BTW I just saw your superhero drawing of me for the first time. I am touched that you went to all that trouble for me. I love everything about it except one little thing... I'm a female. Now that's one heck of a secret identity ;-)

“This is my first time in New York,” came the largest deluge of words, “I stayed at a hotel and I slept for two days straight. It was great with the room service and the comfortable furniture, but I got tired of it. It's hard to find the small, quiet places here. It's such a busy, bustling city, but they do exist if you look for them. Have you always lived in New York?”

Every once in a while a really fit girl might pass by and motivate me to keep pace with her, before my legs and my lungs told me otherwise and she'd leave me in the dust. Tell me that's not a metaphor for my dating experience. I was jogging through molasses, and I was an arrogant fool for even attempting to compete. It was then that I saw the sign for the one mile marker.

At lunch, standing on line in a supermarket, an elderly woman behind me kept inching her wagon dangerously close to my heels, though I had no control over the speed of the cashier or the customer ahead of me. I stepped up to pay when it was my turn, even as that wagon again stopped shy of a collision, and she began impatiently and loudly slamming her groceries on to the belt. I stepped forward and grabbed my bags after paying, and as I walked back past the aisle she shoved the wagon forward with such force and speed, it would have knocked me into a newspaper rack had I not leapt a bit.

Much like a character in the very promising new series Heroes, I found I could manipulate time as well as space. No sooner did my friend B13 and I leave Japan last week, then we found ourselves transported back to medieval times, where jousts, minstrels, archers, knights, and damsels in distress still thrived, a welcome sight for a Photo Blog Wednesday.

Dreary Sunday, woke up before afternoon,
Went outside, to see what my dad was doing.

“Yo, dad?”

“What up son?”

“Why's my car onna jack?”

“There's another spot to fix, another place to patch!”

“Trudat, double true, though I just got outta bed,
at least let me help you put the jack back in the shed.”

This is Otis's baby picture. Adorable little tyke, wasn't he? I won't speculate about his glazed eyes, but I've heard it said that he started experimenting with marijuana at an early age.

Here's Otis in tenth grade. If he looks young for a tenth grader, that's because he was accelerated to the tenth grade at the age of nine. This wasn't done as a matter of advanced placement. This was done because the kids his own age kept giving him atomic wedgies. Tenth graders, on the other hand, simply locked him in his locker, which was where he preferred to spend the day in the first place. It was a win-win.

This picture of Otis was actually taken at work. No, it wasn't the department supervisor who took the picture. And, no, that's not a cruel joke written in Sharpie magic marker on his back. That is actually a tattoo that Otis got when he was much younger. He also has an arcing tattoo across his midsection that reads "Too Legit To Quit."

This is the most recent picture of Otis I was able to sneak out of his house that day. As it just happens, I actually snapped this picture. I took this picture of Otis on his wedding day. At his wedding. During the ceremony. Those are his formal shades.