July kicked off with my 47th birthday on the 4th—my wife baked an incredible cake you can see above. It is called, bizarrely, pig-lickin’ cake; my mom used to make it when I was a kid. Instead of braving downtown Columbus for Red White and Boom or a school construction zone for our local fireworks, we went to a Clippers game on the 5th. The game was great—the Clippers won on a walkoff homer in the bottom of the ninth—but the postgame fireworks were incredibly disappointing. Lesson learned.
I’m a big fan of the National, a longstanding indie rock band with roots in Ohio. They’re known, among other things, for their melancholy, introspective lyrics, often inspired at least in part by classic or contemporary literature (one of their recent albums is titled First Two Pages of Frankenstein). From this came the “Sad Dads Book Club” on Instagram, a book club dedicated to books inspiring or inspired by the band. I was lucky enough to win a recent giveaway, a copy of the novel Sorrow by Tiffanie DeBartolo (inspired, fittingly enough, by the National song “Sorrow”), and when it arrived I was ecstatic to see that it was signed and personalized by the author. I’m very much looking forward to reading it.
Our neighborhood is always a haven for wildlife. In addition to the lawn-grazing family of deer seen above and typical suburban sights like rabbits and squirrels, there are also plenty of chipmunks, the occasional fox, and once or twice even a couple of turkey vultures, just off the top of my head. There are also a ton of backyard birds, and for a couple of days, we had a goldfinch that got obsessed with our bedroom window. It would flutter around right in front of it and would even perch on the screen so it could peer inside for long stretches at a time. This went on for probably the better part of two days; on the third day I still saw it a few times sitting in the pine tree just outside the window, and then it apparently decided it was time to get on with its life.
And of course, there were cat pics:
The Commaphile 