Dadland

Remember Jason?

I swear I'm not spending more time playing on Photoshop than I am working on the next book. I swear!

Because Jason gets the job done, I'm going up to my ancestral land of Long Island tonight. Why? You'll find out soon enough.

Making fun of my dad is one of my favorite things to do (along with my newfound joy of Photoshopping Jason's face to the Kraken's body). Don't get me wrong--my dad is great. He's smart and generous and hard-working and all that, but he's got too much free time and a billion different hobbies. Some of them are totally normal:

Playing soccer.

Gardening.

Listening to NPR.

Learning new languages.

And some of them are a little weird:

Finding an overgrown plot of land, taking the machete out of his car, and hacking a path in order to find wild berries that he'll later make into preserves.

Inspecting Persian rugs--he likes to flip them over and count the amount of stitches and rub them between his fingers and then utter some weird guttural sounds that he swears are the names of the regions where the rugs originated.

Peppering his speech with words from other languages and becoming sorely disappointed when I can't understand what he's talking about, and then saying them louder in hopes that volume will improve my multi-national linguistic skills.

Making homemade wine.

My dad asked me to make him a wine label. "Fine," I said, "what's the name of your wine?" He had no answer. Every month or so he'd say, "Where's my label?" and I'd say, "What's it called?" "WHERE'S MY LABLE?" "NAME THE WINE AND I'LL MAKE YOU A LABEL!" This continued for about a year until finally one day he blurted out, "IGNATOW JUICE!" So now he makes wine that sounds like it's main ingredient is a bunch of squozen relatives.

Unfortunately Papa Ignatow and my stepmother, Gail, are away on vacation, but he called from Canada to let me know that Of course you can stay at the house, just warn your stepsister, etc, and after a couple of minutes of talking about how polite Canadians are--

"I was shooing away a mosquito and someone waved at me! CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?"

he mentioned that I should probably stay away from the homemade Shiraz. "We think it might be toxic."

Nice! So back on the road I go. This time I'm relying on public transportation so that I can get work done while I travel. This book-writin' is time-consuming.