Sailing

I've never sailed in the Med before so it was a blast to skipper a 51 foot beauty around Tyrrhenian Sea and the Aeolian islands for a week. My crew of seven were good or willing sailors from whom I learned a lot and they were also a heap of fun, though our sister boat out drank us easily by an order of magnitude.

We visited the islands of Lipari, Panarea, Basiluzzo, Stromboli, Salina, Filicudi, and Vulcano. I ate some seriously good Aeolian food and a lot of raw swordfish and tuna, drank more than my fill of local wine, and swam in the amazingly blue waters of the Mediterranean sea. 

At the end of the day I learned that there are places that I'd never heard of till last week that will knock my socks off.

Next time I'm in these parts I hope it's in a cat and with Jo, Vivian and Evan.

The Rest of May

May came in like Texas spring - cool with gentle showers and flowers and a burst of green. Vivian and Evan had tons of shit going on and I don't think I remember half of what they did. But I do have a stream of photos I'm going to post here - with a little story for each. And that will have to do for my poor neglected blog.

Vidian (as Z calls her) and Z hung out together at times when Ava and Evan were at school. They seem to really like each other. Sometimes I wonder if Vivian and Evan would have bonded in this way if Jelly Bean had been a girl as Vivian had hoped and predicted instead of a boy.

Speaking of that boy - here they are, on the sets of Pinocho - the Spanish language production of Pinocchio by the middle school kids at Magellan. I think Vivian is pretending she is controlling Evan by his puppet strings. Or she's about to hammer his head.

Evan had a great year in second grade. I will miss his last day of school (and his last week...) but he won't notice. He likes his classmates and his teachers and seemed to have learned a thing or two. Here are his version of Starry Night and a cubist self portrait. Last summer at exactly this time he read his first chapter book - Harry Potter - which he started reading on the plane trip from Austin to Sweden. In the last twelve months he has read thousands of pages of various books. He doesn't like being read to. And he seems to retain vast swaths of absolutely useless information (like Rick Riordan's version of Greek mythology).

Vivian spends a lot of time with her nose in a book too. But she still loves to be read to and it's a nightly ritual for the two of us. And she loves climbing and has a real rock climbing camp this summer. By real I mean she will climb real rocks - like Enchanted Rock. She's pumped.

Here's a picture of us with the Shah clan and friends. This was later the same evening as the Pinocho play, outside China Cafe. I'm still in shoes from a meeting for Archer's Challenge that morning. This year's Challenge is shaping up pretty well.

It has become pretty hard to get Evan and Vivian out walking on Saturday mornings. Most times we wander down to Pacha and eat a huge breakfast (chocolate pancakes and bacon and acai berry shakes for the kids). But when we do go for a walk they love it. Here they are at St. Edward's park. We followed Bull Creek up stream and they swam and tried to catch fish - unsuccessfully - with Evan's shirt.

We went to Nicolle's for her birthday and to celebrate the completion of their deck. And we went to Grandma's for Mother's Day. Evan and Vivian got some prime cousin time and donuts for breakfast and a walk on the damn dam or the damn dam trail and Grandma's iPad to play on and cartoons and murder mystery shows to watch on television. I am starting to realize that if I pick Sadie up and choke and pet her at the same time she is less likely to scream/bark/yelp with excitement. I'll never admit that I'm beginning to like that damn dog.

Vivian has gotten very fashion conscious but in a nice-ish way, if that is possible. She isn't after designer brands. She creates her own stuff - literally - like this t-shirt that she laboriously cut up. She also combines her wardrobe in interesting ways and runs impromptu fashion shows. 

In this shot Vivian is wearing a hipster outfit and Evan's tie for a bicycling trip to the public library. Vivian is also taking a lot of photos. She has the use of an iPhone at home and now takes pictures of everything. Like this head shot of her and Evan sitting on top of me one weekend morning. And she can make up a stop motion video in a jiffy.

One weekend in May, Jo's cousin Stephanie visited from California and she and Jo went to an NKOTB (ha! I said it) concert, also featuring Boyz to Men (I think I spelled that right) and Paula Abdul. They filled breast milk bags with vodka and snuck them inside their bras. The rest of the weekend was no less eventful - here Stephanie is kissing a stuffed moose at Poodle Dog lounge at closing time. We did a bike tour of a few fine drinking establishments in central Austin that night along with Chris and Nina and ended the night with breakfast at 24 Diner. The kids spent the night at Grandma's and remained blissfully ignorant of their parents' and aunt's shenanigans.

Evan finished scouting and taekwondo for the year. He enjoyed both and his instructors, Greg and Master Palacios respectively, did not kill him. Though one time he came back home without his belt and Master Palacios explained that she was withholding it because he wouldn't listen. Apparently in class he had continued to kick the dummy even after she told him to stop and then she stepped in between him and the dummy and he kicked her. Luckily she didn't kick back. This woman can tap you on the back of your head with her foot while standing in front of you and pretending to kick you in your face. So Evan was pretty lucky. Anyway, now he's a wolf scout and a green belt.

Vivian played in her first team sport and loved it. Between volleyball and hanging out with friends she had a great time. The team that started the season as the Turquoise Turtles ended in third place as the Furies - as confident as their Greek justice and vengeance seeking counterparts. Last weekend we hosted the parents and kids back for a end of season party and pitched a game in the back yard. I think the mothers were taken aback by how much skill the kids had developed during the short season. 

On the Saturday of Memorial Day, Jo and I did a modified partner version of Murph at the gym (1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, 1 mile run) and survived. Then we went sailing and had fun splashing around in the cove to beat the heat. Sailing is on my mind - on the last day of May I took off to sail in Italy. Here's the view out of the window just before I finish this post and land.

Autobiography

Evan wrote his autobiography in January of 2016 and again last week, Two data points do not make a trend. But in this age of factual flexibility I'm calling it an annual tradition. Here is his latest, for his English homework, along with editing that he did in class. His first grade English teacher, in a stroke of genius, has taught a basic set of proofreading marks so the kids can proof read their own work.

An insight into Evan's personality - initially he wanted to write the name of his best friend. Then friends. Then he couldn't decide. I asked him how he would feel if his friend wrote an autobiography and left him out of the list of friends. He had witnessed that happen to a buddy during his birthday sleep over when another kid declared that yet another boy was his best friend, leaving Evan's buddy out in the cold. Without prompting, Evan wrote "I have lots of friends". Nice and simple.

Now they are working on poems. In class, Evan was asked "What is a poem?" His answer:

A poem is a poem
however way its wrote

When Jo and I asked him, he said that he'd made a mistake. He had forgotten to add an apostrophe in "its". Then he recited the poem he wrote:

Blue is my left shoe
Same with my glue

He explained that he was wearing a blue shoe, and his glue was blue in color and those were his inspirations.

Happy Camper

A couple of weekends ago Evan and I went camping. It was with his boy scouts pack but we gave up any pretense of it being a scouting trip. The kids ran around all day. The dads grilled, ate, and occasionally sipped on a cold beverage. The weather was awful - hot and humid, so we swam a lot. Then it threatened to storm so we returned home on Saturday afternoon instead of Sunday morning. Though the storm didn't go through here, it did kill a handful of people in other parts of Texas that Sunday.

A dad pointed out that with his stick, long hair, and dressed only in shorts, Evan looked like he was from the Lord of the Flies.  The kids did manage themselves pretty independently, stopping by the adults occasionally and only for nourishment.

Oh - and when we got home Evan discovered that he had chigger bites in those places where chiggers bite. Over the course of the next day, all of us realized the same thing. So for the next few days there was a lot of groin scratching around Magellan and in Magellan households. Fun camping, Texas style.