Various Random Whatnots ...

This is NOT my daughter! This is one of my storytime girls, a very special one at that. Lele started coming to my storytimes at work when she was about eight months old. Now she's starting kindergarten and her little sister, about the same age that Lele was when she started coming to storytime, is now coming to see me pretty much every tuesday. So, to repeat, this is NOT a picture of my daughter. It's a picture of Lele's sister Alexis. How amazing is that storytime story, huh? That's some touching circle of life shit right there.

I took this picture a few days ago. This sign was in front of a Pakistani market. I've never seen Nazism look so festive before.

Actually ... nevermind. I HAVE seen Nazism look more festive ...

Isabela is the queen of the frogs.

This is NOT a picture of me wearing a giant mouse's head. This is a rare picture of a North American Hmong eating in the wild. It is a rare thing to get a picture of one of these noble creatures eating.

This is a picture of the amazing sign in front of Mr. Lucky's, a Phoenix-area party bar-turned-sports bar-turned-redneck bar-turned-cowboy rodeo bar with animals in the back-turned-wetback music bar-turned-empty lot. This sign has always been visually amazing, though, a rare sort of architecture you don't see everywhere. Seeing this picture really makes me miss Arizona.

Yesterday I was alone with the kids for a huge chunk of the day. And it was such an unseasonably warm January that we went outside and played for about two and a half hours. It was great. The kids were content with just scooting around in circles in our various forms of child transportation, but I remember having such a huge imagination when I was a child playing alone in the backyard. So the kids and I created a big town. There was an imaginary bookstore, an imaginary mall, an imaginary restaurant ...

... and an imaginary police station ...

... and it was a whole bunch of fun. Now yesterday seems to be repeating itself. Natasha is marching downtown with blacks. She's representing H and R Block, where her parents work. I told Natasha that she should wear a shawl to cover her hair so that all the blacks don't see the knockout combination of big ass and blond hair and all start raping the shit out of her. But that's racist of me. She's marching and I'm stuck with the three kids. Bela is watching Clifford, Em is playing her DS, and Double D is reading Secret Invasion. I think yesterday was a play day and today will just be a chill day.

That's just fine with me.