We've Got Tigers Here

A friend's son got wooden fridge magnet animals and his favorites are the lion and the tiger.

Dearest's weekly calendar has a photo of two affectionate tigers on the first page.

I've started a small watercolor with a lion and a tiger. It's actually the second one in the last week - I did another which did not turn out and has been cut down for CD covers.

We are clearing out old stuff in our office, and I ended up taking home an old wooden box (called a cable coffin) which had "DataFlow Education Center" engraved into the lid. I founded the Education Department at DataFlow, over twenty years ago. The system we had in the Ed Center (for whose extra cables the coffin was made) was a "Tiger 16," which had to be reloaded using a technique that involved flipping a pencil switch on the mother board and faking the system into accepting a restore of a different bootstrap partition. This technique was called "Tiger tailing," and I documented our company's instructions for how to do it. I thought of it as I put the box in my trunk yesterday.

Youngest's birthday party was today and (as per tradition in this house) he got to choose what the "pin the ____ on the _____" would be. With no hesitation he chose pin the tail on the tiger.

What is going on? Is it some kind of message?

The photo here is of the tiger I drew, and the tails, which had the kids' names on them, worked into the stripes (they loved that). I scrambled the names in this photo - we don't put others' names on the web... Over in Facebook I'll post the unscrambled shot.

We had two rounds of pin the tail, walked down our driveway, with the tiger taped to the garage door. Red bandana tied over the eyes, turn the player three times one way, then one time back the other. Then they walk 25 feet to the tiger... Some were off by 12 feet or more, others (including the birthday boy, who won the first round) were only off by a few inches. We've played this at birthday parties since we moved into this house. It's always something different. Wings on the dragon, last year. Paratrooper on the chute the year before that.

They call out hints to each other, which could be right or wrong. "You're way off!" "You're going good! Keep going that way!" "You're going to miss the house completely!" "To the left, to the left, a little more!"

And then there was the most interesting case today: "Come towards the sound of my voice - I wouldn't steer you wrong!" and he was actually standing directly in front of the target, and each child saw him do that for the turns of others, but no one trusted him and walked towards him on their turns...

Youngest doesn't have much wall left in his room - I wonder if we can get the tiger, and his tail, up somewhere? We'll see. I've always thought tigers beautiful, but until I started drawing them this week, I had never observed how individual each one is - how unique their builds, faces, stripe patterns. And now I feel their beauty not only at an abstract level, but up into my hands and arms, as if I'd been touching and building tigers myself. This is one of the miracles of drawing and painting, for me.