BerthaBlog

You’re on a plane, and your toddler has been having a tantrum. Her behavior is so extreme that the flight has been delayed for 15 minutes while they wait for you to get your child under control. Do you:

1. apologize to the other 112 passengers on the flight
2. ask the flight attendant to assign you to a later flight and leave the plane, to gain more time to get the kid under control
3. just keep holding her on your lap and expecting the rest of the plane to listen to her screaming while they all wait for you

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When it becomes clear that you will not be putting a stop to your child’s behavior, the pilot has your family removed from the flight so you will no longer delay the other 112 passengers. Do you:

1. feel embarrassed that your child caused such a disturbance and inconvenience to so many other people?
2. take the opporunity as an example to the child of how bad behavior results in unpleasant consequences?
3. pitch your own tantrum for the media so the airline will give you free tickets to make up for acting as if all those other people on the plane were just as important as you?

Apparently all the hullabaloo is because the airline, following FAA regulations, required the child to be in a seat and buckled in before they’d take off. The parents think this is an unreasonable thing, and they’re completely wrong. The safety issue isn’t just to keep their crotchfruit in one piece, it’s also to prevent her from injuring another passenger when her unsecured body goes flying around the cabin in the event of an emergency landing.

The father said his family would never fly AirTran again. Sounds to me like a selling point for AirTran, right there.

Ya know, when your first thought on getting out of bed is to wish it were Friday, because you’re so tired and you just want the weekend to get here already…

…and then you remember it’s Monday morning…

…well, it just doesn’t bode well for your week.

They were predicting a little winter weather, but this morning it started snowing hard enough to make the roads slushy. The public schools are closed, the community colleges are closed, and we’re all hanging around the house now going “Woo hoo!”

So I’ll probably spend the morning doing all the homework I couldn’t do last night, because I wasn’t home more than half an hour yesterday. Then I’ll spend the afternoon farting around on teh intarwebz. I predict by the end of the day my online friends will be turning off their computers to get away from me.

It’s been quite the busy week around here. Just about every afternoon there was some errand to run after school. Homework had to be done in the evenings, or at least as much as I could manage before my brain said “Screw that, I’m turning off the lights and going home.” I’ve been doing my assignments the day before they’re due, which gives me a feeling of barely keeping up. Luckily I don’t have many commitments over the upcoming three-day weekend, so I’m hoping to gain a little ground academically.

I’ve also run across one aspect of college I’ve never liked: being hit on. One of my classmates seems to have targetted myself and meriwynn for flirtation; he touches our arms while talking to us, tells us how great we look, how nice we are, and so on. I set a bad precedent last week when I gave him a hug goodbye; normally I don’t like hugging people I barely know, but he seemed to be expecting something and I wanted to end the awkwardness. After that he expected a hug goodbye every day.

The first day it was mildly flattering, but frankly now it’s getting a little creepy. Tuesday I’m going to discuss it with him and ask him to tone it down, and tell him I’m really not comfortable being touched by someone I barely know. It’s quite possible he doesn’t realize he’s making us uncomfortable. But he can learn. I’ve found most guys are perfectly happy to do what I want if I just tell them unequivocally what that is.

I still don’t know if my spouse is right about my being an overachiever. I certainly wasn’t in high school. My mother recalls saying to me, “What is it with these C’s on your report card? You have an IQ of 136, you should be making straight A’s and certainly no less than B.”

“What can I say, Mom. I’m a classic underachiever.”

But maybe that’s changed since then, because there’s evidence that my mate may be right. At the end of my first accounting class, one of my classmates approached me to ask if I’d be willing to assist her. She’s deaf, and she was having trouble copying down what the instructor wrote on the board while watching her interpreter at the same time. She asked if I’d mind giving her a copy of my notes for the classes—she had some special carbon paper so I could just take notes as usual and then have two copies of them. I said that would be no problem.

I wondered as I was packing up why she’d selected me, because I’d been sitting on the other side of the room. As I turned to leave and saw the rest of the class, I understood her reasoning: I was the only one in the class who had been taking notes.

So I guess either my husband’s right and I’m an overachiever, or I’m the only one in the class who wasn’t getting it. I figure if the teacher is writing it on the board, I should write it in my notes. Hey, it’s worked for me so far.

A new semester has begun! With my catch-up-to-college Algebra class out of the way, I can now take an actual accounting course in my accounting curriculum. Only one, though, because this one is a prerequisite to every other accounting course offered. So I’m filling out the rest of the semester with a couple of other required courses, plus basic Spanish and a class in web graphics.

I’m totally jazzed about being back in school. Last semester a lady who’d learned I was going back to school said, “I’m so glad I don’t have go to school any more.” I found the sentiment surprising; if I had the money I’d go to school for the rest of my life. There’s so much stuff I want to learn.

On the other hand, going to school means no more time for World of Warcraft. Oh, well.

In other news, my oldest son is just finishing up his driver’s ed course. Next week he should actually be getting some road time. Ironically my aspie fifteen-year-old son will probably be one of the safer drivers in this area; people around here can get nuts behind a wheel. I’m more worried about the other idiots on the road than I am about him.

Today on the way home from swim practice I had to turn on the air conditioner in the van. WTF? Hello, January?