Day 5

The morning is probably brisk. Somewhere in the green bushes birds are twittering about nothing. We have slept the peaceful sleep of the damned. Lil s has been having good nights as the room the moms has put her in is nearly pitch black. We've also equipped her with a white noise making fan to try and make her as dependent on it as we are. I suppose we'll pass that on to her along with the poor eyesight.

We start out by heading over to a local coffee shop cutely named Bidwell Perk in honor of the park it practically abuts. I go there to get these ice cream coffee type monstrosities called blizzards that turn out to not be as good this time as I remembered. But I suppose that's true of almost everything in life, it is rarely as good as you'd remembered. That said, the morning is pleasant. Lil s is fascinated by a fountain and charms the local middle aged women who primarily eat at the place. My mom tells us the top fifteen brunch places in town because she's retired now and an expert on brunch.

Whenever I'm in Chico I try and head downtown and buy some books at the used bookstore. I like to buy books at the used bookstore because books are my thing. You probably have a thing as well, maybe it's cookware, or vegetables, or eating out, or whatever, my thing is books. S doesn't exactly like my thing because she feels that books take up too much room, and she's always reminding me that I work at a library and that the books are free there. I don't judge a book by its cover but I do judge a person by the quality of the content on their bookshelves. Again, I was born to be an independently wealthy country gentleman and instead find myself treading water in late stage capitalism as a middle class normy. That's the term we country gentleman use for the middle class folks who work at jobs that are kind of meh, and who have opinions about things in the world, which aren't really strong enough to make too much of a difference and who complain about things like mortgage, car payments, house projects, child care costs etc. Wouldn't it be more fun to go hunt some foxes?

Anyhow, I manage to limit myself to only three books, one of which happens to be The Histories by Herodotus. And it's just the sort of thing that a pseudo intellectual will go in for. Hilariously, my brother-in-law later described men in their early fifties reading Noam Chomsky at 3 o'clock on a Tuesday and just sort of wondering what the heck they were actually doing. I can't wait to read Chomsky at 3 on a Tuesday. Ah, to be useless. Anyhow, after that the moms and S went by the store Made in Chico. (Chico is the sort of place that has a bunch of local stores downtown, and someone even once tossed a brick through the window of a Wendy's that got put in. That is to say, like parts of the Northeast, they place a very high value on keeping things local. It's a kind of hippieish religion that's taken hold and which I'm mostly supportive of.

In the meantime I head over to the other used bookstore. The second used bookstore is amazing, lined with cloth Melville, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hawthorne, Woolf, Eliot, the whole lot of them. Unfortunately I've run out of room in my bag. (We only carry on now like everyone else who flies regardless of how giant our carry on's actually get. Oh this, yeah, no, this horse is my carry on. My personal item is his colt). So I just get to walk through the musty shelves and trace the names of authors that I've loved. I leave after twenty minutes or so and try and make sure the guy behind the desk doesn't think I'm stealing anything. Luckily, I don't have any bags or anything that would make him think that I'm stealing something. Perhaps my fear of people thinking that I'll steal something is in fact merely a manifestation of my latent desire to steal something. (The last two times I've been at Whole Foods I've eaten a cookie while shopping for groceries and not mentioned it to the clerk. I mean, the place is called Whole Paycheck by folks for a reason. Stealing food is morally ambiguous right? Although perhaps the loaf of bread for the starving family is more ambiguous than the oatmeal raisin cookie for the slightly hungry normy).

We join up in time for me to buy a bunch of stuff with my credit card. Our new credit card is mileage plus, so I'm happy to pay for everything. I don't think I quite understand it completely as of yet, but I'm fairly certain the thing pays for itself. It's like we're making money by spending it. We retired after this brief forray because s will melt if she doesn't get a nap, a fact, which I'd debate with S more if I was the one who had to feed her at night if she doesn't sleep well. I tend to be the more relaxed parent when it comes to worrying about naps, feedings, diaper changes, teeth, and cracks in the wall.

We sit around the house for a while until I get impatient and make us go for a walk in the heat of the day. For some odd reason I drive us to upper park and take us on a death march through the star thistle and dry golden grass as opposed to the more shaded lower park. At some point someone mentions rattle snakes, and I spend the next five minutes trying not to look as though I'm jumpy even though I'm jumpy. Luckily I'm pushing a happy gurgling lil s in front of me like a shield.

After a while it's clear that we're headed for a reenactment of something like the Donner party, we're at least three hundred feet from the car, when we finally reach a shady patch and backtrack through the shady portion of the park past the trickle of the creek, where sun bathers sit on an inflatable plastic toys and drink cokes or beers.

On the ride back to the car we see another swing and so push s in it for a while. The moms talks a great deal about which portions of the playground are shaded. She also points out, as I was parking the car, which parts of the lot will allow for the most shade. This is the moms version of books, shade and air flow. I blame it on her red hair. Red hair that lil s seems to have as well. It teaches those fair-skinned folk a healthy fear of the sun that grows into mania. We push her on the swing for a while, and she seems to like it. I'm just happy she doesn't cry like when I throw her in the air. Then she just panics.

In the evening we sit in the backyard and talk about jobs, places we've lived, and lil s. One thing we discovered is that she wants to pet kitties. The thing about the moms kitty is that he's a bit untrustworthy. Well, in general he behaves like a dog, coming when you call him and rubbing himself up against you in order to be petted. However, when he disappeared for two years, lord only knows where he lived, he got a bit more of an attitude and has been known to nip. Lil s has been known to pretend to be petting something only to latch on in some sort of crazy baby vice grip and then yank. We didn't think putting the two of them together was the best idea. Though, when S wasn't around I let lil s have a little more leeway, and she did just fine beyond some surface cuts. Anyhow, whenever she could see the cat she pretty much wanted to pet him. And sometimes he'd walk away, or we'd hold her arms back to try and show her how to be gentle and she'd start squalling as if we had taken away her favorite little blanket, and I suggested regular spankings to remedy the problem, but was revoked on the grounds that she was "just a baby." At which point I retired to the room with a good book and my vacation hat like any good father.

Picture time

Yeah, we put her hair up in this little blow because we love the movie Monster's Inc. Okay, that's not entirely true.

This is the fountain that lil s loved. We were all just happy he wasn't pissing like he would have been if we were in Europe. Dirty Euros.

Then we headed off to the plaza in Chico where all the cool hippies and drunks used to hang out at that is now paved over so that little kids and babies are there. It's taken a turn for the worse.

This is the happiest my mom was on the whole walk. Note that we're shaded.

These are my girls looking cute. Because anything less is not accepted in my house!