Revisiting The NIKL Gazette

During an ongoing tedious, disgusting but apparently obligatory review of boxes of materials formerly in storage for perhaps twenty-five years, I have come upon some pages of The NIKL Gazette.   This “publication” was something invented back in 1994 as a way to send each set of grandparents a regular newsletter of anecdotes and reports about their young grandchildren.  Some issues and individual pages are unaccounted for, but what remains gives me a chuckle now and reminds me of how easily accurate recall slips away in the absence of contemporaneous documentation.  One incident that I do remember, for which the corresponding NIKL page has not yet turned up, was when I reported that 3-year-old Nikolas, while riding in downtown Los Angeles traffic, spotted an adjacent car with a heavily dented fender and exclaimed “Look!  Earthquake damage!”.  (This, shortly after we had experienced a fairly significant local earthquake.)

Anyway, click the link below for a PDF containing what pages I have so far recovered:

NIKL_Gazette_183

Btw, the NIKL (Nik-Ivi-Kim-Lawrence) Gazette was the predecessor to this whilebusy blog.

Land Rover (1972)

Today, revisiting the dreaded storage boxes stashed in my work space, I came upon a previously-rejected polaroid print (made in 1972 with my ancient 4×5 view camera to which an equally-ancient manual wind-down mechanical shutter delay release had been attached) of my 1963 home-market English RHD (right hand drive) Land Rover, parked in Santa Monica.

rDay Sixteen-Hundred-Sixty-Six

This morning’s wired skies:

My mini-photoshoot draws a small Main Street crowd (mostly out of frame), gushing with canine questions and admiration — and snapping cellphone photos.  This little guy was said to be a malamute/husky mix, but I forgot his name (and that of his gracious person).

Downtown scenes:

Coming from and going to home base …