The Mammoth Murder

Had you asked me what the coolest thing in California was when I was in grade five number redacted years ago, I would have not hesitated: tar pits. Pits of tar, laden like Chunky Soup with the remains of such wondrous creatures as sabre-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths.

It took a visit from our French friends, Yann and Félicie, to finally induce us to make the trip out to the pits. It was pretty awesome: there were a lot of animals that fell into those pits. The fact that the first few dozen to go in didn’t serve as an object lesson to the dozens more that followed probably goes a long way to explain why they didn’t survive to the present day. The Ice Age was a stupider age.


_{Sabre toothed freakin' tiger!}

As visitors enter the museum grounds, they see the largest pit, fenced of for safety. Within the fencing is an educative, if horrifying tableau:



How can you look at this and not be shocked? Look at the mother mammoth, crying uselessly for help, as it sinks, panicked, into the relentless, sucking void? Look at her baby – reaching it’s tiny trunk out for his mother, watching the very source of his existence sink, with tortuous slowness, into oblivion, while his father, stands by, helpless and knowing he can do nothing to help. It rends the heart.


But it got worse. Unnoticed, on the other side of the lake, we spot another mammoth, concealed behind a bluff, watching the terminal paroxysms of the female.



Creepy. What is he doing there? Why is he watching, offering neither assistance nor comfort? Why is he hiding? Did he have a hand in events? Could it be that our perpetually dying mammoth did not fall, but was in fact pushed?

Still alive

_{Proof I leave the house occasionally}

Boy, it’s been a while since I’ve been around here, eh?

A blog like this will go dry for one of three reasons: there’s nothing going on, and therefore nothing to write about, or there’s too much going on, and therefore I’ve no time to write about it, or I’m suffering some sort of blogging/writing ennui and therefore don’t want to write at all.

Or option number four: All of the above.

Most of our life over the last few months has been exactly what you would expect life with a new baby to be like: feeding, crying, sleeping, and dealing with the baby’s feeding, crying and sleeping. And while I find absolutely everything Sana does to be enthralling, I recognize that not everyone else is tuning into this frequency of the Internet to read about me babbling on about how absolutely brilliant, beautiful and awe-inspiring my daughter is.

Even if I wanted to write about that (which I do, believe me) I didn’t have the time because my Guardian Angel Mom has been here for the last month, keeping us alive helping us out and spoiling spending time with her newest grandchild. During that month my sister and her family of four, as well as friends from both Canada and France have arrived for visits. It’s been a madhouse, and Sana probably believes she’s being raised in a Bed and Breakfast.

In addition to that, Sana has started at daycare (breaking my fragile heart) and I have started a new job.

So, there’s plenty of material to write about, and I hope to do so soonish, but I am now splitting my writing efforts between here, my job, and my semi-pseudonymous blogging gig at Goodkin, a family lifestyle site at which I am now semi-professionally blogging. This means some stuff that might have appeared here will appear there: check ‘em out.


So this isn't a post so much as it is a promise statement of intent to eventually post here again, soon. My apologies to both my readers.