“Do you have any super cute pictures of me, or Ella, or anyone when they’re little that you can think of?”
So asked Chloe in an email to me today. She’s working on a school project and is looking for a photo illustration. What a great question to ask the likes of me! And indeed, I managed to find 1 or 2 or 200. I had to sort through them in order to send her just several, instead of several dozen, one of which is today’s photo.
Asking a father for super cute pictures of his kids… 🙂
It was a tiring day for me at school, having made a significant school structural decision that was unpopular with many of the students because I didn’t involve them. In a school like PSCS, not involving the students is a rare occurrence and I don’t do it lightly. As such and for related reasons, I’m tired.
A result of this is not putting a lot of time, energy and thought into today’s blog post. In fact, I’m using a picture Melinda took last Friday night when we stopped at our favorite local hangout, Frank’s, for a little husband & wife Friday evening kick off the weekend happy hour beverage, if you know what I mean.
So to those of you who sometimes have to make hard decisions I say, “Cheers!”
Listening to music is one of my favorite pastimes. Over the years, I amassed quite a record collection that over the last 20 years transformed into an impressive, 
if I say so myself, CD collection. But now CDs have more or less been replaced by digitized music, iTunes libraries, as well as cloud players and streaming radio stations. Times are always changing.
Anyway, trying to keep up with the changing times, Melinda and I recently bought a Sonos player, seen in today’s photo. Sonos allows you access to your digitized music and all kinds of Internet radio and streaming services. We hooked up ours to our home speaker system and have been, in a phrase, transformed by it. We are becoming fluent in all things Pandora, Aupeo, 7digital, Last.fm, and Murfie. We play music from the Amazon Cloud Player and my iTunes library.
Over the weekend I starting selling our old stereo components on CraigsList, hoping to start saving for something called a Sonos PLAY:3 which would allow us to wirelessly play anything, including French radio stations, in our bedroom.
It’s very cold in Seattle right now, with overnight temperatures dropping into the 20’s (that’s in Fahrenheit, of course). Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s January. It’s dark. It’s supposed to be cold. But that doesn’t have to stop me from reflecting on what I was doing 6 months ago.
Of course we were in France. And on the day this photo was taken, which happened to be a delightfully hot day, I walked from the home of the Bertails to the racetrack in Nantes for a little reminiscing.
This gets me thinking about what I will be doing 6 months from now. The first two weeks in July… Ah, yes, Melinda and I will again be in Nantes. And hopefully there will several delightfully hot days.
Ella got to try out her new pink skis today and they performed well under a beautiful blue sky at Snoqualmie Pass, a scant 45 minutes from Seattle. In fact, Melinda and Ella fully executed Ella’s Friday independent study project, skiing at the pass with Melinda’s parents. PSCS allows students the chance to be credited for being in school when pursuing a personal interest, and today Ella pursued her interest in skiing with her mother and grandparents.
It’s somewhat rare that you get to ski that close to Seattle under blue skies, but that was the case today. We’ve got a ridge of high pressure over the area that extended to the nearby mountains. This time of year that means it’s going to be cold (in the 20’s at the pass and low 30’s in the lowlands), but you get the benefit of clear skies, rare in January.
Perfect for Ella and Melinda, as the smiles in today’s photo demonstrate.
So here are my folks in tonight’s photo, and a brutal shot it is. 
I took it just seconds ago in their apartment, where I came to dinner tonight to check up on them. Truth be told, the photo isn’t as bad as it could be. You see, my dad has two black eyes. I suggested they pose with my mom throwing a faux punch and my dad reacting in response. What I got was her looking off in space and my dad staring at the camera and appearing to cry.
Believe me, that’s pretty disconcerting.
The truth of it is that my dad had eyelid surgery yesterday, a procedure to remove some excess eyelid and make it easier for him to see. Like I said, I came over to check on him (and my mom).
At dinner tonight, my dad, two shiners on proud display, said, “You should see the other guy.”
Melinda has been looking for a new set of ski equipment for Ella, Ella having outgrown her boots and having been “living on borrowed skis,” to steal from a couple of expressions. So Melinda has been scouring CraigsList for equipment at an affordable price.
In searching, Melinda got a kick (if by getting a kick I mean being annoyed) by the number of people on CraigsList who misspell the word skis. Many, and I mean many, list them as “skies.” So here’s a tip for you. If you are looking to buy “used skis,” try searching for “used skies,” instead. Hopefully, they’ll be blue.
Regarding today’s post and its title, I challenge readers to see who can make the funniest comment in response.
Twice recently, I became a winner, the most recent being today. In an email this afternoon, a colleague told me that I won the adjective contest, 
using an unusual adjective to describe a person I was recommending for a speaking engagement. The adjective? Sparkling.
Then about a week ago, I was the high bidder of these brand new running shoes on eBay. When you are the high bidder of an auction, you are the winner, right? Melinda gets a BIG kick out of this. I win something on eBay and then have to pay for it. She tells me that she wants to run down to Nordstrom and “win” something.
Anyway, these new shoes are the brand new Merrell Bare Access shoes, version 2.0. They retail for $90 and I lucked out on eBay, as sometimes happens, “winning” them for $46 including shipping. As the weather gets better this spring, they’ll be my new running shoes.
Give me the blue ribbon!
One of our favorite grocery stores in Seattle is named Trader Joe’s. We like it for a number of reasons, including decent prices and a variety of products you can’t get elsewhere. But we also like it because a number of the products have a French connection.
A couple months after returning from France back in 2011 I wrote about this, specific to the French lentils I buy regularly at Trader Joe’s (and included as a side dish the other night with my French duck).
So how fun it was a couple of days ago when Melinda and I stopped by Trader Joe’s and found not only this salted caramel sauce, but the label referring to the store as Trader Jacques! When we feel at home both in Seattle and in Nantes, things like this are interestingly reassuring.
So Chloe and Alex left this afternoon, returning to British Columbia for the resumption of college. Things start up for them again at Quest University tomorrow. It will likely be a little while before we see them again.
Over the break, while Alex was in Japan visiting his family, Chloe took the time during her busy babysitting schedule to knit Alex a scarf as a holiday present. It came out very, very nice. The last little bit involved some help from Melinda, captured by me a couple of days ago with today’s photo. A big question was whether or not the scarf for a 20 year-old young man should have fringe or no fringe. Then, once it was decided to have fringe, how much fringe and how long should it be?
This is a matter of consequence.
Andy Smallman 