Nobody Knows Anything

I took the kids and flew to Chicago for the weekend for what is euphemistically known as “a family emergency.” Ah, so this is what people talk about when they talk about family emergencies.

I don’t recommend them.

Anyhow, I got to experience the joys of traveling by plane. All I can say is, TSA? Frak you very much. We’re stuck in a hot airport and then on a hot, dry-air airplane with nary a flight attendant in sight, let alone a bottle of water. I can’t wait for people to start getting massively ill from dehydration. Starting with little kids, who often need something to drink and they need it now.

They confiscated the kids’ jar of Nutella at the airport. The Transportation Safety Administration: keeping the country safe from European chocolatey spreads since 2006. The funny thing is? They confiscated it on the return flight. Along with the two juice boxes I hadn’t even realized the kids had put in the bag. So I managed to fly one way with these dangerous implements of nutrition and apparently nothing happened.

This no-liquids nonsense has got to end. And it is nonsense. Pure political theater, not based on anything real. Please, we’ve been taking bottles of water/shaving cream/hand lotion on planes for years. We have these verkakete regulations because a couple of bozos in England were talking about doing some massive terrorist attack, not that they had plans, and not that they had realistic plans. (That James Bond thing they were planning on? Not going to happen in real life, guys.) And the authorities found them the old-fashioned way: police work. Not by confiscating a goddamn bottle of Arrowhead Spring Water at the security line.

I can’t figure out what the upside to this is. Business travelers must be pissed having to check all their luggage. Moms with little kids: not too happy either. I assume that this is just to keep us all afraid, ’cause it sure isn’t making us any safer. Which is par for the course with this bunch.

I woke up this morning — better would be to say, “I extracted myself from a comfortable and warm bed simply because a loud noise urged me to and not because I was, say, ready” — and dressed quickly before heading down the hallway to the kids’ room to get them up for school.

I walked into the room and thought, Why are their beds empty? I was very confused by this — surely I would have heard them if they were downstairs watching TV, wouldn’t I? (What didn’t dawn on me until later: the odds that they would pass by my room without paying me a loud visit were nil. Or lower.) They weren’t downstairs. They weren’t in their beds. They weren’t on the floor. Where in the hell were they? I didn’t freak out, precisely, but I was certainly on the periphery of it.

Then I realized they were in bed: both of them were sleeping with all of their covers drawn up over them, so that it looked like their beds were made. I pulled the sheet down from Sophia’s face and said, “Time to get up, honey.” She grunted and pulled the sheet back up. It took quite a bit of cajoling. I am so glad I make them take out their clothes the night before or we would have been there forever. Zeus Almighty, that momentary panic took a few years off my life.

I understand the problem of wondering what happened to the kids will get worse during their teenaged years when they actually will be gone from the room.

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A friend of mine IM’d me the other day with a link to a news story from about 10 years ago about a white collar criminal who made off with over a million dollars… but then got caught. I pinged back saying, “WTF? Who cares?” My friend then pointed out that we knew the guy. I hadn’t known what his full name was.

Oh my God.

He did what?

I am by no means pals with this guy. We know one another’s names and see one another once in a while. But still: I liked him, I liked talking to him, I never would have thought he was the kind of guy who could do something like this. At no time did my spidey sense tingle. And maybe it shouldn’t have: after all, he’s done his time, and the way I know him has nothing to do with doing crimes. It’s none of my fraking business, right?

But wow. I am stunned. Finding out stuff about people — thanks to the Internet, things need never put behind us again! — completely changes how you think about them. I mean, am I going to be able to have a conversation with this guy again? In fact, am I going to want to go to the get-togethers he puts on?

I know we don’t believe in redemption or rehabilitation in this country — we say we do, but we lie like little rugs on the floor. I just never realized how much I didn’t believe it.

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Is it scary or wrong of me to want one of these?

Vote for your favorite hotties.

(Yes, this is what I spend my time finding.)

Simon’s preschool is 4 miles away. I usually take the freeway there, surface streets back, and it’s 4 miles either way. And it takes 15 minutes, door to door.

Today, Sophia was off school and we biked to the market and back. When we returned home, she said, “Let’s bike to Simon’s school!”

What an excellent idea, I thought. I’ve been wanting to do exactly that, and I wanted to know how long it took to ride there. So after we put the food away, we got back on my trusty Xtracycle and headed to Simon’s school.

It takes 19 minutes to bicycle there.

And that was with Sophia on the back. She weighs slightly more than Simon, so it would probably be faster with Simon.

It took longer to get home — about 26 minutes — probably because from school to home involves what amounts to a giant left-hand turn, which slows you down quite a bit on a bike. And, of course, I had two kids on the back.

And when I got home I was a little more tired and sweaty than perhaps most people might like to be for their day, but I was completely exhilarated — it’s mostly a car-free ride to the school, except for a stretch along Los Gatos-Almaden, which is newly paved and has a pretty good bike lane for most of it. (I’m actually not a big fan of bike lanes, because I think they encourage cars to regard bikes as a nuisance that can be kept over to the side of the road and not treat them as separate vehicles on the road, which, you know, they are. But the new paving was definitely nice.)

A mom at the school said, “Oh yes, I’d love to bike to school, but I have three kids.” I don’t know what the solution is for her, but there has to be one, doesn’t there?

Via Commute by Bike, it’s the World’s Best Card Trick!

(Okay, I am so lame I don’t know how to embed YouTube video. Sigh.)

(Oh, it turns out YouTube is lame and doesn’t support MT yet. Carry on.)

Now, maybe everyone else in this area drives a whole bunch more than I do and they already knew about this, but I just discovered one of the coolest features of living in this area.

So there we are, driving up Highway 17, heading to 85, and then to Simon’s preschool when BAM! Someone throws something at our car.

Except there aren’t any other cars around. Hmm.

On the connector between 17 and 85 the car starts driving funny and I think, “I bet this is the situation people refer to as ‘a flat tire.’”

I pull out the phone and call the preschool to let them know I’ll be late. Then I dig out my AAA card and get ready to call.

A tow truck pulls up behind us. Oh great, think I, a freelancer. I tell Sophia to remain belted in, just in case. In case of what? I don’t know. But it seems like the prudent maneuver.

The guy comes over to the passenger window and says that he’s with the Freeway Service Patrol and he’d be happy to change my tire for free. Which he proceeds to do in about 15 minutes. He asks me to fill out a little survey form and mail it back at my convenience. And then we’re all done and I continue on my way. I end up being about 10 minutes late picking Simon up.

Coolest. Thing. Ever.

And I don’t have to use up one of my AAA freebies.

If you drive in the Greater Bay Area, you need these guys’ brochure in your glove compartment.

Sorry, haven’t been around much — both kids have been off school, and I have done such things as go to Bonfante Gardens twice in two weeks. (And boy, are my arms tired.) And now after our break it’s time to get ready for school, which involves running around and getting the list of silly school supplies required (TWELVE sticks of glue?). And every fall the kids get new lunch boxes.

Simon took approximately 0.000000004 seconds to choose his: the Batman lunch box, which came complete with cape on the back! Sophia chose the Lil Bratz one, mostly because it was pink. (I’m fairly sure she doesn’t have any Bratz dolls.) And they’ve been very excited about their lunch boxes since we brought them home.

And then Simon mentioned that the Batman box’s cape was all wrong: it had a straight edge instead of points. I thought it was funny that he noticed such a detail about the cape.

Then he mentioned that the Bat symbol on the front was different.

I looked at it, and yup, he was right, that’s not the Bat symbol. The Bat symbol has one points in the middle of each wing; this lunchbox’s symbol has two points.

Damnation. This is a counterfeit lunch box. And it’s probably not really Thermos brand either.

The weird thing is, I didn’t buy this at a corner off Capitol Expressway, I bought this at Target. You know, major corporation, central supply facility, etc. You’d think they’d have buyers who would, you know, notice these kinds of things.

Now, Simon loves his lunch box, and I realize that this is not the end of the world. But am I supposed to mention something to Target — “By the way, you’re selling fakes!” Am I supposed to take this from Simon and try to return it?

I keep opening these links and then losing where I got them from, but here are some good links I’ve found:

Life? It can be a musical. At college, at any rate. (Wait! I remember this one. Via Suburban Guerilla.)

Maureen Johnson on How To Write A Book.

Tell me the Amateur Gourmet doesn’t make you want to run right out and make a quiche. Or at least be a witty Jewish playwright in New York.

How to Write Screenplays. Badly. is always hilarious. Clearly, this guy will have a 3-picture deal soon.

I spent it flying. With two kids. It was even more fun than you can imagine. (As John Rogers and George RR Martin put it, that’s the point. I was so clearly the harried mother of two in the pre-board line that the attendant letting us on let me go on without having to go through the pre-board search. So I walked on with two bottles of water. So much for TSA Security.)

After a few days away, I am so happy to be home again. The odd thing is, I feel as though I was away for weeks. I keep wondering why Mel Gibson is still on the cover of People. Have the shops in town changed any?

My lovely, talented, and amazing daughter found my notebook in a place where I would never have thought to look for it and have no idea how it might have migrated there: a bag of toys rounded up and stuck under the kitchen desk a long time ago.

But who cares. It’s found.

What’s funny is, even when I was freaking out about it on Friday, I had a quiet, calm voice in my head saying, “You wrote it once, you can write it again. Everything is fine.” So I got over my upset a lot faster than I might have once. It’s like I’m growing up or something. (Which is good, given that my birthday is this week.)

Off to transcribe.