What could possibly be cooler than a shirt like this?

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Pain meds + head full of crack squirrels + Photoshop + free time =

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… whatever the heck this is…

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Technically, this is not another ‘dia de los muertos’ post…

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So there we were, showing our English visitors around Seaport Village down by San Diego bay, and my younger daughter and her boyfriend found a cool candle shop…

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The candles were awesome… they had hard outer shells, with thinner parts where the light from the candle would shine through… You could hold them up to a little spotlight to see the effect.

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There were lots of kinds of candles, but naturally, I focused… (ha, bonus camera joke)… on the skull ones, because I thought it would tie in nicely with all those Mexican ‘day of the dead’ folk art photos I took. Fortunately, I didn’t notice the sign… right behind the little spotlight… that said: ‘no cameras’ etc… until after I was done with my pictures… that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it…

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And obviously, these are inspired by dia de los muertos.

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And thank you, Mollie, for being my hand model for these pictures.

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Now this is just a weird, ironic coincidence, but after we took a few family photos by a fountain, I noticed some big kites being flown on a spit of beach in the distance. I put on the zoom lens, and lo and behold…

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Flying skeletons… how is that for tying together all these skull and skeleton pictures?

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I might as well show you the photos that led to my noticing the kites. I had to crop them because most of my family has no interest in being on the blog… so you miss seeing two brothers, two nieces , a nephew, my wife, and my daughter… but you do get to see cousin Dot… and her daughter, cousin Lynne and her boyfriend, Malcolm. And yes, they are pinching the statue’s rear end… and yes, I did egg them on into doing so…

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Since all this happened, the three travelers have driven up the coast of California and visited my mom in the Bay Area, and are, as we speak, flying to Seattle to visit more relatives.

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And that wraps up day two of their three-day visit.

 

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A kiss from the end of a war, and a war that might never end…

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You might recognize this famous kiss. This is a statue based on a photograph taken when the surrender of the Japanese was announced, and the end of World War Two brought about a lot of random kissing. I seem to recall reading that the sailor in the picture didn’t even know the nurse he was kissing.

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Yeah, the statue is slightly larger than real life…

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The thing is… and this is a thing that struck me even through the haze of pain meds I am currently on… San Diego is a military town.

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The zoom lens let me get up close and personal with a pair of Navy helicopters…

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I took all these pictures as my wife and younger daughter and I walked back to our car at the end of the second day sightseeing with our visiting English relatives.

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We passed by the Midway again, an aircraft carrier that was still being built as World War Two ended, but that served in other wars, and is now a floating museum…

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And if you look across the bay, beyond the Midway, you can see nuclear carriers that are so new that they cover some parts of the ships with white tarps to hide the secret technology from spies… or maybe it is just like when your grandparents never took the plastic cover off the couch… somebody should Google that…

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What I do know is that, if you look closely, you can see, stretched across the water in front of that carrier, a line of connected floats called a boom. These are used to keep vessels loaded with explosives away from the ships… and there are small Navy speedboats that zip around the Navy moorings… and they have loaded machine guns on them… to keep such suicide attacks from happening… because now we are engaged in a war that seems like it will never end.

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And if you look way past the Coronado bridge, you can see the 32nd Street Naval Base, where I was stationed for two years back when I was 17 and 18-years-old. Back then, Russia and the communists were the big enemy. When I started this post, I didn’t know if it was going to end up being funny or not… but now I am actually a little depressed. Is there ever really going to be peace in this world?

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I did take one random picture of a weird, big ship, on its way somewhere. I have no idea what kind of ship that is… somebody should Google that too.

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Well, I told you I took Olivia to the zoo the other day… (featuring a cute baby monkey and an adorable little human)…

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And I told you I took a lot of pictures…

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And you know I like monkeys so much that I wrote and illustrated a children’s book called ‘I Like Monkeys’… still available in the links over there on the right in my sidebar—>

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And you know I am stuck at home on pain meds, because of the whole kidney stone thing…

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And you also know that a pack of wild crack squirrels live inside my head…

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And you know how much I like to use my zoom lens…

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But did you also know that Olivia, our friend’s daughter, whom I am fortunate enough to get to babysit now and then, has a special ‘can we go to the zoo now?’ face?

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And also a ‘no, seriously,  stop packing the diaper bag and take me to the zoo now’ face.

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What a kidney stone feels like… part 3…

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Okay, that’s the last one… I swear… from now on, I will use the pain meds only for good… like making fun of Trump…

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What a kidney stone feels like… part 2…

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If, like me, you had never bothered to learn anything about kidney stones… other than the fact that they are extremely painful… here is something interesting about them. I always imagined that the real pain would come at the end of the stone’s ride through your lower urinary tract… you know… when it tried to squeeze its way out through that last little bit… well, I mean, not little… exactly… but let’s not worry about that for now…

It turns out that the last part is not so bad… or so I was told by real medical professionals, because I haven’t reached that point yet… no, the bad part is what bent me over, gasping for breath last night, pain so bad that I felt like I was going to pass out and I actually vomited until I couldn’t anymore. Pain that made me immediately realize that I had to go to the emergency room… and not put it off for a few days or a week, like I would normally have done.

The painful part is when the stone… 3 mm X 4 mm, more or less, in my case… gets lodged in narrow parts of your plumbing. I really thought my kidney had burst, or something near it… hey, I am not a doctor… but the pain was a big, burning ball just slightly behind the mid-line of my lower back.

Now I am on pain meds… and that is my excuse for sharing all this with you… that and the fact that I share all of my life with you, the good, the bad… and this…

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What a kidney stone feels like… part 1…

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The nurse at the hospital said that she and her coworkers refer to kidney stones as: ‘the male equivalent of childbirth’… All I can add to that is: ‘Yay, pain medications’!!!

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Hi, my name is Arrrrrrrthur…

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That’s quite a grip you’ve got there, matey!

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See, told you that grog would be even better if we mixed margaritas into them… so let’s sing some more sea shanties!

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Avast there, cousin Dot! I don’t care if you are visiting us from across the bounding main… Shear off there, shipmate. Alter course to starboard or larboard, or I will be forced to send a boarding party!

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I sent a warning shot across your bows, now belay that flirtatious fondling of my new best friend, or I will have you keelhauled and drawn-and-quartered, and then make the quarters walk the plank!

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Seriously, I know, right? I left for one minute to batten down my hatches and clear my decks for action, and my own cousin from Old Blighty mutinies and tries to wrest away my prize ship.

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But your booty is my booty now, if I may make so bold, you salty old sea dog.

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And that is about as far as I am willing to take this metaphor… But this was bound happen when a man with a head full of crack squirrels, grogaritas, and pain medication has extra pictures of exploring San Diego with visiting relatives…

 

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Arthur row that cow ashore… hallelujah…

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Hey, I’m no cow-ard…

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I told you that I never would have talked my visiting English relatives into doing awkward poses on a plastic cow bench by an ice  cream parlor unless I was also willing to take the bull by the horns, as it were… (Also, that right there, that is how you steer a cow…  oh man, I crack me up)…

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I call that one: ‘the bovine recline’… yeah, you herd me…

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I admit that I am milking the udderly ridiculous  cow jokes and puns for all they are worth…

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And that’s no bulls#%t…

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