Category Archives: Nifty things

I just finished making a photobook of old pictures of me and my brothers as babies and kiddies.
When my Grandpa Joe died, a relative gave me his collection of pictures from my family, which my mom must have mailed to him over the years.  So I had my own little personal collection of childhood pix.

I made the book for my mom for her upcoming 64th birthday and titled it chickadees, which is what she used to call us when we were wee.

I love that I’ve regressed back to my 5 year old hair cut.

Whenever people want to know which brother is which, I tell them that J was the ugly one. Then they get horrified that I could say such a thing, but sure enough, they can then identify the twins correctly.

I can’t imagine the three babies, but looking at the pictures, I remember the hooligans we were.  Awesome hooligans.

My brother and his girlfriend came to visit this weekend. I haven’t seen them (or any of my family) since last May, so it was super to have some beefed up Hannon time. I feel extra specially Volvo and Buggles infused.

The girlfriend is 6 months pregnant and seems to be a very normalizing factor for my brother. He didn’t get ridiculously drunk once. He (and they) seem to be doing very well. I’m excited about the pending nephew business and eager to see Joe being dadly. Although, he did let me trim some of the more outrageous of his eyebrow hairs. Perhaps he needed those to bolster the dad style mojo.

My favorite part of the weekend was going to the German Tourist Club in Oakland. Evidently, there’s another one in Marin that is better known, but we lucked out and stumbled across some info advertising Herbstfest in the Oakland Hills.

The scene was predominantly 65 and older, but they were wearing Bavarian costumes and polkaing to an oompa band, so the people watching was still super. Mostly, we just sat at a picnic table under a big oak tree and drank a fair amount of beer and just chattered.

It was good to have some family time, particularly pleasant family time.  The Squeeze was happy to be there and very accommodating and all rose-colored glasses about my brother and his pending fatherhood.  So it was a nice weekend, and beer in the Oakland hills was a very good find.