Summer is Quickly Coming to a Shopping Halt

For my family, this is the end; of summer that is. There were such high hopes for this summer. Early in the summer, I spotted a tweet from a twitter friend, Rachel @girl_onthego, referring to her grandfather’s brain museum. More correctly, it is “The Museum of Neuroanatomy,” and it is located in Buffalo, NY, which is a scant hour drive from my home. It sounded off-beat enough to pique the interest of my daughters and me. I thought it would be a good thing to do.

Although it was on our list, it didn’t get marked off as done; we have decided to keep it on the list.

We did have a busy and wonderful summer. Littlest, Middlest, and I went with a group of teens out to Greenville, Illinois for a week of Bible Quizzing competition. As a family, we spent a day at the fair and an evening at a ball game (I wrote about that adventure last week). This past week, Beloved and I celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary. The details of that celebration will be kept under-cover.

Any long-time reader of my blog knows that I dislike shopping and the end of summer means more shopping: school shopping. I am not sure which I dislike more: school or shopping. Be assured, gentle reader, that I went to school. I even have a bachelors of arts degree in something or another. Notice that even though I was confirmed a bachelor, I still married, and being married is way better than school. Even if my wife works at an educational institution and drags me shopping.

Going shopping with women folk is an experience. Once in a while I will be asked whether I like one piece of clothing over another. The interrogator will hold each piece up over her appropriate body part and look at me expectantly.

I rub my bearded chin softly and make fluffy noises to my self with my brow furrowed. Then I reach out and touch the fabric of each item; I examine the quality of the stitching. Then I pronounce judgment on which one I like the best.

I always end up choosing the least expensive item, for, you see, while caressing the fabric and examining the stitching, I always look at the price tag.

While on one of these recent school shopping escapades, I was thinking to myself, “Self, it will be so nice when school starts and the shopping will be done.”

Beloved, as if reading my mind, hugged my arm and with a warm giggle said, “As soon as everyone gets back to school, we can go Christmas shopping.”

Oh bother.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

Saint Patrick’s day is upon us and it is one of my favorite minor holidays of the year. As a child, I remember all of the excitement at school. Everyone would wear greennand the cafeteria food had unique descriptions and always had green dye added--normally cafeteria food was green, but not because it was dyed that way.

Another part of the excitement of this holiday is my Irish heritage. A wee small part of me is Irish, and I believe it is one of my elbows, but I am flexible on that point.

In classes we would learn about Ireland and its history. We would also learn some of the folklore regarding Saint Patrick. He, apparently, drove all the snakes out of Ireland, into the ocean. A little known footnote to this story is that all those snakes made it across the ocean and took up residence, where they can still be seen slithering across the halls of government.

This mass exodus of snakes gives us an interesting insight into the history of one of the more adult sides of Saint Patrick’s Day; that is the consumption of fermented liquids in great quantities. Anyone who actually believes they saw a man driving snakes across the land and into the sea had to be drunk.

Another facet of Irish lore is the Leprechaun. These are solitary creatures who hide from people and guard great kettles of gold. I have had a lengthy phone interview with one who expresses great disdain for Saint Patrick’s Day. “It is the one day of the year we have to be extra cautious, for every school aged child and inebriated adult frolics through the countryside trying to locate our treasure. If it weren’t for Patrick, people would leave us alone.”

Interestingly enough, I never heard any of the real story behind Saint Patrick in school (probably due to all the politically incorrectness in the story). He immigrated to Britain from Scotland (we all know that immigrants are evil). He claimed to be a pagan and was kidnapped by pagans at the age of 16 (pagan is a negative label for those who worship anything they want). In captivity he converted to Christianity (everyone knows everything Christian is politically incorrect). After he returned to Britain, Patrick felt a call to go back to Ireland to teach them about Christ (see previous statement).

Those are the reasons that the real story of Saint Patrick isn’t talked about in schools. It is much too politically incorrect.

Instead of fuming about this, I am going to enjoy the brisk day outside and go frolicking through the fields. Perhaps I will find a leprechaun and can nab his treasure.

The first week of school: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

My very first ever blog post was about confusing technological phrases. In that post, I mentioned that Eldest, who was then in High School, was taking Spanish as her foreign language. Now she is in college and is majoring in English and Spanish. She has the same professor I had when I went back to finish my degree. The professor doesn’t know Eldest and I are related, and that is a good thing. She is also taking English Literature with the same professor I had in college. He knows she is my daughter, and that isn’t a good thing, but I hope he doesn’t hold it against her.

 Middlest, who was a freshman, was taking Latin. I originally thought it was so she could talk to Latvians, but apparently since Latin is a dead language, she wants to talk to dead people. Some time ago she took the National Latin Exam and won some sort of metal; it was either gold, silver, aluminum, or latinium. This year Middlest has elected to continue with taking Latin, and in addition she is taking Spanish, starting in Spanish 2, rather than Spanish 1. When her teacher explained something to her, another student stated they already knew that. The teacher replied that they had a Latin Scholar in class who hadn’t taken the first year of Spanish and needed a little extra explanation. Some of the students responded, “What is a scholar?” Middlest, as she related the story, simply shook her head, put it in her hand and said, “Oh heaven! Bless their poor souls.”


Littlest was taking French and continues to do well. About her teacher for Advanced Placement World History, we are a little suspect. She asks questions like, “Does anyone know where the glossary in the textbook is?” and “How would I use the table of contents?” These questions both exasperate and worry Littlest. She is concerned that if “the teacher doesn’t know the answers to these simple questions, what is she going to do when she has to teach us about Ibn Battuta and his impact on the world view and his insights into lifestyles of the peoples of the early 14th century?”


Littlest was thrilled to announce that after 7 days of classroom instruction, her History teacher is giving a quiz. When I asked what period of history the  quiz was going to cover she replied, “The past week and a half and all she has talked about is class room rules and the difference between taking a regular history class and an Advanced Placement history class. She has yet to teach us anything, so the quiz is going to be less of a history quiz and more of a current non-event quiz.”

How was your first day of school?

Today was the day; the day that children have been dreading, and parents have been yearning for all summer. It was the first day of school. I celebrated by going to work, driving a school bus. When I got to the garage, other drivers were gearing up for a busy morning. Soon, they had all left and I was hanging out waiting to see if my boss needed me. Sure enough, after a few moments of quiet, my boss looked out the window and barked, “Distaffen! There is a bus out there; go fire her up and pick up some kids and get ‘em to school.”

I asked which kids I should take to which school. There are a lot of children and a lot of schools in the district I work for.

“I don’t care!” He snarled, “Just get ‘em to school. Let the teachers and administrators figure it out, and smartify them. That is what they got all those college degrees for.”

I dutifully went out and started picking up students and dropping them off at school. Lots of different students, in different neighborhoods, and when I passed a school, I would drop some of them off. Although, once I mistook a lumberyard for a school, and the students pointed out my mistake.

When I got back from picking up dozens of students and dropping them off at a myriad of schools, my boss asked me how it went. “Just fine,” I replied. He grunted, “Fine? Then come back this afternoon.”

That afternoon I returned and looked around for my boss. He was chewing out a mechanic for using an amber light bulb instead of a yellow one. The mechanic looked plaintively at me. All I could do was spread my hands and shrug, because I couldn’t tell the difference either.

Finally, the tirade relented and my boss spotted me. “Distaffen! What are you doing back here?”

“You told me to come back this afternoon.”

“Well, yeah, whatever. Remember those kids your dropped off at school this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Go put them back.”

My children’s first day wasn’t much better. Except I think they had a good bus driver. Littlest and Middlest had large packets of surveys to complete. Beloved and I had stacks of papers to sign, assuring that our daughters would be respectful, involved, and interested members of the learning community. I always have nightmares that one of them will yawn in class and the school police will hunt me down with a copy of my signature on one of those forms, and when they find me, they make me go to detention.

Eldest, who is finishing up her secon week of her freshman year lamented over a paper she had to write for some guy named Phil. I asked her who Phil was and why she was writing his paper. She groaned, “Daddy, Phil isn’t a person, it is a class in Philosophical Ethics”

I couldn’t help her, so off we went to see grandpa, who has a bunch of college degrees and he smartified her.

Thank you Mr. President for my three jobs.

This was written in May, 2012. If you are reading it now, thank you. 

Today, it is expected that the Labor Department will announce the creation of 165,000 new jobs. I have three of them. I work three jobs, not because I am a workaholic. I could be a card-carrying member of the local Union of Procrastinators, except I keep putting off sending in the application. Nor do I work three jobs because I am greedy and want to make lots of money, since none of them pays extraordinarily well.

For my regular, 40 hour a week job, I go to the home of nine people who score lower on IQ tests than the majority of people score. Working in an environment like this can be quite stressful. I have been lied to, lied about, misused, maligned, and mistreated. In truth, if it weren’t for the nine residents of the house, I would have quit a long time ago.

Let me explain with a story. One afternoon I was particularly grumpy. I was not happy with life, particularly life at my 40 hour a week job. Yet, here I was walking in the door for another 8 hour sentence. When I walked in the door, Max met me with a huge smile. Max is not short for Maxine, Max is not even her real name. Everything Max does is 100% full of heart and today was no exception. I walk in grumpy, and Max comes around the corner with a huge smile and a big greeting. “Hi Wob!” That is what she calls me, Wob, not Rob, which is too formal for her I suppose, but Wob. “Hi Wob!” she grinned, “Welcome home. I am glad you’re here Wob. Are you hungry? Come in the kitchen, I will get you some snacks. You want a banana Wob?” The words came so fast and with such enthusiasm, I did not have time to blink before she had my hand and led me into the kitchen for a piece of fruit. Grumpiness…gone.

My second and part time job is at a printing and distribution center for time sensitive documents. Whereas my full time job is the most rewarding, this job is the most enjoyable. I work in the middle of the night, usually until 3 in the morning, in a noisy building, with cold, hard concrete floors, pushing heavy carts of documents into trucks to be distributed throughout the surrounding counties. If a mistake happens, it means lots of grumpy managers and customers. The equipment used is complicated and as you know, the more complicated a machine gets, the more likely it is to break down. When machines break down, things run late, when things run late, there are grumpy managers and customers.

What makes this such a wonderfully enjoyable place to work? The team of men I work with. Each person expects the other is eventually going to screw up and keeps checking what the other is doing. Eventually one of us screws up and someone else catches it and disaster is averted. Usually. If not, then we brace ourselves for grumpy phone calls.

My third job is my newest job and will hopefully take the place of my full time job in a few months. In the morning, I assist students to transition from home and community environments to the school environment. In the afternoon, I assist students in decompressing and smoothly transitioning from school to home environment. On top of this I get to drive a big yellow bus and stop traffic, which is way cool.

Thank you President Obama, for creating my three jobs. 

Do you suffer from Valentine's Day Panic?

Valentine’s Day is the holiday each year I look forward to with the least fondness. I am sure this is from the years in elementary school where teachers had each student write a valentine for every other student in the class. This frustrated me for two reasons.

First, I had, and still have, the world’s worst penmanship. Being a left-handed male has doomed me to smudged and wriggly letters. All through elementary school, I struggled with writing. The mention of an essay sent me into a panic. For those of you who have more youth than age, a bit of clarification. There was no internet, no personal computers, and no printers. The only way I could type was using a typewriter and if I made a mistake, I had to use ‘white-out’ to cover it and type over it. When I did type and with the amount of typo’s I made, I kept a 5-gallon bucket of latex white semi-gloss next to the desk and dipped a small paintbrush into it to fix my errors.

I always paired writing with penmanship. My difficulty in writing legibly caused me panic that generalized to not only forming neat letters, but gave me great anxiety when faced with stitching words together to make sentences and stacking sentences together into paragraphs. There are times when I sit at the computer and type meaningless, random letters, just to see how neat and tidy they appear on the screen. I want to cheer at this technological marvel that takes my words and makes them neat and orderly. There are even times I am filled with such joy at the orderly characters I publish those in my blog.

The second frustration of my elementary school Valentine’s Day memories is that I always seemed to have been left off another student’s list. Every year another student or two would seem to neglect to give me a little card with a heart, or superhero, and a shining example of their perfect penmanship. I am sure that some of those cards were simply overlooked as students checked names off those unending lists, or some that were dropped from paper bags as they were carried into school. I have a deep-seated suspicion that some were deliberately and malevolently unsent. As a child, I found this deeply and profoundly troubling and hurtful. However, now that I am an adult I see things differently and wish those former classmates no ill will. I used to think that deliberately leaving my valentine unsent was the beginning of a downward spiral eventually leading to a lifelong incarceration in a federal penitentiary. I now realize that those children probably grew up to be normal, healthy adults, with wonderfully fulfilling careers as convenience store cashiers or TSA agents.

It has been a few years since elementary school and the number of people on my Valentine’s list has shrunk. I buy a card for my wife and some small tokens of affection for my daughters. Those small tokens usually involve sugar and cocoa. The act of buying a cardhowever, still stirs a sense of panic , but I no longer fret over my penmanship. My wife seems to be able to recognize my scrawl; at least enough to know it was I who signed her card.

I would give cards to my daughters, but they make fun of my handwriting. I once wrote a note asking them to switch the laundry and they assumed I wanted them to send it to Switzerland. I did not want my shirts in Europe, I wanted them in the dryer. It is for this reason I have scratched them off my Valentine’s card list.

Spelling bee

GCMS held their school spelling bee this past week. Middlest was selected from amongst her classmates to compete. She was less than enthused; she was downright depressed. With all of her activities, she did not want to add another one. Mother asked, “Did you tell your teacher you didn’t want to compete?”

                “Another girl already tried that. The teacher told her there was not anyone else who wanted to compete. Like really? There is a whole class full of AP English students who could compete.” Middlest expressed her frustration with a roll of her eyes and a scowl. “Last year was more fun, when Littlest and I competed together!” Which they did; both of them made it to the last round. Being stumped on baccalaureate and annihilate.

                The preparation continued. Mother reading a word and Middlest spelling it. With scientific precision Middlest rattled off the proper spelling for each word. When she missed one, she would write the proper spelling on a sheet of paper for further review. Mother read the word, “similarity” and Middlest commenced, “S-I-M-I-L-A-R-I don’t understand why I have to do this!” Her transition between spelling and complaint was smooth and seamless.

                The next word was deceit. Which prompted a discussion of the ‘i-before-e-except-after-c rule and all of its corollaries, such as ones you can disprove with science and other weird options. Littlest piped in, “I thought every time I read that word in a book it was spelled, i-e-t.” to which Middlest responded, “I hate reading books that haven’t been written.”

                The evening of the spelling bee arrived. Middlest again expressed her unwillingness to compete. Littlest offered to take her place, “No one will know it is me.” Middlest rolled her eyes, “No, it is ok, I will do it alone. But I wish you were competing with me.”

                That night Middlest got out in the second round. The word that tripped her up? Loneliness.

               

                

SNOWDAY?!

Tomorrow the forecast calls for a winter storm, with up to 15 inches of snow in the area. This means a rush on the local grocery stores. For some mysterious reason whenever the forecast calls for snow, people immediately go to the grocery store to buy bread and milk.

I went to the grocery store today to make some purchases for dinner tonight. We are having pot roast, using a calorie-free carbonated beverage as liquid, instead of water. I did not purchase any milk or any bread. The gentleman in front of me as we checked out was lamenting the storm, and the possibility of getting snowed in.

“You were afraid of running out of milk and bread?” I asked him.

“Oh no, I don’t touch the stuff, I am gluten and lactose intolerant. But the talking heads on my television set said it would be a good idea to stock up on milk and bread.”

“Excellent idea, you can feed the poor sparrows and put out saucers of milk for any traveling cats caught in the storm.”

My children are thrilled at the prospect of a snow day. They are eagerly plotting how to ensure that school is closed tomorrow. They have heard from a number of experts on how to ensure this happens. They are going to wear their pajamas backwards, sleep with a spoon under their pillows, and flush ice cubes down the toilet. They received most of this information from a family friend, who is an elementary school teacher. So it must be right!

I told them I have the foolproof way to ensure a horrible snow storm. With great eagerness they begged and pleaded to hear my words of wisdom.

“Wash my car.”

The looks on their faces indicated they did not believe it, so I explained that as soon as I wash my car, it never fails to storm out so it gets covered with salt again. They rolled their eyes in disbelief and grabbed entire trays of ice cubes to flush down the toilet.

My youngest girl announced that the last time it snowed particularly hard out, one of her classmates came to school visibly angry. When she was asked what the problem was she explained her father “made me come to school; he would not let me stay home.”

My daughter consoled her and said that I had made her come to school too.

To which the girl replied, “You don’t understand, my father is the Superintendent!!! I begged him but he wouldn’t cancel school.”

“Why not?” my inquisitive daughter inquisited.

“He said we didn’t have enough bread and milk.”