Lunchroom Larfs- September 30, 2013

Like all five-year-olds my daughter is obsessed with mermaids. When I asked her what her thoughts were on this cartoon, she said she thought the mermaid and the fish exchanged bottoms. But which, I ask, has the siren song to lure sailors to their death?

Lunchroom Larfs- September 27, 2013

I've always found the red eyes of white rabbits creepy. It gives this rabbit a walking dead feel. I picture he then unemotionally crumples the tiny magician in a ball and tosses the broken man over his fuzzy shoulder before exiting the stage.

Note how the rabbit's legs are not seen under the table. That isn't an error in my drawing, that's another magic trick of the rabbit. Levitation!

Lunchroom Larfs- September 26, 2013

Here is another one that the kids in my daughter's class didn't get. No one knew why a dog in a museum salivating over the dinosaur bones was funny...

... wait a minute my daughter goes to a school for the blind and they all have seeing eye dogs that would totally be allowed in the museum... Now I get why they didn't find this funny! But wait... how did they see this cartoon?

Lunchroom Larfs- September 25, 2013

It took me a while to figure out which appliance should be getting married to the robot. I started with the toaster, but quickly realized putting a veil or a dress on a toaster makes it just look like a box with a veil or a dress. The vacuum cleaner was the best one to wear wedding attire.

If you look at the toaster watching the wedding it's obvious that she is jealous of being passed over and will spent the reception afterwards telling her friends how handsome the groom was, and never mentioning the bride though they are considered best friends. The toaster thinks she is hiding her disdain and bitterness by not speaking of her friend, but this is not so, the blender has known the toaster since kindergarten and knows her almost better than the she knows herself. The toaster will drink too much and make an embarrassing toast during dinner that will further drive a spike in the friendship between the vacuum and the toaster that will never heal. The blender will take the vacuums side and the toaster will slowly realize she is alone and has squandered her life on bitterness and regret. She will end her life by jumping into the bathtub. It will be weeks until the superintendent of her slummy building finds her rusting at the bottom of a pool of crumb filled water.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 24, 2013

This is a picture of my two daughters doing a puzzle together. The missing piece is laughing because he knows what happens next. A chain reaction of anger. My five-year-old first blames the two-year-old for removing the piece, which then sets off a wailing from the two-year-old, which then sets me stomping through the house shouting "What is going on!" Soon the whole house is upset and the bastard little puzzle piece hides around the corner laughing with schadenfreude delight.

On an altogether other note, the picture in the background is my crappy rendition of our good friend and talented artist Tania Boterman's art, of which we love and have many pieces hanging on our house.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 23, 2013

Both my daughter and the kids in her class didn't get this one. The way I saw it was that the zebra among the tigers has integrated itself and convinced the tigers that he was one of them based solely on the fact that they both have stripes. The next thing that would happen in this tale would be the ultimate test for the imposter as he must choose to either save his friend and give himself away risking his own life or to save himself by brutally killing and eating his zebra brother, essentially turning to a life of cannibalism that he would have to live with for eternity.

Then again, I am colorblind so maybe the two animals don't look all that similar anyway.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 20, 2013

There was great debate in the schoolyard as to if the man was blowing his nose, or wiping his mouth. Also, notice the man is totally dressed inappropriately for the climate there.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 19, 2013

My eldest daughter and I love Halloween. So she and I have decided that this is how we will decorate our house this year.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 18, 2013

This is the third day in a row, my notes have centered around life in or as a tree. This one is funny because all the other leaves are falling to their death. The one with the parachute lives, gets a good paying job, meets a beautiful oak leaf and gets married, has children, goes through a midlife crisis, loses his job due to redundancy, the oak leaf leaves him, his children stop calling and he ends up hanging himself in the basement with the Dollar Store belt.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 17, 2013

Each day I ask my daughter what she thought the note that day meant. When I drew this one I thought the Mommy Bird was getting impatient with the "egg" that wouldn't hatch. My daughter and her friends just thought she was pissed because someone smashed a baseball into her nest, which I didn't really see the humour in, but she and her friends thought was hilarious.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 16, 2013

I like how the tree doesn't seem angry, but is just trying to bear through it. Like a true pacifist. My daughter particularly liked the bloodshot eyes.

Luchroom Larfs- September 13, 2013

Along with my daughter's love of squids, comes a love for their only enemy the sperm whale. I'm not sure if it's a sentient submarine, or someone inside it that is confused.

She has started to show the cartoons around the lunchroom now so now I feel I have to keep this ritual up.

Luchroom Larfs- September 12, 2013

Not sure what inspired this cartoon, but I am so worried about copyright infringement even when only in my daughter's lunchbox, that I didn't make the toothpaste look like any brand.

Luchroom Larfs- September 11, 2013

My daughter came home from school today and said she, "was not doing good at Grade One." I suppressed the urge to explain that it might be due to her atrocious grammar and asked why. One of the changes in Grade One is that there is no longer a teacher yelling at you to say it's time to come in from outside. Instead there is a bell that is easily ignored by a daydreaming five-year-old. She said that she got in trouble because she didn't hear the bell. I asked what she was doing. She told me that she was, "singing to the bees to invite them to land on her shoulder."

We of course sent her to bed with no dinner.

Luchroom Larfs- September 10, 2013

I was totally out of ideas for today's note in my daughter's lunch, so I drew this:

That panda looks both sad and happy all at once. The flamingo is an apathetic dick.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 9, 2013

The night before I drew this one, we had some neighbors over with their kids for Smores. Do you know what is a bright idea? Feeding children a diet of chocolate, marshmallow and graham crackers right before bed. They were like Whirling Dervishes in the bed. An even better idea is to give into the screaming two-year-old demanding that she hold her own marshmallow roasting stick. Though "A Flaming Marshmallow" sounds like and excellent name for a band, it is not an excellent salve when applied directly from fire to skin.

 

Lunchroom Larfs- September 6, 2013

We went a good three days before losing the lunchbox. Yesterday when I picked my daughter up at school the lunchbox was nowhere to be found. We looked in her room, the lost and found and tried to check the lunchroom, but like the gulage I assumed it to be, it was locked up tight. My daughter was quite upset over this because the lunchbox was new "AND IT HAD PEACE SIGNS AND HEARTS ON IT. MY FAVORITE".

Today with head hung low and her ham sandwich in a liquor store bag she went to school. I tried to cheer her up with this happy thought of her lunchbox.

Like how the dog you had as a kid went to the "farm".

Because I am a genius, and put my phone number in the box, I got a call from someone saying they had the lunchbox, so I said, "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter's lunchbox go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you"

Or he just said that he left it by the main entrance of the school. I can't really remember to be honest.

I went to school today and there was the lunchbox, with all it's innards strewn around it like a pack of hyenas got at it and tore it apart. 

Lunchroom Larfs- September 5, 2013

We lay the seed of keeping boys away regularly at our house by giving my daughter a large amount of Cliff Claven like trivia to sprout off ad nauseam. Our hope is that this keen interest will work for us when she is a teenager and she'll go out with a nice nerdy boy. This is really plan two, plan one is to somehow raise her lesbian. Anyway, my wife found this video of a Noodle Squid, which I feel would make a really trippy lamp, and showed it to her. She flipped out and that lead to a Wiki Wormhole of watching videos on many weird squid in the ocean deep and delaying bedtime by about an hour.

This combines her two greatest loves. Macaroni and squid. Which I'm sure we could order in China Town.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 4, 2013

Another water themed note for my daughter's lunchbox. That worm obviously has Stockholm syndrome.

Note that we are too cheap to get my daughter flippers, only a mask and snorkel for her.

Lunchbox Larfs- September 3, 2013

In lieu of writing actual blog posts I thought I would share a new hobby with you. Isn't it interesting that it's a hobby if it is vaguely productive, but an obsession if it's vaguely criminal? Building model trains is a hobby, building trains out of models is an obsession. Jefferey Dahmer would be known as merely a hobbyist if we could all just stop labeling people. 

But as always I digress. My eldest daughter started Grade One this year (or First Grade for you American readers), which meant a lot of changes for her. She would have to go full day (8:45 - 3:15). Man, I wish when I was in an office that was considered a full day. She has to to more learning through structured learning rather than play. And she has to remember her lunch box. This of course is the apex of difficultly for any five-year-old.

She was quite worried about being in the busy lunchroom with all the big kids and who she would sit with, if anyone. Her worries made it sound like there may be a separate dungeon-like room for introverts where they take away the ham sandwich you brought and replace it was a tasty gruel, then immediately be pummeled by the Grade Sevens.

One of the things that she and I love to do together is draw. I don't claim to be a great drawer, (that's the technical title right?) but I do enjoy it. Always have. At the age of ten I asked for a drafting table for Christmas, making my free spirited young parents quite worried that they were in fact raising "The Man". Thankfully I don't have the drive nor energy to be a powerful person, I just wanted to draw silly pictures.

So in order to help her through the terror that would be lunch time I drew a silly cartoon and stuffed it in her lunchbox, hoping that would make her feel a little more at ease.

Being that this was my first attempt at a note to make my daughter feel good on the first day it's not incredibly funny, so much as it's something she can relate too. 

My daughter has an amazing interest in giant squids. We have read many books, watched a number of documentaries and even communicated with one of the world's foremost experts on giant squids, Dr. Clyde Roper. All this has cumulated in a planned visit to the Smithsonian to view the display there and hopefully meet Dr. Roper. Hopefully I'll have an amusing post about that when it happens.