Girls, Grow Giant Psycho Desert Ants In Your Basement!
I am easily besotted by fatherhood, as the 2 or 3 regular readers of this blog likely already know. We've had a couple deeply memorable Father's Days over the last few years - Sands Dunes, AAA baseball games - but this year was low key and merely fun. Which is fine with me. Greeted with presents in the morning - homemade cards and pictures, silk shirts, a camping hammock (dibs!) and a grill brush so large and sturdy it could be used as a weapon. And probably will be used as a weapon by one of my daughters before the summer is over: the kitten-inspired ceasefire is long over. They are once again fighting like cats and dogs. Sunnis and Shiites. Mets and Yankees. Matter and antimatter.
Presents were followed by swimming at the State Park (and a waterslide charging an unconscionable $1.75 per slide). Swimming was followed by eating tasty NY strip steaks with my own Dad as we watched Pedro pitch his best game of the year (6IP, 1ER, 1BB, 4K), making the hapless Rangers look like helpless little kittens at the plate.
Nice day.
Thanks Dad. For making me a better Dad, teaching by example. Among many other things.
The girl's new kittens got out of their room while we were gone. They had all day to explore the house, get lost, rip furniture to shreds, terrorize our other old and boring cat. And yet when we got home they were both within six feet of the bedroom door.
I thought cats were supposed to be more curious than that.
More pet news: we got a fancypants antfarm on Christmas (filled with weird transparent gel instead of sand). We sent out for mail-order ants, and when they came half were dead. The survivors built maybe 4 inches of ant tunnels before they died as well. Wimpy. S and I went out this weekend and got eight - just eight - of our homegrown giant psycho desert ants. They've already dug to the bottom of the antfarm several times, and are now digging across the bottom, with tunnels heading back up interspersed every few inches. They've disposed of the corpses of their wimpy precursors. I'm not sure how. I'm not sure I want to know.
I fear what will happen when they run out of gel...
p.s. - Extra credit for spotting the Bradbury reference.
