Hipster

It’s springtime here in the Northwest, marked in culinary terms by the temporary displacement of my eventide pineapple and mango smoothie by a handful of lightly-boiled locally-raised fresh-plucked asparagus spears, cheekily poked into a dollop of mayonnaise en route to my taste buds. And, just when you think life couldn’t get any better, Ben and Jerry’s release a new “Cinnamon buns” variety. O brave new world.

In other good news, I believe the clouds may be slowly beginning to part on Rachel’s post-partum depression. And, after a virtually somnambulistic month, I have regained something approaching a normal night’s sleep, primarily because Ethan has done likewise... and what a fine and hearty fellow he is, fully 26lbs 10oz at his last checkup and over 30” in height, smiling and giggling and lobbing bright plastic dishes of mushed-up banana across the dining room, zipping around in his Winnie-the-Pooh walker-on-wheels, banging blocks together and so forth. He has shown increasing discrimination in his diet lately, a tendency Rachel refers to as fussiness, whereas I am delighted by the suggestion of a nascent connoisseur. Who would want to eat cold pasteurised, liquidised peas, after all?

Even the casual reader will have noticed that my increasingly infrequent posts have lost something of their trademark bohemian eclecticism and instead focus almost exclusively on the activities and general hijinks of the young master. Thus art mirrors life; so get used to it, as I have done. Recent highlights:

• I am pleased to report that I have come upon an alternative transportation mechanism for the little fella, which I call the hipster, a sort of across-the-shoulder sling affair which allows him to sit astride my left hip and generally take in the myriad splendours of this world from shoulder height as we stroll around the locality. Good up to 35lbs.
  

Travels in a hipster.

• Did I mention that he temporarily turned yellow? Not jaundice or binge-drinking, but carotenemia from eating too many sweet potatoes, and nothing to worry about, I’m pleased to report.
• I have contemplated the construction of an Ethanopedia, combining the principle of Walter Shandy’s fictive Tristrapaedia with the technology of Wikipedia to crystallize the profound and vital wisdom of my thirty-five years into a handy guide to generally untaught but necessary intelligence and related insightful ephemera. Wikipedia is all very well, but its insistence on citation and reference and – more generally – the epistemic criteria of a bygone era, the oppressive insistence on truth and relevance, for example, is not entirely to my tastes, if not a little passé.

Potential future recipient of the Ethanopedia.


Rachel and Linda unwind with a little shuffleboard. More fun than skittles, with commensurately greater space requirements.


Well, it amused me.