Friday Picto Five 9-21-07
We (and by ‘we’ y’all can just infer ‘TheMan’) started in on a long overdue project that I thought up ages ago but never did anything with. That is, I stole all my mumses’s family photo albums with intent to scan. Digital babE! I’ve had them for over a year so finally, I asked TheMan to do his TheMan magic on them soas we can get the pics back to my mumses. Apparently she misses them. Who knew! Anyway, here are five random pics from the ‘green’ photo album which is, more or less, baby pics of yours truly. Also, amusingly out of sequence random other pics, but mostly they are me. I think.
Onward! These are five favorite pics picked by TheMan with commentary from the me.
Baby boo! I can tell it’s me because it’s in black and white. A good rule of thumb is: Baby pic in b/w are of me, color are of my sis. That’s not always true since there are clearly pics where my mumses is preggers (and in color) in her West coast get up so there were color pics taken at the time but there aren’t any b/w pics of my sis. Why? I have no idea. Maybe my dad was gettin all jiggy with the artSAY, or maybe b/w was much cheaper stock for a newly established family. I also have no idea what I’m so interested in here but it has my undivided attention. And rapture. It’s probably the dog.
Yeeeeeahhhhhh. Me again. Do other families have an obsession with taking pictures of their kids in the tub? Because there are a TON of ‘kids in the tub’ pics scattered throughout the boo family photo albums. Seriously, I think it all started here and by the expression on my face, you can tell that there will be years of tub shots to come. I’ll have to admit, one of my very favorite pictures of my sis and me is one of these tub shots (and I’ll share as soon as we scan the album it’s in because it’s an awesome pic) but how many bath tub pics does one need? Well, not that I’m in a bath tub per se in this shot, but it was a prelude to getting a bath so I’m counting it.
As a funny side note, my grandpa took a pic of my mumses bubble bathing when they all went on a ski trip to Colorado back in the 90s just because of all the bathtub shots. Priceless.
Me and my dad singing a tune. OK, so he’s probably the one doing the singing and I’m doing the drool counterpoint but I’ve always liked this shot. My dad had this guitar, a 4 string guitar, a 12 string guitar (I think) and a mandolin by the time I was old enough to start taking interest in how one played them. I even tried to teach myself (several times) but it never took because I never kept up with it. Then things and stuff happened and he eventually sold all his stringed instruments (probably to buy scuba gear) so I lost my means to practice. I’m still pretty good at the chords G, A, and D though from all those years of relearning how to play.
Ahhhh the great Christmas/Hanukkah cookie party prep. This is one of the old (and discontinued) family winter traditions wherein my folks would invite a couple families over for cookie decorating. The grownups would do whatever it was the grownups did (like I was paying any attention to them, I was a kid and besides COOKIES!!!) and the kids would descend on dozens and dozens of cut out cookies and frost the beegeebus out of them. Prep started a couple days before the big event when my dad would mix up about five batches of sugar cookie dough. Then the next day, after they had a proper time to cool off in the fridge, he’d bake them all up. I think there were often something like 10 to 15 dozen cookies baked for the event and they all had to be cut just so to maximize the amount of cookies one got out of a rolling. Note to you future cookie makers: Never let an engineer handle the cut out cookies.
However, sometime near the end of the process, but before we had to go to bed, my dad would trace out both my sister’s hand and my hand in the dough and he’d bake up our hand cookies. That was the best part of baking cookies, despite the somewhat disappointed look on my face here. I think that’s because really, cut out cookies are rather bland without a good hat of icing on them.
Hey a color pic! And if it’s in color it’s gotta be my sis right? Right! Or at least right for this shot. Sometimes you get an awesome pic of your little kid and other times you get a pic that some 34 years later the husband of the sister will dub a “blackmail pic”. This one really cracked TheMan up but he didn’t want to post it out of difference to my sister (who is not, in fact, actually cross-eyed). TheMan is nice like that. I, on the other hand, am totally all about teasing my sis so I yoinked that pic and slapped her happy cross-eyed baby butt up on teh internets for all to see. Besides, I think she was just really intent on something here and her eyes went all wacko. Lesson one: Learning to control the eyes.
And a picto-extra for you! TheMan discovered this tucked behind another picture in the ‘baby book’. See what I mean by out of synch? I’d say that 75% of the book is baby boo or the pregnant times back before baby boo but then there’s also a first grade pic of my sis, a portrait pic of a fiveish year old who is either my dad or uncle, and this gem. The wording to the right is scrawled across the back of the picture. Esther was my paternal grandmother so I’m thinking that maybe this is a picture of her as a little girl and she had written the note to one of her kids (although I don’t recognize the handwriting as hers, unless she wrote it when she was very ill before she died). Or, it could be that this is a picture of my great grandmother and she wrote on the back for my grandmother. Either way, cool find!
Last year at the booniverse: Hording photo albums and not updating.
Last last year at the booniverse: My mumses has a lot of albums.
The year before at the booniverse: My nap was punctuated by short bursts of “Yieeee!” and “Ouch Damnit!” and “Gahhhh!” along with some longer “AiiiAiiiAiiiAiii”s and a few “GoddamnitsonofabitchPOLENTAfucker!”s, all of which made trying to nap quite a challenge.
The year before that at the booniverse: Thinking about napping the family photos and not updating.