Had a glorious week in Seattle babysitting the grandkids. It was challenging grandparent work, but someone's got to do it.
Weston tries his first bite of a green chile chicken burrito
Grandparents get along so well with grandkids because they have a common enemy. Ha.
Frances Grooving On An Empty Box of Fiber One
Lots of fun picking through the trash and I'm always amazed at what the little tykes find amusing. I was holding Frances in the back yard when I randomly kicked a soccer ball and she started laughing, so I walked over and kicked it again and she laughed and laughed. I must have kicked that ball 25 times and she just kept on laughing. It's the little things.
We gathered every morning in the kitchen.
The Morning Gathering
But my favorite time was the painting sessions:
Weston does the first of many Daily Whip Outs.
Of course it wasn't all art sessions:
The Tree Climber
Weston Abstract
I got to catch up on a lot of cartoons. I must say Nut Job 2 is pretty spectacular with superior animation and funny sight gags. We watched it twice. Nut Job 1 was okay—one of those rare cases where the sequel is better than the original—and I thought the animation on Coco was crazy amazing, although the story about the Day of The Dead and how it was related to the little boy was a little overcooked. Of course there were insufferably bad cartoons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Stagecraft Edition was terrible (Weston loved it) and there was a Monster Truck show where the animation looked like it was done with two pieces of plexiglass and three rejected truck drawings from Cars III. But what do I know?
Quite a bit, actually. Hard to believe that I have lived long enough to see movie shorts (when cartoons played before a movie) and then the beginning of Saturday morning cartoons where we saw the same 15 cartoons over and over because there wasn't enough product to fill the pipeline for one hour of one day, much less seven days.
And then all the different genres, like claymation which Wes Anderson has revived in his brilliant Isle of Dogs.
Kind of crazy when you consider what it all comes down to:
"It's just lines on paper, folks."
—R. Crumb
Amen
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