I almost made it through the holidays without a single lactose-related injury. I’ve managed to consume my volume in Egg and other Holiday-themed Nogs several times over this past month, to no deleterious effect, but today I pushed my luck just a bit too far, and have been paying the price for most of the evening. Considering that the Nog is on the shelves but a couple months out of the entire year, I regret not even a single drop of its dairy goodness. I just wish my stomach and adjacent facilities would get on the same page as me.

My son has been harassing me since arriving on The Island, insisting that I play Star Munch(i)kin with him. I can usually beat him in less than ten minutes, but he keeps coming back for more. I only really want to play once a day with him, as he’s less interested in the game, and more on reading every single card out loud to me several times consecutively, and generally just messing about. He bends the cards, and knocks them on the ground, and is obsessed with getting “The Cool Bounty Hunter” card. For the rest of the time that I cannot bring forth the will to play, he grabs the box down from wherever I have stashed it, and begins a “game” with his Auntie or his Grandmother, which consists primarily of him just pulling out all of the cards one by one, describing them out loud like the Special Audio Edition for the Sightless, until whomever he has cornered finally gets up and leaves him to chatter amongst himself.

Yesterday I took my family to the Grand Forest where we met up with (everybody look at) Ms. Squeak and her band of bouncing boys. I’d been looking forward to a pleasant walk along a forest trail to soak in extra oxygen to replace that which has been unavailable to me through life in the Bay Area, and cigarettes. Flor loves it as well, and for very similar reasons. But David had the best time out of everybody, running back and forth along the paths and trying to discover puddles in which he could go a’splashin’. And after being stuck with his soon-to-be-ancient parents, the chance to run around with a couple other troublemakers proved to be more than he could bear. As we were nearing the end of the trail’s loop, he managed to soak through his jeans and jacket in one epic and poorly placed foot-first dive into a pond. I don’t know that I’ve seen him happier.

We packed up the kids and headed back to where I’d once hung out beneath the gaze of A.B. Squeak’s father when we were all back in High School. Aside from a handful of electronics that sat scattered around their living room, the place looked like it had been perfectly preserved since the late 90’s. I hope one day to have the stability to maintain a museum level dedication to the preservation of chosen way of life. We’d brought a couple sandwiches, and Squeaky had baked bread, but the only thing the kids truly desired was a Family Size bag of Cool Ranch Doritos that my wife shoved in pack as well. The grownups sat around the table and told stories of Tex Batmart, my own and Ms. Squeak’s, having been blown upon to clear the decade and a half of dust. I am forever grateful that the Middle School yearbooks never saw the light of day.

All too soon (for David), it was time to go. They bundled into the car and waited for it to warm up while I strolled to just past the property line and lit a cigarette as A’s dad look on in judgment like I was still some trenchcoated high school malcontent off to corrupt his daughter. I wasn’t then, and it wasn’t my intention now, so I puffed as fast as I could manage, and stowed the butt upon my person for disposal upon a later occasion. It had been a relaxing afternoon with a modicum of exercise, and I’d been afforded the opportunity to introduce my wife to one of my female friends of whom she did not immediately have anything negative to say. We drove back to my Grandparents’ place and thanked our hostess for a well-spent afternoon.

Tomorrow is my dear wife’s birthday, and I have decided that I will cook her some sort of delicious dinner. Of course, half the household is on some sort of taste-free diet, so in addition to being habanero-free for the benefit of David, it now will most likely not contain enough salt or proper butter. Or I could make a small batch (enough for five or six people), and just let the Weirdos eat their cardboard. I wish shopping for my wife was something that could be an entirely electronic experience. For most people now, I just buy e-books and queue them up for either right this second, or the moment that the year arrives upon the day of their birth. But Flor doesn’t really care to read (which is bizarre, since I have always been both a reader and a writer), and usually forbids me to get her anything (showing just the tiniest tic of disappointment should I have obeyed her. It’s too bad, because the Kindle versions of six Calvin and Hobbes collections were on sale today for $1.99 each, and I could have said that I purchased them for her.

So I will cook something fancy for her, choosing ingredients at random until a recipe begins to coalesce. That’s been my favorite part of cooking over the past several years: wandering into a grocery store and sizing up the produce, grabbing what looks good until I figure out what I can make from what I’ve shoved into my basket. Probably some sort of pasta or perhaps my rice dish… I think I’m really going to miss: having access to a Mexican Supermarket.

-Tex

UPDATE: The Calvin and Hobbes sale has ended.