It's your Birthday!

Party Time ... September 6th, the day after Anderson's birthday ...

Birthdays are - by definition - week long celebrations in our house. At least my birthday is, and I'm trying to impose this on my son. With this idea, you have the excuse of cake, ice cream and pizza for an entire week. If Jewish people have things like Hanukkah and celebrate for days on-end, so can Anderson. I'm merely trying to translate that idea into our lives, just without the dreidel game.

So Anderson had his official birthday party, and Olga, Amadeus and my mom came to celebrate. Anderson, of course, was blissfully ignorant about the importance of this event, which signified that we would no longer care about celebrating the months as they passed by. In essence, we were turning 12 celebrations a year into 1. He was getting robbed and didn't even know it, and all he was excited to do was to tear open wrapping paper. Basically, we were giving him beads and trinkets for Manhattan, and all he cared about was crinkling paper.

He needed legal representation.

Famed (and now deceased) OJ Simpson attorney Johnny Cochran.

Contemplating legal representation ... saddened by the early demise of Johnny Cochran.

Unfortunately for him, he didn't have that. But he did have cake and both tuna fish and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (painstakingly made with the crust cut off by Natalie and my mom.) The PB&J was well received by all, and the tuna fish was well-received by our cat Newton.

Balloons!

Gathered around the table to celebrate (of note: none of us could play the kazoos)

The all-important "chocolate cake all over me" shot ...

In all, a good time. Lots of cleanup afterward and the cats liked batting around the balloons as well. We thank all of the grandparents for coming and Anderson loves the gifts (although he's yet to get over his father giving him "Pop Rocks".)

Growing up

Anderson - all 2'4" of him - at the Children's Museum in Austin ...

Mary and the Malloy boys visited Texas from Rochester, NY (home of the "lilac festival" ... ugh) to see what it's like to be in a manly part of the world. After first parking their saddles in Houston, they hopped into the rented SUV and moseyed into our neck of the woods.

A painful amount of "Texanisms", eh?

Having them here forced us to leave the air-conditioned confines of our house, which we will be remodeling starting in winter/early spring. We went to the Children's Museum and then the zoo, which is a safe haven for exotic animals that were owned by private citizens who bit off more than they could chew.

First, the museum, which had a "construction zone", for all of those parents who dream of their kid growing up to compete with illegal immigrants for a low hourly wage. Or an engineer. Maybe that's the idea ...

Anderson getting ready to go into the construction zone ...

In a building undersized for little construction workers ...

The following day we went to the zoo and saw an assortment of wild animals, including panthers, tigers and lions. Remarkably these animals were being kept at home as "pets". Imagine being the unsuspecting burglar who sneaks into one of those homes ...
Even more remarkably was the fact that they called this the "Austin" Zoo, even though the zoo is so far outside of Austin that you think you're almost in Mexico.

Mary and family with Natalie, Anderson and me ...

Having to interact with Mary took a lot of energy out of Anderson, although the boys liked playing with him and are remarkably well-adjusted (and even intelligent!) considering their mother's parentage. After intensive psychotherapy to recover from the experience, Anderson needed to recover ...

Glacier National Park

So I haven't submitted an update for the last almost 4 months. I'm going to try to do a series of blogs that should have been done before to make amends. I'll start with Glacier National Park ...

Once upon a time in the summer ...

My friends and I first started hiking when I was 18 years old. You could call it hiking - I guess - and our first experience was a near-death experience in Shenandoah National Park that involved 7 waterfalls, rain, ice, bears, a deer that looked like a sign and a 25+ mile hike that was supposed to be 5 miles long. And being rescued by a Virginia lesbian couple who had a "Virginia is for Lovers" bumper sticker on their car. Classic trip. Despite nearly dying, we were stupid enough to continue hiking and returned to Glacier National Park to risk death yet again.

I flew from Austin to Kalispell, Montana, where I rented a car and stayed with Tobin and Molly in their plush new house. It was odd sleeping and waking up without Anderson wandering around in the morning. We went to breakfast and Tobin and Molly (whom I know from Vermont ... Tobin and I did our internship, residency and fellowships together ... and I like to take credit for setting the two of them up.) After this, I bought some gear - including bear spray - to get ready for the hike. I then rushed to the Glacier Backcountry Office to make reservations for the hike before picking up my friend Matt from Houston. There is where the first mistake was realized ... I'd forgotten my passport and would be unable to cross the Canadian border, which was part of our planned itinerary. As the Canucks have been cracking down on Americans who wanted to steal their moose, I was left in a bit of a dilemma: Should I get a permit for the original itinerary and risk getting stuck at the border or should I paln a different route and ruin the plans of my friends? Hmmm ... me stuck in the cold or my friends inconvenienced ...

So the new route avoided crossing the border. I drove to the airport in Kalispell and picked up Matt, subsequently informing him that his leisurely vacation hike was about to be replaced by a significantly harder route. We called Mike, who was driving in from Calgary, where he'd flown into, and told him that we screwed him over. Oh ... and since I couldn't get into Canada, the first night of staying in a Canadian hotel was changed to a 3 mile climb to a random campsite in Glacier. Time to try out the gear ...

We started the uphill Bataan Death March (okay, it wasn't that bad) to the campsite and made it to a mosquito-infested site before the sun went completely down. Matt was cursing me out, saying that he missed watching Canadian ESPN, which likely had curling highlights in their "top 10 plays of the day". Still, most of the stuff worked and we managed to survive the night.
In the morning, we woke up and decided to only snack, as cooking would have involved effort. Knowing that we would be meeting Mike in a different part of the park, we were in a bit of a hurry ... we didn't want to keep the all-important CFO (Mike is the chief financial officer of a law firm and we endlessly make fun of him because of his title) waiting. So we started hiking down the trail to the car when a guy ahead of us casually mentions that he'd recently passed a bear ("I think it's a black bear", he claimed) on the trail.

Surprisingly, this didn't throw us off too much. We continued hiking and stopped at a trail junction for a break and snack.

"Crllack. Crllack."

Luckily, the aforementioned bear sauntered up and decided he was going to take a break as well and was headed directly toward us. We hastily put on our packs and wandered down the trail, me with my bear spray in hand and Matt, with his bear spray packed in his backpack. My philosphy on bear spray is that it's a nuiscence for the bear. To truly gain the upper hand in bear encounters, my idea is to grab the bear spray and turn it on myself. That way, the bear knows that if you're crazy enough to harm yourself, there's no telling what you'll do to them. And then they leave you alone.

Matt and I, at a different point in the hike.

Finally we made our way back to the car, loaded up our stuff and, after a brief stop in a hotel gift shop, made our way down Going-to-the-sun Road to Many Glacier to pick up Mike.
Mike was rested after spending the night in a Canadian hotel and had clearly spent his morning watching Canadian ESPN. He knew all of the Brett Favre updates (Brett Favre was mulling coming out of retirement) and seemed well versed in the finer details of the National Hockey League. We despised him for his night of good sleep and drove to the trailhead. Our 5 day hike would start at Packer's Roost and eventually take us to Stoney Indian Pass, Mokowanis Lake, Elizabeth Lake and eventually through Ptarmigan Tunnel and back to Many Glacier, where Mike's car would eventually take us the hell out of the park.

By the end of a hike - no matter how impressive the scenery - we always want to get the hell out of the park.

After backtracking in the car for about an hour and a half, we begrudgingly left the car and any hope of Brett Favre updates behind and started the hike.

The first day we saw a mother moose and her calves, but our nemesis was a group of rather aggressive deer, who decided that the campsite was theirs and that anything that was there was for the taking. This was one of them, and I unfortunately don't have a picture of the one that grabbed Matt's boot (and ran with it for about 75 feet with us in the chase group.

Evil deer.

As most of our hike's go, Matt eventually breaks (and whines about wanted to do the next hiking trip in Maui). As the pictures I have were taken by Matt, there unfortunately aren't any shots showing him in significant pain.

Me and the CFO (oddly, none of his "people" are in the shot)

The hike came and went ... oddly we saw no Grizzly, although we supposedly walked right by them. We met the assortment of odd characters (including "Captain Frank" a ukulele playing Kiwi who lives in New York and has a public access TV show. Although I don't have a picture from the trip, here's a shot of Captain Frank (so named because he offered everyone Captain Frank rum) from his website and a link if you want to see how ridiculous ... er, creative his band can be ...


http://www.sonicuke.com/index1.php

Finally, a picture of the three of us ...

Next trip is likely Maui because Matt's a wuss ...