She's Wearing Great-Grandpa Chiefie's Cap

Isabella is getting scary cute.



Plot and Duck are setting their fall schedules to include time to get back East. Halloween and Belly's Birthday seem to be good candidates.

Every time Plottie starts planning trips to the Big Apple he gets excited about all the zillions of things he wants to do there. He wants to see museums and eat great food and travel through the boroughs on Dan's bicycle and drive out to Pennsylvania and up to Maine and the fact is he and Duck will probably be ecstatic to do nothing but hang around Clinton Avenue and soak up all the good stuff there. Then they'll head up to Providence and do it all again with The Beez. Maybe if they're lucky everyone will manage to get together somewhere at some point.

The going there is the easy part. The coming home is the tougher call.

If they had their way, the Plotniks would maybe stay for a month or more, but that's only what Plotnik thinks now. It never takes him too long to start feeling useless and in the way when he's away from his own stuff. He writes verses like

"I miss the noise
And my trucks and my toys
I believe this old boy's going home."

Which of course leads to the inevitable conversation he and Ducknik are not ready to have yet. The facts are clear: life is so much nicer on the West Coast than on the East, where each week you're saying to yourself "Man! THIS is GREAT!" for one day and "This place SUCKS!" the other six.

That one great day in the Apple is better than all seven in Saint Plotniko. But the other six aren't. He and Duck already did the math once. Plotnik was crazy about The Big Shmapple until it was time to get the hell out of there. And once was enough.

But then they look at those two pictures again and the even larger truth comes into hard and clean focus: God, she is beautiful.