My Life In Pictures

I thought I would share some pictures from the last month or so. I'm not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but The Moose and Pedro Tulo have been back to in-person school four days a week for about two months now. Therefore, it's just me and Luigi (and Ziggy) at home between the time we drop the older kids off at school in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. While he probably gets more screen time than he should because I have work to do during the day (and I continue to do work in the evenings too), we regularly spend significant time outside. These are from a playground in our neighborhood (and the view from the playground). I don't think the tree should be leaning in this direction.

We also took a trip to Frying Pan Park. We saw this peacock and while they also had cows, sheep, and chickens, the cat might have been Luigi's favorite animal.

On a recent walk, we saw this blanket(?) from a neighbor's window. A little freaky.

Speaking of freaky, let's talk about cicadas. It rained much of last weekend and temperatures were only in the 40s and 50s. I thought that the cold weather might have killed off some of the cicadas, but they just went quiet and hunkered down instead. With temperatures back in the 70s and 80s this week, they're out in full force. While I'm not sure if the video below really gives the complete cicada experience, they were really loud the other day.

To celebrate my birthday a few weeks ago, The Moose made me a card and was nice enough to remind me to sign him up for baseball this fall.

Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship recently and as he walked to and then at the 18th hole, seemingly the entire crowd walked with him. If anyone with my neighborhood golf course ever stops me while walking on the course, I'm just going to show them this picture and say that it was fine for people to walk on the course at Kiawah, so I'm okay walking ON THE CART PATH here!  

I really needed to go through my clothes, and I finally did last weekend. I ended up donating two bags worth of shirts, jeans, and more. (Well, I'm going to donate them soon.) I think the oldest item was an XL Ohio State University Welcome Week T-shirt from 2000. The XL shirt was probably too big even then, and I don't think I've worn the shirt out of the house in a decade. It was time to go.

Finally, here's Ziggy sleeping on my bed.

My Trip To The Podiatrist

Before Monday, I had never been to a podiatrist. I'm not going to share the reason why I went or what happened because it is not very pleasant particularly if you're squeamish. Well, I can confirm that I did not have a foot amputated and did not start growing extra toes. Therefore, you cannot call me Sixto Lezcano.

Anyway, since I haven't written anything in nearly a week, I felt the need to share some notes about the appointment.

When the doctor recommended getting a procedure done in the office that day, the assistant asked me if I wanted a divider so I wouldn't see what was happening. Since I wasn't having a C-section, I declined though I did ask for a magazine. She returned with two choices, a golf magazine and a runners magazine. I chose the runners magazine since the woman on the cover was more attractive than Phil Mickelson.

Runner's World (I think that was the magazine's name) included a profile of a female teacher in her 20s who is in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the youngest person to run the most marathons. The article didn't mention that she is too busy running to create adequate lesson plans for her students.

After the doctor completed the procedure, he said that I shouldn't go to the gym that evening. No concerns on that one. Then he clarified that I could still go to the gym, but that I shouldn't do any running. I guess he thought I was a runner since I was reading Runner's World.

Several days later, I'm walking around with a bit of a limp. I've been referring to myself as 50 Cent since I thought "In Da Club" included a line that he walks with a limp. I discovered that the actual line is "Been hit wit a few shells but I don't walk wit a limp." You learn something every day!

Meanwhile, perhaps I'll start to refer to myself as Martin Crane.