i spent this past weekend up in n.h. at the parents' house, celebrating my father's retirement from the the u.s.p.s. after 38+ years of service. government jobs are strange animals that breed interesting people. these jobs & people have things like pensions & grievances & overtime rules & seniority & pay scales & a union. whereas my father had all these things, i, at the one job at which i even had the chance to join a union (when i worked for b.u. after college), chose not to join, half because i felt unions pressured people into joining & half because i couldn't afford it. oh to be a naive 23-year-old again.

the retirement gathering was on saturday at the house of one of my 6'0" tall almost-16-year-old brother's friends, whose father my father has become friends with. they live in a house with a yard that slopes down from the road past the house & some landscaping into the backyard, where the grass continues downward around the pool & pool house and rolls for a while before hitting the sand area, featuring a horseshoe pit & bocce court. off to the side, there is a shed & behind it all, there are two tall trees, from which they have hung a 30' x 50' screen that they pull out at will to project movies onto in front of the forest. one phrase i overheard from one of the more-grownup-than-me grown ups was "he must have at least an acre here." i am not the one to verify acreage, but i was duly impressed with the environs.

it was a perfect day weather wise & a 4pm start time gave the heat a chance to partially subside. after three hours of yummy catered food & homemade salads of both the fruit & vegetable variety, the sun began to go down & our hosts capped off the meal with a table full of cookies & treats, of which i chose...

#13 - backyard yumfun.
snack: many dainty canollis
drink: iced cappuccino

...& we waited quite a while for the sun to go down so we could watch the slideshow my brother & his friend had thrown together in the hours before the party. the husband host offered up coffee beverages. i was away at the restroom & missed when he initially took orders, but when i returned & saw people with cups that featured a straw sticking out of them & a whipped cream topping, that changed faster than you can say "gimme." turned out they were iced cappuccinos & turns out it was the best iced cappuccino i have ever had...ever...in the history of me.

coming into the gathering, i had expected that, given the flagpole that jutted out of the sand area & held both a large italian flag & a large american flag, that the evening's dessert would feature either tiramisu or cannoli...either way, i knew victory would be mine, yumwise & when they brought out the boxes of dainty cannolis, my tastebuds flashed the ol' V sign.

as we waited for it to be dark enough for the slide show, i passed the time with my tasty treats & a conversation with my dad's friend/our childhood dentist, a man who, when i was a kid i thought of as "preachy." now that i'm an "adult," he is "opinionated." during our chat, his wife brought up this youtube clip, which captures him at his dental office on this january's nh primary day working on a patient whilst talking politics. he commented that it had over 1000 hits already.

finally, the sun went down & my brother put on the slide show. we got to see my father graduating, in various poses with the four children and in a series of photoshopped photos that placed him in canada, paris & italy (where he also had a photoshopped afro & sunglasses). among the photos were photos of me, my oldest brother & my sister as "adults." as my teenage brother had put the whole thing together that afternoon, he pulled this photo of me off myspace & it became the adult photo representation of my dad's eldest son:

i would have gone with one where i wasn't half blinking & at a party, but that's just me...& in a time that lasted in the area of two minutes, the slideshow looped back around & was over. soon after, the guests started to head for home. i hung around for a while & left with my mom for home, with approx. fifty pounds of food in my belly, all topped with dainty cannolis & iced cappuccino.

up until i left high school, the tape was still pretty much the dominant way that i listened to music. my two high school cars came equipped with tape players. i had a receiver with two tape decks, which was absolutely necessary for making mix tapes. growing up, my first tapes were born in the u.s.a., the joshua tree and colour by numbers, although it would be years before i could even grasp what the deal was with boy george...come to think of it, i still have trouble grasping what the deal is with boy george.

a lot of the tapes i listened to came from my parents' collections. around the time i was 10, my father came back from a stint in the air force reserves in texas & brought a walkman & a bunch of tapes back with him, including albums from hall & oates, styx & men at work.

somebody in the house had this lionel richie tape...

...and my brother took a sticker of a smiling popsicle & stuck it above his hand, since it is sitting in that weird position like that, perfect for popsicle holding. seriously, picture a happy popsicle in lionel richie's hand & see if you don't smile back. i still get enjoyment out of that cover until this day.

my dad had a sweet stereo setup for its time, with big wooden boxed speakers that ran from the "playroom" into the living room & sat on either side of the fireplace. two feet from the left speaker was a recliner, where my grandfather always sat when he visited. one day in 83', this put him in a perfect position to experience my new thriller tape when i surprised him from the other room by turning it on somewhere in the 6-7 range of the stereo.

one of the tapes my siblings & i listened to over & over again was bill cosby: himself, which featured the favorite comedic piece of most of my childhood years, one that probably reigned up until i discovered monty python...track 5..."chocolate cake for breakfast," where bill cosby tells of his kids convincing him to let them eat chocolate cake for breakfast because cake has eggs & milk in it.

this was my childhood--obliviousness to cross-dressing, sticker fun and bill cosby. good, clean fun.

#12 - good, clean fun.
snack: betty crocker warm delights minis chocolate raspberry decadence cake
drink: 1% milk with bosco chocolate syrup

at the pathmark last night, i was loitering in the baking section when i came across betty crocker's line of single serving baking products for the lazy. as a snack-eating swinging bachelor type, there was no mistaking that these were made with me in mind. as a snack-eating swinging bachelor type who loves chocolate, raspberry & decadence, the type to get was also quite clear.

to sum up these treats, for two & change, you get two individually-wrapped bowls, each containing a tiny bag of cake mix & a pouch of raspberry drizzle. all you have to do is add 1 tbsp & 1 tsp of water to the cake mix, stir it up a bunch, drizzle the raspberry jelly stuff on top of the batter, pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds & let it cool for a few minutes...piece of cake.

to go along with my cake, i could have just drank milk & that would have been yummy, but i was feeling chocolatey, so i decided to pick up a bottle of bosco chocolate syrup to add to it, figuring that in the long run, it'd get me, at age 33, to drink more milk. this plan would work out perfectly if bosco chocolate syrup did not taste ABSOLUTELY HORRID. it is beyond me how you can mess up chocolate, but this company has done it. i drank the whole glass because i felt bad about wasting the milk. i haven't figured out what i'm going to do with the rest of the bottle yet, but i'm thinking i might sprinkle it on the souls of my enemies or salt the earth with it...you know, good clean fun.