Saturday, August 14, 2021

Farewell Mr. Bill, aka Billbo Baggins, aka Ohdabu daBill, aka many things

It's been a rough week. We said goodbye to our oldest cat, Mr. Bill, and helped him peacefully cross the rainbow bridge. 

Our beloved family cat, who had oodles of wonderful quirks and personality — moments that will have us reminiscing and laughing as family for years — was a big contributor to Papergreat, too. (He also starred in a Twitter thread gently mocking his silly sleeping positions this year.)

Longtime readers have seen him plenty of times. There was a Christmas cats photo gallery. And, perhaps most notably — and nearly 10 years ago — Mr. Bill appeared in Happy Halloween: Witches and zombies and scarecrows! Oh my! He was my Halloween front-yard decoration co-conspirator in that one. It's the first image below in a "tribute reel" for Billy.
Circa 2012. From left: Mr. Bill, Salem and Huggles. In the foreground: Mitts. All four of them are now hanging out together again, in the warm sunbeams.

Sunday, August 8, 2021

Snapshot & memories: The Phillies are hot, and so was I

In the overwhelming majority of photographs that exist of me as a child, I'm wearing some sort of Philadelphia Phillies T-shirt. This includes, to my mother's chagrin at the time, at least two official school photos. I've considered putting together a post that's simply a gallery of all the "young Chris in a Phillies T-shirt" snapshots that I could find, but nobody needs that. (Heck, there's few of you reading the actual posts these days.)

Anyway, I thought I'd share this tonight because the red-hot, first-place Phillies have just completed a three-game sweep of the New York Mets, thanks to the complete-game pitching of Zack Wheeler and solo home runs by Jean Segura, J.T. Realmuto and Bryce Harper.

All four of those players were born roughly a decade after this photograph was taken. Yes, folks, I'm officially getting old. This snapshot, based on my height, is almost certainly from the summer of 1981. Forty (gulp) years ago. I'm in the backyard of our Willow Street house in Montoursville. I'm very hot, probably from running around the backyard in circles or something similarly unproductive. The tank top + cut-off jeans shorts is no longer a look that I can or should attempt to pull off. And it's been a long time since I've had that much hair; not even during the height of the pandemic, when I'd gone months without a haircut, did I have that kind of mop atop my head.

When I posted this picture on my Facebook page in 2014, Mom's only comment was: "I remember the chives, but forgot about the grill.......! You look hot, literally!"