I don’t think he is going to mind… he still sends me tweets now and then… and he did get me permission to use all those Monty Python quotes for that alien in my sci-fi novel series that learned how to speak English watching BBC reruns of that famous comedy show…
It started when I spotted this photo on Twitter…
And I tried to be tasteful about it… at first…
But then, the pain meds in my body interacted with the crack squirrels in my head…
And then… things just got weird…
These are supposed to be the last photos of our time with the English relatives… I don’t know how that dog got in here…
There they are, cousin Lynne, her boyfriend, Malcolm… and most of cousin Dot. They came over to our house on day three of their visit, for a barbecue.
Awwww… how cute are they? I really think you should go back a year and look at the photos of our adventures with them when we visited them in England last summer… we did some crazy stuff.
You would see the sights of London, and the English countryside… where we stayed with Dot for a few days… and you would see the Queen and Royal Family, a scene from a James Bond movie being filmed, and lots of other cool stuff.
Seriously…
It was a pretty awesome day. Lynne is petting our dog, Shiloh… so who the heck is that other dog?
And I even got to get out the tikis I carve for decorations…
Oh yeah…
Wait… that might not be a dog at all…
That might be me in a dog mask…
No!
I didn’t say ‘shake it all about’ yet!!!
Wait… which foot are we putting in first?
Oh wow… cool nests… I wonder what kind of cute little birds built those?
Great… devil birds…
This is not going to end well…
Nope…
Good idea, Olivia… give them the ‘squishy face’!!! Ha! I love taking my little babysitting buddy to the zoo!
… whatever the heck this is…
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…
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.
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…
And obviously, these are inspired by dia de los muertos.
And thank you, Mollie, for being my hand model for these pictures.
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…
Flying skeletons… how is that for tying together all these skull and skeleton pictures?
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…
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.
And that wraps up day two of their three-day visit.
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.
Yeah, the statue is slightly larger than real life…
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.
The zoom lens let me get up close and personal with a pair of Navy helicopters…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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?
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.
And I told you I took a lot of pictures…
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—>
And you know I am stuck at home on pain meds, because of the whole kidney stone thing…
And you also know that a pack of wild crack squirrels live inside my head…
And you know how much I like to use my zoom lens…
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?
And also a ‘no, seriously, stop packing the diaper bag and take me to the zoo now’ face.
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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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/.
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Pouring My Art Out 