Archive for the ‘Yoshi’ Category

Legos

Toys for Tots, it’s called. From me, to a Marine, to you. When I bought these toys, I imag­ined you would play with them. Thousands of hours, I spent, with my Legos. Houses, cars, trucks, air­planes, heli­copters, cranes, robots; and even, in a spate of furi­ous bewil­der­ment, a 9mm auto­matic. After that, after the gun I made with my Legos, I never played with them […]

A Pair of Dishgloves

As I’ve men­tioned ear­lier, I’m work­ing toward licen­sure to fost/​​adopt par­ent — I want to be a dad. Things seem to be going well with the new agency. During the home­s­tudy inter­view my con­tact kept look­ing though the paper­work for any­thing amiss, at me to see if I was furtively hid­ing dis­mem­bered body parts or what­ever in random […]

Postergasm II: Assorted Nerdery

The sequel to Postergasm I, here I drop var­i­ous images of var­i­ous things for var­i­ous pur­poses. As with the first post the high-​​​​res ver­sions are opti­mized to print on an 11 x 17 sheet — not exactly movie-​​​​poster size, but large enough to be notice­able. After the fold, mis­cel­la­neous posters along with descrip­tions. Enjoy!

Postergasm I: Mars, Venus, Moon

I men­tioned last week that I’d assem­bled a few tabloid-​​​​sized posters for Yoshi’s room, in what I hope will be a suc­cess­ful attempt to instill won­der at the nature of … well, nature. Below the fold is the first set of those posters, as JPEG pre­views with links to the PDFs (for high-​​​​res print­ing; these are pretty big […]

Gingerbread Boy

Almost some­times, almost I can feel you there beside me, as I walk along the aisles in the store and select pro­duce, fruits and veg­eta­bles crisp vibrant and bright — and there almost, in my vision, another vibrance unan­swered by the full gaze but almost, almost there, and I won­der how I can miss some­one I have yet to meet. In […]

Stranger than we Can Imagine

Sir Arthur Eddington said this of our cos­mos: “Not only is the uni­verse stranger than we imag­ine; it is stranger than we can imag­ine.” I was reminded today of that fact by an image I’d for­got­ten. In an effort to reduce the bare­ness of the walls in Yoshi’s bed­room (as well as in an effort to […]

America’s Least Wanted

It’s not every day that you look out from your bed­room win­dow and see some­one get­ting busted by the cops. At least, I would hope not. But now, it’s hap­pened to me twice. Years ago in Tucson I had a bust hap­pen, lit­er­ally, on my porch. I heard scuf­fling, words like I got him, and went out­side when the noises less­ened to see […]

Diary of Adoption: Yoshi’s Room

It’s not what I envi­sioned when I was liv­ing in the brick house, but it doesn’t suck. The walls are plain white, no Lego-​​​​inspired color schemes (but, you know, that’s flex­i­ble); there’s a bunk bed, a bean­bag, some book­shelves (pre-​​​​stocked already with a few decent titles, but await­ing his tastes), a dresser, some stuff on the walls. The pride of place­ment is […]

Parents Behaving Abominably

There’s a rea­son peo­ple like me are needed through­out the US — peo­ple will­ing to adopt an older “special-​​​​needs” child as opposed to a more-​​​​or-​​​​less fresh-​​​​from-​​​​the-​​​​package infant. Special needs is an unfor­tu­nate term to use, though, because of the ram­i­fi­ca­tions asso­ci­ated with the phrase spe­cial edu­ca­tion. The lat­ter gen­er­ally refers to pull­out edu­ca­tional pro­grams intended for developmentally-​​​​disadvantaged […]

Diary of Adoption: Glaack!

That was my response to the dis­cov­ery that, some­time when I wasn’t look­ing, some­one jacked up the price of kids’ bed­room fur­ni­ture to gen­uinely over­achiev­ing lev­els. Yoshi’s bunk bed got put in this week­end. I got a good base­line price on the frame and dis­cov­ered that while styles var­ied, the costs didn’t. Sigh. The next deci­sion was mattresses. […]

Diary of Adoption: A Bizarre Hiatus

It’s funny, but after I moved to my new digs — to get more room for myself and my even­tual fost/​​adopt child — I basi­cally lost touch with the agency that I’m coör­di­nat­ing with to make the adop­tion hap­pen. I’m not sure why things unfolded the way they did in the last two months or so; I think […]

Diary of Adoption 3: Dear Yoshi…

As a pre-​​​​adoptive can­di­date par­ent, I was encour­aged to write a let­ter to my (still unknown) prospec­tive child. The idea behind this is obvi­ous: I must delin­eate, as best I can, why I want to be a father; while super­fi­cially the let­ter might be a kind of com­mer­cial pro­mot­ing myself as a par­ent, the real pur­pose is to expose, to me, what my motivations are. […]