Jon Parrish 50th Birthday
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Our theme for this year's adventure was "a celebration of Unkle Jon's 50th Birthday." Woo Hoo! Not looking nor acting nearly his age, Jon displayed admirable courage for someone reaching an advanced state of decrepitude! Fortunately for Jon, the universe provided an encouraging sign, which we all took to mean that, yes indeed, there will be more of Jon, and by god he will camp!! LARGE |
The Boy. AKA: monkey-boy. Known to pound on the display glass in order to frighten the children on the other side. LARGE |
This is what it looks like when Janel is forced to "climb up on that tree and smile, baby, smile!" LARGE |
This is what it looks like when Jonny-boy has released his inner monkey (caution: go easy on the bananas; they set him off in random directions, only to be found later, way up a tree, scratching his pits and pounding his chest). Janel, on the other hand, is just looking darn cute if you ask me, your humble and anonymous narrator. LARGE |
Unka Jon and Dr. Jones. I'm thinking that the look that Jon is sporting is saying "I have something up my sleeve. Guess what it is before it's too late and you end up being the recipient of some tom foolery!" Joe, on the other hand, is looking like he's ready for intense conversations on all things Oz-landish. LARGE |
Unka Jon and Jeri. To cute for words, stuffed to the gunwales with tasty victuals, fine brews and wines, and topped off with a chocolate cake that Jeri smuggled in from some country where they make cake that is too good to be legal here in the US. Mmmmmm, mmmmmmm! Belch. (sorry!) LARGE |
Field of Flowers LARGE |
Cute wife, outstanding in her lupine meadow. Doing her best Vanna White. LARGE |
Rock and Janel, as if you didn't know, even tho they were both attempting to look as goofy as possible. And succeeding. LARGE |
Rock, once again, releasing his inner orangutan. Notice the colorful pelt, the immensely exaggerated cranial brow, the arms, able to touch the ground and capable of swinging thru trees (but only in jungles, not those wienie climbing walls where macho dudes are trussed up in the latest "can't get hurt" gear--if you fall it should hurt and serve as a reminder that paying attention while swinging from limbs is one of the best ideas). LARGE |
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A hideous beast, horrible to look upon and worse to stand next to without a military-grade gas mask. With a single side-wise gaze, he's able to frighten small children at 100 paces, and quite capable of turning the stomachs of hard core bikers, causing them to soil themselves. An insult to olfactory senses, this cunning beast inhabits the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest, never daring to come closer to population centers for fear of instilling abject smellified terror (if not projectile vomiting) by it's residents. This cumbersome beast is best known for his mating call: heybaby-yobaby-yomybaby and for a knuckle-dragging shuffle reminiscent of history's most frightening nightmare-induced demons. That's right, it's Bighead, the most loathsome and pee-yer-pants scary creature in the forest! Fearing for his very life (and nostrils) Rock--who is known to be both cunningly stealthy and strangely fond of bizarre and/or hideous creatures--crept silently up on the beast and snapped the following image. (no small creatures were harmed in the filming of this strange event, however, several senses were offended, and one of us was definately scrimping on the personal deoderant option.) |
Standing under what is purported to be "the worlds tallest something-or-other tree." Jeri, with cone in hand. Jon, also with cone. Rock, coneless (sigh), but yanking on Patti's coat. Patti, patiently putting up with Rock, as she has been doing since 1985. Eric, again down on bended knee. Group consensus was that he had been drifting off in "Knights of the Round Table" fantasy, wherein he is knighted by none other than King Arthur his own self. And Jonny-boy, attempting to plant a cone in Eric's head, regardless of the fact that we told him that "nothing can grow in Eric's head onna acount of while it gots a lotta fertilizer innit, its as hard to crack as one of them nut things that ya haveta beat on with a mallet, over and over." LARGE |
Janel, cute. Patti, ditto. Eric, not so much. More like "was cute when he was 12, but stopped being so about the time his voice got lower and hair started to sprout in odd places." In fairness, Patti still tows the party line, saying things like "Hi! I'd like you to meet my cute husband, and nobody is paying me to say that. OK, so his friends all chip in a bit each month, just to keep Eric at home, and away from fire-making materials and insects (a whole other story, that)." Jonny-boy: once again his inner monkey has taken over. "Here's a piece of fruit monkey-boy (throws the fruit way deep into the woods). Go get it monkey-boy, fetch! Good monkey-boy. Now jump down off that nice postman and quit violating his space, monkey-boy." LARGE |
One honking-huge cedar. Jon is seen gazing up into the farthest branches, perhaps contemplating "upper canopy lifeforms" such as squirrels that throw small pointed objects at tourists, or raccoons that will gladly sneak up and bite yer ankles and then scamper off, all the while whispering under their collective breathes "neener neener neener!" Probably he was simply captivated by the overwhelming smell of deep forest, coupled with the underwhelming sound of anything resembling modernity. LARGE |
Two chicks hiking in the mountains surrounded by fog, mighty trees and the deafening sound of silence, of course taking into account that they yacked the entire time, hardly taking out time for snacks and other really important hiking activities. LARGE |
It Was A Close Thing! Rock almost caught Jon hugging a tree! Gad-frikken-zooks BatBeave! We got us a real live commune-livin', no-deoderant-usin', anti-everything-proper hippy child tree-huggin' infidel! And dammit, lookit there Marge, he's smilin' at us! Wait a minute! Is he peeing on that cedar? Oh, gotcha, guess not. For a minute there, your narrator though he detected child like glee, which is known to have many causes, such as peeing in the woods, or on them, and general silliness, again, in the woods, and other things that people do when nobody is there to laugh or point at them (except others of their group, who are by nature exempt from laughing and pointing due to the simple fact that they, too, will be the subject of group giddiness and self-induced hilarity due to random falling down, tripping on roots and falling flat on faces, and other assorted pratfalls). LARGE |
Yessir. A jen-u-wine flower, in all it's splendiferous glory. We knew you wanted to see flowers, so here's another chance. LARGE |
It Was A Foggy Morning. Street lights, non-existent. Traffic signals, none to be seen. Crosswalk guards, nope. No flashlight handy, nor any really good stick to whack a bear with. The intrepid (if not poorly equipped) group of hikers took off in search of wild strawberries, mind-boggling vistas, and plant & tree identification skills testing, all of which they enjoyed immensely. During the journey, they ate exotic trail munchies, drank copiously of bottled water, and traded goodies. Jeri had the best goodies, Rock and Janel had the most odd, and Jon ate whatever was shoved into his pie hole, all the while making sounds of extreme contentment! LARGE |
In The Misty Morning. Janel was captivated by a tree that looked like a Poodle's tail. Thusly, she demanded the camera. Rock humbly submitted it into her custody, rather than face the look. LARGE |
Nobody ever figured out what Jeri was contemplating, and she wasn't tellin'! Could have been a bug, or an exotic plant. Could even have been something here-to-fore never seen, like actual evidence of intelligent life. Jon, off in the distance, and hiking stick in hand, focuses in on activities off in the woods, perhaps those of small furry creatures, perhaps those of large... Janel, obviously trying to decipher Jeri's somewhat cryptic gaze, looks to be attempting to determine why Jeri has assumed the little "n" position. Perhaps a yoga stance. Perhaps a "I'm-leaning-over-good-thing-I-got-me-a-stick!" thing. LARGE |
The Distance. Looking off in the. LARGE |
Hey! What's that!! Over there, yonder! Could it be a bird? Yes, Eric, it IS a bird. Rock and Jeri are amused by the fact that it took Eric so long to figure it out. Jonny-boy is, as usual, amused with most of the things the adults do, this moment in space-time being no exception. Patti is looking for wild strawberries and keeping an eye pealed on Eric, who is known to act real squirrelly if he hasn't eaten in a while. Anyway, back to our story. Eric thought it was a beaver, but of course beavers cannot fly. Then he thought it was a pterodactyl, which is equally impossible, since of course they have been extinct for millions of years. Lastly, he hitched up his drawers, hocked up a nasty bit of phlemage, squinted real hard, focused real tight, concentrating the entirety of his feeble mental horsepower, and determined that LO! (and behold) "that there's a possum, one of them flyin' sorts, with jaws that bite, and claws that catch..." tsk, tsk tsk. So sad. Too many trips down Leary Lane. LARGE |
Rock is dubious, to say the least. To say the most, he is bewildered, befuddled, and bemused. It is also possible that he might be both obsequious and purple, which we can discuss at a later date and time, over fine beers that you will bring to the party. Nobody knows what Jon was up to, altho it was bandied about that he might have been staring into infinity, or his navel, which is the same thing. As for Eric, Jonny-boy and Jeri: they are aparently enjoying a bit of amusement amongst themselves, possibly due to the realization that they were, indeed and in fact, having way too much fun. LARGE |
Jeri, Jonny-boy and Eric get together for a group hug, onna acount a Eric being one bulb short of a lamp in the "attempting to identify what is obviously a bird, right there, about 20 feet away, on a perfectly clear day, with no visual distractions and a direct, unobscured line of sight," trick. Patti has her hands in her pants; nobody knows why, but speculation abounds, some of which revolves around the possibility that she was considering kicking Eric in the shins in an effort to get him to pay attention. To what, we may never know. LARGE |
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This site went live on Cinco de Mayo 05.05.2001
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Use other than personal viewing is prohibited without written permission.
Images may not be copied or reproduced except as links from your site to this one.
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All rights Reserved, USA and Worldwide.
This site went live on Cinco de Mayo 05.05.2001
Last Update 16 November 2011