Chores
Some things are important. If you have two cars and two drivers, and one car has to take the kid to school while the other has to shlep back to Santa Rosa to meet with the movers, then a flat tire on one of the cars is a serious bitch. A cracked windshield isn’t quite as big a deal, unless you cross a cop on a bad day.
About the windshield: first, it got starred by a flying rock on the 101, then a trip to Medford in the middle of summer turned the star into a spider. I replaced that windshield and the very next week (again on the 101) a truck kicked up a rock which starred my windshield. This time, I said fuck it, I’m letting this thing ride for as long as I can.
Friday night yucks
Stick with it to the end . . .
More performers should screw up their lyrics. It’s great entertainment.
Jonathan Coulton is also known for the best zombie song ever written and Still Alive, the end credits song for Portal. Portal, by the way, is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s pure, distilled brilliance.
D.
Too cute
My son outgrew his bowler hat, and he’s been pestering me to find a store where we could buy a new one. The kid hardly ever asks for anything, so it’s not like we’re spoiling him with bowler hats. Anyway, whenever Jake talks about the bowler hat we like to claim he’s emulating Alex (from A Clockwork Orange). Kind of difficult since he’s never seen the movie. (He’s way too young. He should be at least fourteen.)
We thought it would be fun to dress him up like Alex for Halloween. Karen remarked that he ought to skip the athletic supporter, which of course forced us to do a google image search, which led to
Time for a little ultracuteness!
Which doesn’t at all explain how we came by this,
pimp my code!
. . . from this zany place.
Gaaaah I’m exhausted.
D.
Unclear on the concept
You mean I wasn’t supposed to bring my son with me to Back to School Night? Then why do I have memories of my parents dragging me along with them to the elementary school for BtSN?
I tried to make it interesting for him. I told him, “Try to find the moms of the cuter girls in your class. That way you’ll know what they’ll look like when they get older.” Fortunately, I whispered it to him; otherwise, I think I would have crossed the line between Insufferable and Downright Embarrassing. Nevertheless, the minutes crept by. Forty minutes in a hot cafeteria . . . with no food.
Was I really supposed to go around from room to room to meet his teachers? Why? What possible motivation could I have to do such a thing? If we have questions of his teachers, we email them. Is this supposed to give me a glimpse into the adolescent zeitgeist? Make me a more empathetic parent? I think I’m plenty empathetic as it is!
So I’m afraid we slunk off together after the introductory comments were concluded. We were hot and we were hungry and I, for one, had had a very long day which wasn’t over yet (I still had to return to the hospital to complete a consult I’d rushed through at lunch . . . instead of eating lunch). Call me grumpy. Call me hungry. Call me a little bit of both.
I hope we don’t get dinged for not showing up in the classrooms. I did show up for the introductory comments, after all. That’s gotta count for something!
D.
So far, so good
My son has logged three days of high school, not counting the orientation day (wherein they played Simon Says and sang ‘several dumb songs’). He seems to be assimilating back into the mainstream with little sturm or drang. Well, maybe a little drang. Maybe lots of drang with Theology, since introspection isn’t Jake’s bag, and introspection is what it’s all about.
He has some sort of project involving four photos of himself and a paragraph explaining “how the journey of his life is like an adventure.” We picked four out of all the photos I’ve posted to the blog. Not this one,
which is one of my favorites.
I picked him up today after I was done in the OR. My patient scared the shit out of me as I was leaving: his pulse oximeter bottomed out. Due to his pigmentation, his nail beds looked blue, which didn’t help my worries. But then he started moving, which dead people don’t do, and when I readjusted the pulse ox, the numbers came up nicely. Effin machines.
Anyway, when I picked him up, he was talking to a girl who was a head taller than he was. I resisted the urge to tell him, “Yeah Jake YOU ROCK baby!” I’m trying not to be an embarrassment to my son. I really am! I can still remember how uncomfortable I was after my first date, when my dad asked if we had “gone parking.” I’d never heard that expression. The explanation, that was the embarrassing part.
Tomorrow is Back to School Night. Guess it’s more of a Back to School Night for us than it is for a lot of other folks there.
D.
Cookies ‘n contests
Kate has a contest, too. And just like Kris’s contest, which I hawked yesterday, she’s trying to bribe us with candy. Kate’s throwing in her new book and a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate, too. When I get pubbed, I’m going to send cookies.
Molasses cookies.
I’m grateful to Vons and Albertson’s that they no longer carry molasses cookies. Store-bought molasses cookies never were the shiznit, you know? Dry, chewy without being crispy, lean on flavor. A molasses cookie should be bold, full-bodied, complex. Spicy as a ginger snap, only edible.
So when my son got a yen for molasses cookies, I did what any real man would do. I googled “molasses cookies recipe” and picked the first one that sounded reasonable.
This recipe from About.com’s Southern Food section isn’t quite the shiznit, but it comes close; and if you read to the end, you’ll hear how we improved on an already good thing.
Overcompensate much?
My wife insists I blog this.
Zorc appears at around 1:01.
Zorc’s penis appears at around 1:20. Shooting fireballs.
There are antibiotics for that, you know.
D.
Gray skies
First, the blue sky news: Kris Starr has a contest. Promo, baby, promo! And a chance to get a cavity search*, too.
I drove down to San Pedro today to pick up school clothes for my son. That’s a little over two hours in one direction, barring traffic, but it’s L.A., so you can’t bar traffic. Got stuck in the thick of it on the 405 South, and again on the 405 North on the drive home. But the worst bit was the Grapevine, where I crawled at 2-4 mph for 30 or 40 minutes, thanks to a brush fire on the shoulder. That was painful.
Speaking of painful: did you know there’s a Ronald Reagan Freeway now? The Freeway Formerly Known as 118. It astonishes me how many things are named after that criminal.
Smog today: dense. Reminded me of my childhood. Must have been better up here in Bako, since my trainer worked the crap out of me and my lungs weren’t aching afterward (the way they used to when I was a kid. I thought it was a side effect of exercise). If you looked directly overhead, you could see some blue, but elsewhere, just a gray haze. I suspect visibility was under three miles. Yes, I can remember worse, but I grew up in the pre-catalytic converter era. Back then, pine trees would only grow so high. They would hit this invisible ceiling, and the top of the tree would look smooshed, as if the Jolly Green Giant had pressed each one down like Play-Doh.
I drove down by myself. No need to subject Karen to such a long drive, and Jake had schoolwork to worry about. Karen took his measurements and sent me on my grumpy** way. And now Jake is well accoutered to look like all the other Catholic High School kids 🙂
L.A. is like no place on Earth. (No place on Earth I’ve ever been to, that is.) This is where I grew up, this is my brain’s default idea of a city, but it’s still amazingly big. It took two or three minutes to drive from one end of Crescent City to the other, ten to fifteen to do the same in Santa Rosa. San Antonio was a little bigger: it used to take us about an hour to get from our home in Boerne to some of the cooler stores at the southwest end of town. Bakersfield? Maybe 20, 25 minutes tops to cover its full breadth. L.A. has no clear starting or stopping point, but one could easily spend several days driving the named freeways of Los Angeles . . . yeah, just the freeways.
This place is too big. The government needs to break it up into a bunch of Baby Bells. You could put Compton somewhere east of Bakersfield, Rancho Palos Verdes in the corn fields of Iowa. Hollywood gets to stay in Hollywood. Keep a few beaches down there, but not too many; I’m sure a lot of midwesterners would like to learn to surf.
Just a thought.
D.
*By your dentist, that is. Oh, go check it out, you’ll see what I mean.
**I really don’t understand why some guys like to drive.
This goes to . . . well, you know.
Even funnier with Legos.
The Catholic school’s not putting up any fuss over placing Jake in math analysis. He’ll have to perform well, of course, but we have no doubts about that.
Can’t tell you how refreshing it is to have administrators and teachers who are willing to work with us.
D.
P.S.: I would have gotten thrown out of Catholic High School. They have this little rule in the Code of Conduct forbidding public displays of affection 🙂