Baby Ben Roethlisberger

I promised sports.  I promised controversy.  I promised current events.  Well ladies and gentlemen, I bring you all three in a single photograph.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture accompanied by a thousand words ought be worth a thousand dollars.  The world needs to see this.  For those of you who have not yet graced us with your presence, I'll supply the back story.  Amanda (my wife) ((this is the last time I'll mention that Amanda is my wife, so if you don't know me personally, try to follow along)) and I bought a house in Avondale Estates, GA.  For those of you who don't know Avondale, it is just east of Decatur and credited as the oldest planned community in America.

We bought our house from a couple spectacularly nice gentlemen whom (for the sake of identity protection) we'll call Basil and Sage.  They were originally from Boston, but moved to AE for Basil's work.  It so happened that Basil was a lumberjack who traveled a great deal to the Pacific Northwest or somewhere overrun with hardwoods.  Meanwhile, Sage occupied his time by staying home and doing ruggedly masculine tasks around the house like sanding things down to virtual nonexistence and recreating them with wood filler and homemade paint mixed of spit, sweat, and armpit hair.  At some point, Sage returned home from a horseback trip to Smith's Ace Hardware and noticed that Basil (temporarily home from lumberjacking yet still clad in flannel and Wranglers) had framed out a section of the wall of the master bedroom with left over trim and began painting the masterpiece below directly onto the wall!  (This is written in bold letters because I simply can't stress enough that the painting is seemingly forever plastered to the wall like hieroglyphics in the burial room of an Egyptian pyramid.)  Basil understands, much like myself, that the true way to a woman's heart is with the arts like painting, writing, and chocolate.  Sage however, did not appreciate the explicit nature of Basil's nude beauty and requested that he do something to cover her 'are[ol]a'.  I can't say for sure as I only received this story second-hand from Sage on a trip to my soon-to-be house to get last minute instruction on the landscape lighting (not a euphemism), but it seems the opposition gave Basil the greatest inspiration.  Basil decided to appease Sage by bringing in a reference to the NFL, but their hometown leader Tom Brady was simply too feminine.  Basil went to sleep to brainstorm.  When Basil awoke, inspired by the cold steel of his pillow case, he begin the chef d'oeuvre that would develop into Baby Ben Roethlisberger.      

Madonna with Child (not the singer)

As I'm no art history buff, I will spare y'all my critique.  I am really impressed by the painting and several other paintings Basil left us.  In fact, Basil left us four beautiful paintings above the fireplace as a 'housewarming' present.  In doing this, Basil effectively saved me dozens of hours of driving around town to various Kirklands and Homegoods stores trying to find what exactly to put up in that space.  Subsequently, Basil saved me another 10 hours of trying to hang whatever we found, $400 for that and a ladder, and about $7 for the bottle of Ibuprofen I would need to shield my synapses from the pain of my broken ankle and the shame of falling off said ladder.  See below for a photo of the aforementioned paintings.  

The Four Seasons

In case you were wondering, I'm keeping the painting even though the breastfeeding Madonna casts a gaze across my bed while I slumber.  It's an original piece of art, people!