Snapshot from a vacation

My kid sister came out to visit last week.

We did Portland then drove out to the coast, so we had a long car ride just to talk. During a conversation about politics sis mentioned unnamed “friends” who were Republicans but were “nice people”; not overtly racist, sexist, etc. She lives in a piece of rural New York state, so I find that entirely believable that she knows these kind of people.

“They’re Nazis.” I replied. “Nazis are never “nice people”; they’re Nazis. We fought a whole war and incinerated whole cities full of them.”

“But…these aren’t bad people.” she insisted.

“Yes. They are. Just like there were sweet old grannies and kind men and cute kiddies in Dresden, they’re Nazis. You can’t excuse them because they’re “nice”. They have to be fought, and, if need be, killed.”

She was silent. But couldn’t agree. Just didn’t want to face that.

And that’s why we’re here.

“And when their Orange Fuhrer wins, and he sends his soldiers out here to Portland, and they shoot me down in the street because I’ll fight rather than surrender to Nazis, your “nice” Republicans will be happy about that, now, won’t they?”

And she had nothing to say.

Update 10/28: Bret Devereaux says the same things better and more completely.

"And while right now you may have many reasons and many concerns, if you sign your name to this fascist and a fascist government takes power as a result…your many reasons will no longer matter. No one really cares what Franz von Papen or Victor Emmanuel III or NSDAP or Blocco Nazionale voters were concerned about or their pet issues. It no longer mattered. Once a fascist government took power…they were fascists.

And that was all that ever mattered."

As Tubby himself said; this may be the last time you get to vote.

Last vacation snaps

 On our last day we visited "Pittock Mansion", the West Hills digs of a former Portland newspaper baron:

I'll say this for the old plutocrat; he had style.

Showing off wealth in an almost Trumpian way except with less gold leaf:

Mind you, here's where I'd have come in back in the day; the servant's entrance:

Last random snaps, kiddo:

Patinopectin (middle Miocene) Astoria Formation, Beverly Beach

Stone lion, Japanese Garden:

You at the Zen Garden:

Izakaya Kinchito:

The Inn from Otter Crest:

Sunset:

Moonrise:

Lighthouse Keeper:

Thanks for coming, sis. It was fun.

More vacation snaps

 Posting pictures from my kid sister's visit.

We stayed at a quiet little place called the Inn at Otter Crest. Sorry, no otters.

I'd done work there before, so I knew the good sights to see, like the little pocket beach below the landslide;

I took a ton of pretty pictures there that evening:

The actual "Otter Crest" is the point of land in the above photo, tho.

The swell was up that afternoon and made so pretty pictures:

Oh, almost forgot; on the way there we stopped off at a winery I'd also done some work at. Decent work, apparently, since they'd added this ginormous showplace out front:

The view was pretty spectacular:

As was the gigantic glacial erratic rafted from Coeur d'Alene to outside McMinnville on an iceberg:

Let's see. What else. Oregon Aquarium was fun...

Rockfish, though? BO-ring.

THE MEG!!!

Birbs.

Starfish

Anemones

Lighthouses (Yaquina Head)...

More lighthouse...

Pelicans:

More beaches:

Still more beaches:

And then back to Portland...

Back from the East

My silence over the past several weeks has been, unlike my more typical silences of late, not occasioned by simply having little or worth or note to say.

It was because I was not here.

My in-laws succeeded in emotionally bludgeoning my Bride into dragging all of us back to the Eastern U.S. on a "family vacation" ostensibly because her parents so delighted in their adorable grandchildren that their 40th wedding anniversary would have been barren and meaningless without said nippers. They had gone to the vast trouble and expense of renting a summer house on the island of Mt. Desert in southeastern Maine for a week-long getaway to spend time with their beloved grandkiddies in the pastoral Maine woods.

This struck me as nonsenseical at the time it was proposed and, now that the whole magilla is over, done, and dusted seems little less nonsensical than it did at first. My in-laws are perhaps the least outdoorsy people I know, my sister-in-law (another of the Great Grandkid Anniversary Vacation crew) is so huge as to be practically immobile more than 100 yards from vehicular transportation, and my kiddos are both video addicted and at the stage where merely wandering the woods palls relatively quickly.

So off we went, 3,000 miles, to flop down in a great big rental along the northwest coast of Mt. Desert for a week.

My in-laws, I might add, showed little inclination to do anything with the supposedly-adorable grandkiddos they supposedly so desperately needed to make their anniversary complete. I wish I had a little movie of Grandpa Steviepie getting the word that he was expected to take his grandson to ride the little putt-putt go-karts at "Wild Acadia"; I thought he was going to give birth to something right there, and not something adorable or fluffy.

It turns out that my father-in-law's idea of "vacation" is "to be as inert as possible"; he really thought that his week in one of the most beautiful parts of the Maine coast was going to consist of laying immobile on a couch in this rental house while, I suppose, his adored grandchildren gamboled about his rest like wooly lambs. Or something.

For me the whole business was a mixture of occasional enjoyment mixed with repeated periods of frustrated irritation with the general inertness of my in-laws. The entire business came to a head on the second day in Maine, where my poor Bride ended up on the end of a tirade wherein I announced that the solution was simple; either the group came up with a plan or plans to do and see more of the National Park or I would, myself, and they could go hang.

The result was a little more activity, although the Boy was unimpressed with All Things Park; he wanted to watch television and ride the go-karts. The Little Miss was better about nature-ing, but she was desperately homesick and not inclined to be happy about that. Both kiddos were bored, and their grandparents had no idea how to enjoy them or entertain them.

Taken altogether, a rather sad way to spend a week in a very lovely place.

I'm back now, several thousand dollars poorer, but with little more in the way of inspiration for blogging. My nation still seems to be composed largely of hysterical idiots led by cynical idiots or clueless idiots, and I have no notion of what We the People can do about that assuming the a critical mass of us continues to clamor for more idiocy from both varieties of idiots.

But I'll see if I can think of something.

MILF Gone Wi...on vacation

Sorry the posting has been so light; the thing is, I'm single parenting for the long weekend and the preceding week was taken up with getting ready for that. Mojolicious is off to St. Augustine with three of her old college chums (now there's a thought...does anyone this side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge call their friends "chums" anymore? They did at one time, anyway, if the pop novels of the Thirties and Forties are any indication. Hmmm.) for a long weekend of fun and sun.

The funny thing is that three of the four are now nice conventional mommies who leave a total of three husbands and six kiddos between them back home. The comic viewpoint nearly images itself:

Which reminds me of a story.

When The Boy was small - about three years old or so - Mojo enjoyed a similar weekend with one of the friends she's vacationing with this time (let's call her GeoChick, since she, too, is in the earth sciences). Now I like GeoChick; she's a rambunctious, earthy gal and visually is most delightfully curvaceous. Since at that time Mojo was also quite buxom it was hard to...ummm...let's say not "talk to their racks" as us doggish guys tend to if not careful with our gazes.



Anyway, little Peep missed his mommy then as he does now, and about 0.4 nanoseconds after the door closed behind her he asked me "Where's Mommy?"

"Mommy is in Seattle with Auntie GeoChick." I replied. "She'll be home in three days." There was about half a second of silence as he digested this. Then:

"Where's Mommy?"

This went on about for about ten minutes on the hour, every hour, for the next two days. Every time I gave him the same answers; Mommy's in Seattle with Auntie GeoChick. She'll be home in three (two, one and one half...) days.

On Saturday we'd gone to the animal prison zoo and had a relatively-where's-mommy-free afternoon. But on the ride home with nothing else to distract him (and wretched traffic, so lots to distract me...) Peep pipes up noisily from his carseat "Where's Mommy?!?" and I snapped.

"Mommy's with Auntie Chris jumping up and down on a hotel bed naked rubbing their boobies together like in one of those Girls Gone Wild videos! Okay? Stop asking where the hell Mommy is! She'll be home tomorrow!"



Peep cries, I growl, by the time we get home he's asleep (the Carseat Magic, yes!) and we go back to "Where's Mommy/In Seattle with Auntie Chris" for the remaining weekend. Mommy walks through the door Sunday evening and thrills the Peep, who fawns and drools all over her in approved toddler fashion, climbs into her lap, snuggles down, sighs, looks up and asks;

"Why did you an' Auntie Chris jump an' rub your boobies together?"

I won't describe the look I got other than if it were knives I'd have looked like the house special at Yoshi's Sashimi Palace in a heartbeat.

"What?! He asked me a zillion times and every OTHER time I just told him you two were in Seattle and you'd be home tonight! How the hell could I know that he would remember the one time I snapped?"



The funny thing is that I think my wife understands guys and our Girls Gone Wild issues. She was madder than hell, though, that I taught him the word "boobies".

Now the kids are older we've actually joked with Mojo about Mommies Gone Wild and she joked back, but with a glance at me that said plainer than words "Yeah, you horndog, you WOULD like me to make one of those videos with my friends, wouldn't you..?"

Sigh.

Busted.

So to speak.

But, as my wise bride also says, the thing about marital desire is that you can work up an appetite anywhere so long as you come home to eat; die Gedanken sind frei - you can think what you want about who you want in the privacy of your own head, provided you both understand that those are just sparks, and the fire you're tending is in the two of you's eyes and hearts. I'm married, not blind; I still appreciate the beauty of a beautiful woman. But the woman I desire is...right now, she's somewhere south of the Georgia state line.

Dammit.



Now I'm missing the hell out of my bride and she's only been gone for a day.

Gotta run. It's Treat Day and my daughter is responsible for her class Oreos.