ginormous ceramic floor puzzle of which we've finally completed the placing of each temperamental piece. Soon we grout and replace our (gulp) front door frame. Yikes.

A prelude to completion...