Vintonville

I’ve never been one who’s pined for the next stage in life. Childhood, teen-time, the college years– all reveled in. All savored like a fine <insert favorite noun here>. I never wanted be a grown-up.

I knew.

I knew grown-uppery was awash in all kinds of terrible stuff like math and bills and work and… math. There was, however, one footnote to all that when I entered the teen years: I envied grown-uphoods promise of a non-temperamental and pimple-free complexion. That’s right. No crazy third-eyes flaring up right before Homecoming pictures. No explaining away “mosquito bites”. No, sir. Adulthood was a Benzoyle Peroxide-free paradise realized.

Ha.

That one gilded promise of grown-uphood turned out to be a total bust. Who knew that as an adult I’d still find myself the sad host to a raging eye of Sauron? An angry eye– burning fiercely right in the middle of my forehead? Not me, that’s who.

Luckily, in the 4 days since the return to teen town that inspired this post, Sauron’s eye– praise be– is slowly fading away– but rest assured, that sucker would have made The Dark Lord of Mordor explode with jealousy.

Sigh.

Would I be a wuss to think babies are awesome? Because I do. Babies and puma wrestling. But this post is more about the former. Sorry, WPW fans.

MC has been playing with the new camera and had Liz over to do some photographic experimentation with her L’il guy, Jace. I was asked to do some post-processing. To be honest, I’m not all that stoked about how my end turned out.  At the last minute and for this post only, I ended up throwing some cheap and gritty weathering effects (way too tightly, I might add) around the edges.

But whaddya know… despite my destructive attempts at adding some style, the little dude stayed cute anyway:

Yesterday I spent some time griping (well, not so much griping as expounding) on why decades of all this partisan tomfoolery has to come to an end. See, even after President Obama delivered a surprisingly centrist and unsurprisingly inspiring speech (depending on who you ask, I guess– don’t ask this guy), I’ve heard responses reducing the speech to being “just words” as if the measure of hope, optimism and, frankly, graciousness of the oration were somehow lessened because it was what people want to hear.

Now don’t get me wrong– I’m a big fan of healthy skepticism and its colloquial pal “We’ll See”. After all, Obama remains a politician who was elected president, as opposed to a deity like oh, I dunno.. Jesus.

Yet, wasn’t it The Savior who teaches the highest attribute of all is charity, a large component of which is to have hope? So what’s wrong with hoping Obama’s speech is sincere and hoping he means what he says? When did we become so jaded*?

And so, on this freezing January day and in that same spirit of hope and optimism I say…

…I wanna go to Kauai. Bad.

* Somewhere around the time I found out Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was a marketing tactic for Montgomery Ward, pennies don’t have a high rate of return and my back could grow hair. Sigh.

Lately, I’ve been going crazy with post processing (see previous camera post) in the digital miracle that is Photoshop. And, since chances of anyone checking the “Who We Is” page are scant to scanterer, I’m going to post the “grunge” pic I spent way too much time on right here.

So, here.

But it does help us take them. Introducing the new Vinton family Time Machine.

This is a strange post.

Thanks to a recent post by blogroll member and semi-absent neighbor Jenny W. Nelson, I finally took time to peruse a blog called the Nie Nie Dialogues. The blog in and of itself is a widely covered and highly read bit of inspiration for a very large online subculture of blogging moms. Sadly, the site leapt into general public knowledge when the publisher- LDS Arizonian Stephanie Nielson survived a horrific August 08 plane crash with her husband– but not without suffering severe burns on over 80% of her body.  I’m not sure where to go from there, as her situation is the specific culmination of my general nightmares– one that has, on the surface, inevitably changed the way she looks and lives. Of course, based on her previous blog posts, this event will metamorphose into nothing short of a positive, affirming and optimistic life opportunity.

On reading, it’s easy to see why Nie Nie Dialogues gained so much popularity. In fact, it totally made me dedicate a  stuffy and dissertational post to it right here.

Why?

The blog is sheer suburban fairy tale. Not in the modern sense of ascribing the moniker as a jaded jab at wishful thinking/unattainably, but in the truly wistful way she shares her life with others. IE- In the Nie Nie blog, her husband, Christian, isn’t referred to by name– he’s her “sweetheart”– a Beatrix Potteresquely named “Mr. Nielson”. Photos are imbued with stylistically ethereal whimsy via blurs, angles, amped contrast while overlaid with “type writer” fonts– each post creating a digital storybook.  Even paragraphs and text are laid out to conform to a freestyling tale of tea parties and romantic countryside adventure– and the format proves it. It’s simply taken the cold, coded rules of Blogger’s programming and molded it to fit a particular life and creative perspective- not the other way around.

And I gotta admit. It’s both charming and inspiring. It’s light on long paragraphs or staid structure. Just bite-sized morsels of text wrapped in adjective, warm pictures and eye-catching, digital scrapbook styling.

Funny enough, since the inception of Vintonville, I’d had inklings of creating more of a destination via story-like structure to the posts instead of just writing them. After all, thick posts full of words = intimidating, while snappy pictures are infinitely more catchy. It’s just I’ve got this writing crutch– I can, so I do. It definitely takes less time for me to spill words than work all our pics over in post-production. Of course, now that I’ve seen and commented about the Nie Nie Dialogues, I’ll just come off  like I’m aping the site… but without all the flowers and birdies. And as a dude.

So I dunno, in the coming weeks and months I may try my hand at a little more fanciful/visual story-telling instead of long-winded story-telling. The mundane can be made kinda magical like that.

We’ll see how it goes.

Admittedly, I’ve been pretty terrible at posting about what WE’RE up to lately. There’s a been quite a few things done gone down around here that should have been ruminated on in the light of day and made available for the select few who read this blog and the <gulp> millions of prying eyes who could potentially wander across it thanks to key words like “Benjamin Button” and “Underpants”.

You know, ruminations on stuff like how we’ll be welcoming a baby girl in May, and resulting realizations of inevitable paradigm shifts in diaper changing dynamics, a game-changing leveling of the domestic playing field, a substantial increase in “So CUTE” spending habits, satisfaction in knowing the purchase of a gun will pay itself off in 16 years and an unnatural surge in ponies and dolls and pink everything. Which is all fine…

…but I’d always planned on fielding my own little army of action-loving, sports-playing, wilderness exploring little buddies with our very own “Wendy” (read: MC) sharing in the adventure and excitement. While April is well on her way, I’ve got to do some recalculating. Not that there couldn’t be a few changes to the club rules in efforts accommodate a girl, but I don’t necessarily ever want the word “butch” used to describe little Mari-Catherine Jr., because then it would have been all my fault.

There’s also been my spectacular weight gain, going from a running, lifting 178 lbs. to a lazy, cookie-eating 200 lbs. over the waist-busting course of 6 months.  I tend to notice because I store it in my pale, perpetually 5′oclock shadowed face– kind of like Ben Affleck on a bad day. Oh, and my pants stop fitting.

Of course, friends and family soothe me and say they haven’t noticed, but that’s just because there’s another 18 lb. reserve stored in my back-rolls and the thickest white-man apple-booty you may ever see this side of Fatback’s Fried Food Buffet night. I’m serious. I did a quadruple-take on myself  as I caught my reflection in the mirror while walking out of a bathroom. My can has grown into an inland continental shelf. In hindsite, I’m just now realizing the potential I could have had as a heavy-hitting baseball player with a booty like this.  With a little training, I guess it’s never to late to give it a shot.

I’ve been wracking my brain and searching my jaded, coal-like heart for any bit of inconsequential news or event circulating in my life or the life of others to pine on today– and I’m coming up with bagels across the board. Noone’s dropping ski-slope trou, our new camera is resting quietly in its bag and all other news around the world is handing out free prescriptions for depression and anxiety and I’m just not up for any more of that today.

Even the old reliable “Quotables” are hard to come up with these days, as Joshua is exerting this growing up thing called “assertiveness”. I mean, describing a tantrum where an obviously frustrated three-and-a-half year old calls you “prunehole”, “toilet”, “bum”, “Santa” and “Jesus” in the space of 30 seconds isn’t prime material for illustrating how cute your kid is.

Still, when Joshua realizes that even though I was taking him away from Gramma Dunkley’s house when he thought he’d be joining three other cousins  for a sleepover, I was actually saving him from a grossly unfair viewing of  “Barbie: A Christmas Carol”, he’ll thank me.