Andy Smallman

Friday night, 7pm. Melinda & I have taken Ella to her friend’s house in West Seattle. We drop off a borrowed DVD at her sister’s house. We are looking for a place to grab a bite of dinner. Where to go?

Brenda suggests, even insists, we go to Dot’s Delicatessen. She says the magic words – duck confit. Away we go.

Melinda orders the BLT. I order the cassoulet with the duck confit. My nose starts to itch. My throat is scratchy. It’s been a long week. It takes a long time for the cassoulet to be served. It is very hot when it is served. I burn my tongue. Melinda calls me a crankopotamus.

What’s that I hear calling me? My bed?

Remember that great feeling you had when you were a little kid in elementary school and you were going on a field trip? It was always exciting to be somewhere other than at school on a weekday. You know, when you “should” be in school.

That’s me in this photo, taken along the beach in California in March, 2010. Melinda, the girls and I had taken a field trip to San Francisco from our home in Seattle, needing to visit the nearest French Consulate in order to get our visas for our year of living in France. We stayed with Melinda’s cousin’s family, who took us to the beach on a weekday when anyone under the age of 18 “should have” been in school.

Dan Gillmore attended PSCS last century. That’s him in today’s photo, taken back when you loaded your camera with something called “film.” Don’t ask me to explain it. It doesn’t make sense. You’d put something called “film” in your camera, take it out again, drive it (or mail it) to something called a “film processing center,” wait a week or so, then look at your pictures on paper.

It was crazy.

But I was talking about Dan. He’s working on his degree at the University of Washington and interviewed Melinda and me about stories in our lives. In fact, he made a little movie to illustrate part of my story. Take a look:

Film Making Amateur Hour with Dan Gillmore from Dan Gillmore on Vimeo.

“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.