Cumplemeses.

May 16, Hollister, California.
(Floating in space without internet connection for a while.)

Dylan turned six months on Sunday so we had a little feliz cumplemeses celebration for him, with cake and candle.
Happy birthday in Spanish is feliz cumplenaños, which literally means happy birthyears. So it was a feliz cumplemeses, or happy birthmonths, for Dylan. Ekaterina and Vasily were there, and so was Angelo, all singing feliz cumplemeses. But I took pictures instead of filming the performance (professional deformation) so we did it again yesterday, without Angelo but with Edith and her baby, Jose Ivan, and the Chinese girls. And with half a cake, ta-da!, for half a year.
We had to do it before the appointment for Dylan's immunizations in the afternoon. Fridman went with this time and he looked as if he felt more pain than the baby, his contorted face a study in agony. The six-month checkup went fine, this is a healthy circus baby. We went to a place called the Health Foundation, a clinic I had found, as always, by looking on the internet. It turned out to be committed, among other things, to "provide health care to under-served populations," and we ended up not having to pay anything. Since none of us has any health insurance, health care costs are always adding to the stress of the visits so I was grateful for the alignment of the stars that made it so that Dylan's six month checkup would bring us just here to this wonderful little clinic. As I went to sleep last night I thought this must be pretty damn close to what they say is happiness. If I had one fiber of religious material in me I would say that we are blessed.
We moved back south to Hollister for a couple of days and arrived to a field which hadn't been cleaned and was hard to maneuver, all hard bumps left by the combines and unharvested hay. A last remnant of agriculture sandwiched between a KMart and a housing development, probably gone and turned into another development by the time the circus comes back to this town in a couple of years, the way these things go all around the country.