A Happy Friday. Really.

It’s a happy Friday. Two office specials for you today… for some reason I was prolific with the sketching. They’re both odd… yes. But I have odd moments a lot. The first, I just wanted to draw a little girl holding a grizzly bear’s claw… it’s probably badly scaled… and I'm also aware that her legs and torso are disproportionately long... but what the hell… I drew it in ten minutes; cut me some slack.

The second is something that actually happened in the car when I was pretty little. I was always full of strange questions when I was petite, and often drove daddy and mom crazy with my seemingly random queries. Satan My mom had a few good moments here and there… an occasional sense of humour, I suppose. I remember trying for some time to get a close look at birds after that so I could see those little wellies; and was greatly dismayed when Daddy gave me a telescope for Christmas one year, and I used it to spy on some birds to discover them sans wellies. Lies! Injustice!

Man, the sun is beautiful today. This weekend is the weekend we are going to have a memorial for my father. We are having a little dinner/barbecue at my mother’s little rental home today as a sort of pre-memorial, and then tomorrow, we sisters will go up to Mount Hood and have our own special remembrance where Daddy loved to ski. Here’s a picture of him in 2002 at Timberline… He was 72.


That was the last time he skied. He took a couple of hard falls goofing around on the skis—attempting to mimic my sister’s telemark skiing on alpine skis. He didn’t want to ski after that, and it is when I am confident that my father sort of gave up. He became an old man from that point forward. The night before last, we were all in my living room, and we reflected on those ski-trips. They were the best times we ever had with Daddy. Every winter through our youth, we went to Switzerland, Austria, Germany... France… wherever there was an alp to ski on… it was something we did without mom, and daddy, without mom, was a completely different person. We always had major fun. Our best memories of daddy were from the ski-trips. He had such a graceful style on the slopes—he was an amazing skier.

I am looking forward to the weekend. It’s going to be hectic, and I don’t foresee us having a lot of time to ourselves… but I love spending time with my sisters, and I won’t be seeing them again very soon… so I’d like to take advantage of tomorrow. I wish wish wish for once, that we got together just for the sake of getting together. Why does it take this sort of thing for us to stand on the same ground?