Taking Post Tropical Depression Syndrome Escape Measures

Team Gringo has done a very good job at easing me back into the New England winter and dealing with my separation anxiety for warm temperatures and a certain young Panamanian lady. 

And Poof! He Was Gone

My son ably performed those tasks the first couple days but the siren call of the MEF lured him back north yesterday morning.  He did so after making serious inroads on my bacon reserves.  It was awesome to have him around to reduce the loneliness after my time with my wife’s excellent family.  Buddy stepped up (mostly lying down) upon my son’s departure.  My sister and her fabulous in laws then picked up the baton as they summoned me down to Rhode Island last night for a memorable McShawn’s evening.

Before that I snuck out to catch up on my movie going which suffered immensely during my foreign travels.  I went to see I, Frankenstein which has terrible reviews but c’mon, like I was going to miss a movie about the Frankenstein monster fighting gargoyles and demons!  It turned out to be pretty good popcorn fare, maybe because my expectations were so low.  Some great action pieces and fantastic special effects with an out of the ordinary take on the Frankenstein “legend”.  I’ve always thought Aaron Eckhart was an interesting actor and he delivers here as the monster caught in the war between good and evil.  This wasn’t Shakespeare by any means but a good Saturday afternoon escape to fantasy land – just what the doctor ordered for Post Tropical Depression.

Buddy and I  Yesterday Before I Learned About his new Taste In Delicacies

Buddy and I spent the rest of the afternoon in couch potato position #1 trying to make inroads on the overloaded DVR.  It was kind of jarring moving during the same sitting from This Old House’s Norm to the Chicago sociopathic Gallagher clan of Shameless to the demon hunting Winchester brothers in Supernatural.  It made for a kind of surreal TV watching experience.  Buddy was more interested in the burgers I was trying to send downrange.

Seated in McShawn's Last Night

With my mind totally saturated with escapist fare I made my own escape from the empty house answering the summons to a night in Rhode Island at our favorite Irish bar.  My sister and brother in law took me out to eat which allowed them to chronicle Buddy’s depredations during his two week stay with them.  Buddy was a very bad influence on their dog Bailey who has learned to terrorize passersby and actually led Buddy on a jail break.  Bailey made her own way back while a kind neighbor showed up with Buddy in tow.  The most disturbing trend is Buddy’s acquisition of a taste for feline fecal matter.  My sister said she didn’t have to clean up her litter box the entire time Buddy was with them.  I immediately flashed back to the face licking welcome I received Friday morning from my intellectually challenged dog.  Yechhh!!!!

My Sister (L), Her Sister in Law and My Brother In Law

Meeting up with the rest of my wife’s in laws at McShawn’s turned out to be the best medicine yet for the pervasive sense of loss I’ve felt since leaving my wife and her family.  As I sat catching up with them I was reminded of the exact same type feelings I experienced in Spanish a week before being around my wife’s family.

For Some Reason He Was Drinking Wine Through A Straw

They’re both very close knit clans and are gracious enough to let me partake of their familial generosity of spirit.  They’ve gone through a tough couple of months with the loss of their mother but it was nice to see them bouncing back a little and enjoying each other’s company so much.  It wasn’t all cookies and ice cream though as the powerful seer of Red Sox doom that is my sister’s sister in law took me to task repeatedly for posting a less than flattering picture of her last year in this blog.  This did nothing more than inspire me to take numerous pictures of her throughout the night and promising to put the worst on the blog today.  Unfortunately my plan went awry as she’s very photogenic and the pictures demonstrate merely that we had a really good time. 

Trying to Avoid Capture at the Bar with Robocop Husband

Late in the evening some of the younger generation joined us at the bar and smiled good naturedly to see their elders in less than finest form.  This multi generational approach to Irish Pub crawling is to be recommended.  We learned of one of the younger’s penchant for tormenting the Boston Garden’s Bruin crowd and assorted other misdemeanors.

Younger Crowd Easing Away

They wisely moved down the bar a little so as not to be too obviously associated with the increasingly raucous elders.  Late in the evening my wife, assisted by my NYC daughter and a couple of her beautiful friends, tracked me down.  When she returned from the beach and found that I wasn’t answering the phone at home my wife texted our daughter and charged her with locating me.  Since both of us were in bars I’m not sure of the accuracy of the words exchanged.  The silence to my last text was deafening.

I’ll end today’s way too long meanderings with a report on the last two books I finished while in Panama.  I dashed through the next in my list of Brad Thor’s thrillers featuring Scot Horvath as hero, Takedown.  This one has Horvath charging around New York City isolated in the aftermath of a 9-11 type terrorist attack. He’s his typical lethal self as he whittles down a team of terrorists trying to locate one of their leaders.  It was a fast but very enjoyable read which I found hard to put down.

The same could not be said of Angelica Huston’s autobiography, A Story Lately Told.  My wife and I met Ms Huston during my extremely brief movie career and she struck both of us as extremely grounded and very nice.  Her talents do not extend to coherent writing though.  The first half of the book is an almost stream of consciousness type wandering thorough her early childhood.  In one sentence she’s describing the color of her mother’s bed room and then launches in a completely different direction about horse riding and then a bullying older brother. 

Her childhood adventures were fascinating so it was kind of sad to have them so effectively obscured by her writing.  She certainly had an unconventional childhood at the hands of her famous director father and a ballerina mother.  It’s amazing that she turned out to be the very nice lady we met when you read about the bohemian excesses inflicted upon her.  It was also fascinating to see the famous literary and entertainment figures that passed through her life.  Thankfully the second half of the book is a little more coherent and readable dealing with her early modeling career and a destructive personal relationship with a photographer.