Come on, that is a spectacular flower!
And those ain’t too shabby…
That one isn’t even open yet, and it is still lovely.
Wow.
Is that one carnivorous???
Those aren’t even flowers… just colorful leaves… I wanted to see if you were paying attention.
mmmm… furry…
I love the color purple.
Not a flower… wake up and smell the pollen.
Last night, Joey… that’s little Olivia’s dad, for those of you keeping track of details… and I went and saw The Great Wall. I don’t think I have ever done a movie review here before. I hate to start off by slamming Matt Damon, whom I really like, but man… that movie was bad. It was so bad that you should go and see it. Maybe this isn’t really a movie review so much as a warning about how bad this movie is. That being said, you should go see it… and then come back to this post, and we can discuss all the ways it sucked in the comments.
That should be fun.
Okay, it isn’t really a bunch of flowers… it is a lot of separate pictures of flowers…
I was being clever… sort of…
San Diego has its down sides… like drought and wild fires…
But we also have palm trees and beaches…
And flowers bloom all year long.
So, when I took little Olivia to Balboa Park today, I took a bunch of flower pictures for you all.
And I do mean a bunch… (hence the ‘part 1’ in the title)…
I hope you enjoy them… because Olivia was bored out of her skull in the botanical pavilion.
I am watching little Olivia again today. She is snoring on the couch beside me as I type this. We went back to Balboa Park, in San Diego, again.
Her favorite part of the park, it turns out, was pretending to eat at a Parisian cafe. I took her back to this particular park, because last week when we were there, she was really upset that there were too many kids climbing on the dragon statue, and she didn’t get a turn. So that is the first place we went.
There were no kids on it.
It was the perfect time.
She didn’t want to have anything to do with that stupid dragon.
But the day was not a total loss. I met this little guy.
And we went into the botanical pavilion full of beautiful orchids… which frankly bored the crap out of Olivia…
But I did make her wait patiently in the stroller while I took orchid pictures… because patience is a virtue. Just wait… that is only the outside. The flowers are going to blow you away!
I know, she doesn’t look like that anymore. But that is the way I remember her, back when I was a stay-at-home dad… before that was a thing… and the other dads made fun of me. I didn’t care. I was there for all the important stuff.
Now she is all grown up.
And she has style and grace and she is tough and smart. And maybe that is partly because I was there for all the important stuff.
And she is marrying a great guy. Everybody loved the wedding shower, except maybe our dog, who, as you can see, was stuck out in the backyard for most of it. Well, all the guys were sent away too, dog, so don’t feel too bad.
It was a weekend filled with love.
And we stuck Jessica’s fake eyelashes on Big Johnny, so… uh… yeah, that was fun.
Yeah, you will never guess what city that is.
Turns out that wedding showers involve drinking…
Fancy drinking. Most of these pictures were taken by Mollie, our 17-year-old… because, being a man, I wasn’t allowed to be at the wedding shower.
My wife went all out. That is a strawberry/mango mimosa… oh, yeah.
She also made macaroons… from scratch…
And I already mentioned the flowers she made by dying coffee filters with food coloring, right?
That took her a week.
The mixer is sort of an inside joke. We have been planning on giving Jessica a good mixer for her wedding since she was like a teenager.
Sometimes, art is all about finding a new angle, a new perspective.
Well, I was going to start this post with some sappy comment about how magical it is when a kid spontaneously grabs your hand because they love you… but then, I nabbed this picture off Big Johnny’s Facebook feed, and saw what I look like from behind now… which is basically behindless… I mean, my family have been telling me I don’t have a butt anymore, but I didn’t believe them… I was sitting on something…
Anyway, while the wedding shower for my older daughter was going on at the house, us menfolk had to vacate the premises. We took Willie to the park… yes, the same one I took little Olivia to last week. Good eye!
When you are a dad, you end up eating a lot of invisible food… and cakes made out of sand. Big Johnny is a good dad.
William, who is now four-and-a-half, is quite a character.
He was just running around with his sweater pulled over his head. Johnny and I were making ‘Cornholio’ jokes… (if you never saw Beavis and Butthead, don’t worry about it)
So the girls were having fun, and we were having fun.
I call that a win/win situation.
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Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Pouring My Art Out 