Jedi by Knight

I am lucky enough to have a wonderful dad, and I am lucky enough to live close to my parents so I was able to spend Father’s Day with him. Somehow when I was growing up, he developed the nickname “Dadman.”  I don’t really remember how.  In any case, he is the Dadman.  Goo goo g’joob.  The image at left is a card I made for him several years ago for Father’s Day.  The inside reads, “Hey, Darth Vader was a father, too!”

I may look like my mother, but I get a lot of my personality from my dad.  Reading is his favorite pastime (along with watching college sports), and he owns pretty much the complete works of Louis L’Amour.  When I was growing up, he read every book that I read.  At the time, I thought it was weird that a grown man was reading The Babysitters’ Club, but now I see that he was trying to relate to me, to understand my worldview, while also passively monitoring my information intake without censoring it.

We took Dadman to the Akron Zoo for Father’s Day this year, and we had a really nice time.  Akron has a lovely little zoo; you can walk the whole thing in a couple of hours, which is just the right length for small children.  They have improved the exhibits tremendously in the 15 years I have been in NE Ohio.  In fact, there have been improvements since I worked there several years ago! There are no monkeys or free-roaming savannah areas, but you can get within feet of a jaguar, feed goats and sheep, and wander through some stellar gardens.  Their new aquatic exhibit, Journey to the Reef, was very interesting–it includes jellyfish, various kinds of corals, a 4-ft. octopus, and clownfish (MOM IT’S NEMO!).  There is also a touch tank with rays at the end.  Next year, they are planning on opening another whole section of the zoo called Grizzly Ridge.

We ate lunch in the Komodo Kingdom cafe, and while it was a little expensive, I was very impressed with the food.  I had a good quality hotdog (advertised as local meat) and a side salad with lots of nice mixed greens–no iceberg here.  They had little Father’s Day activity sheets on the cafe tables for kids to do with Mad Libs and coloring.  Naturally, my husband and I did one also:

Well, I don’t recall my dad ever making pizza or sleeping in a spotted tent, but he is pretty awesome!