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Roll Call
“Amy?”
“Here.”
“John?”
*John waves from the back*
“And there’s Bertha…”
“Is it bad that you already know me by sight?”
He just grinned and continued calling roll.
Is It That Obvious?
Our Intermediate Accounting instructor wrote our assignment on the board Wednesday, saying “Here’s your second homework assignment.”
A classmate who had been absent blinked and asked “Second? What was the first one?”
The teacher gestured at me. I was busily writing down the assignment. “Ask Bertha. She’ll have it.”
Okay, we’ve had exactly one assignment in this class, and it wasn’t even one that got turned in. How the hell could she tell I, in particular, was bound to have it? Am I giving off some kind of vibe here?
More Proof That I’m A Terrible Parent
Yesterday we had an impressive thunderstorm. The light became eerily golden, the trees were alive with wind, and bursts of rain built into a heavy downpour.
My son put on his shoes and announced he was going to go outside and play in the rain.
My abrupt “No” brought him up short. (You have to be abrupt if you want to catch him before he’s out of earshot; the little bugger moves fast.)
“There’s lightning,” I explained, once I had made sure he wouldn’t be out the door by the second word. “If it were just the rain, I’d say go nuts, but you’re not going to play outside in a thunderstorm.”
He spent the next five minutes explaining to me the statistics of lightning strikes. “You’ve got a better chance of being eaten by a shark while swimming in the ocean than you do of getting struck by lightning.”
I would not relent, and he eventually gave up and sulked back to his room. I’m a very unreasonable parent, I really am.
Child Abuse
Their rooms are beyond messy. They’re shin-deep in toys and trash. There is no horizontal surface that is not covered in clutter. At night the slow scraping of junk keeps me awake as the tidal pull of the moon drags it back and forth across the floor.
Drastic measures had to be taken. I made up a list specifying what I consider to be “a clean room,” handed one to each of the boys, and declared “There shall be no computer time until your rooms meet these criteria.”
Governments suggesting increased taxes have met with less resistance. There was groaning, cajoling, bargaining and dirty looks. One went into his room for five minutes and came out declaring it was all clean now. I didn’t even bother to go look. The other one spent a lot of time shoving things back and forth across the floor, scowling and grumbling refusals when I offered to pitch in and help.
That evening my husband heard the rumblings of rebellion from the trenches when he got home.
“They can’t go on the computer until their rooms are clean,” I told him.
He adopted an expression of mock horror. “That’s terrible! You’re such a cruel parent!”
“I know. I’m surprised they haven’t called Child Protective Services.”
From the other room, my eldest chipped in, “I don’t know their number.”
Web Designers Will Find This Hilarious
Morning musings
I wish there was a way to booby-trap my yard so that the random dogs shitting in it would be electrocuted.
Cruise: The Ship
We’re mostly over our colds now, so we’re feeling lively enough to resume normal activities. Now I can talk about the cruise.
We went with Royal Caribbean, because they currently have the largest cruise ship afloat. As soon as the kids learned about this, they campaigned with great enthusiasm to go on that particular ship.
Liberty of the Seas
The picture just doesn’t give you any idea of the scale of the thing. It’s a floating city. You ride the shuttle bus up to a three-story building they process passengers through, and the ship towers above it. The thing has a promenade for Chrissakes. It has elevators inside it. It has a rock-climbing wall, a surfing pool, and a water park. It has an ice-skating rink.
My eldest took one look and declared that Liberty of the Seas is now his very favorite ship in the world.
Processing an entire city’s worth of people is not something that can be done quickly; it involved standing in line for over an hour. We arrived early in the boarding process; later arrivals had to wait even longer. Our fellow passengers were coming from numerous other countries, and I heard people speaking French and something that might have been Swiss or German. I asked the fellow in front of us if he had a pen we could borrow, and he replied with a Spanish accent, “No speak English.”
I was able to remember enough of last semester’s Spanish to dredge up, “Una pluma?” He brightened at once and got a pen out of his knapsack.
The crew was also widely multi-national. Our cruise director, Dave, had a wonderful Australian accent. The lady running our trivia contest and other activities was from Pennsylvania. The nice man who made my Marguaritas for me was from the Caribbean. There were people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas—I think every continent was represented except Antarctica.
Within an hour of boarding the ship, my sixteen-year-old had discovered the Johnny Rocket’s and wanted to go there for a hamburger.
We’re Back!
We’re back from our week-long cruise! And we’re all sick.
Fortunately we had the good sense to wait until the very last day of our trip to become sick. It was almost as if the ship went through a patch of bad air; we went to bed Friday night feeling fine, and we all started waking up during the night with sore throats and feeling lousy. The air seemed to become very dry all of a sudden. So Saturday while we were making our way back north from Miami, we were all a bit fractious as we felt increasingly crappy.
Plenty to tell about our trip, but I’ll save that for later in the week. Right now I’m so hopped up on Nyquil that I’m probably going to log on tomorrow and discover that I actually wrote about day-glo sea lions eating my begonias, or something.
