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My Profile
She blinded him with whiteness - 2008-07-25
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12:12 p.m. - 2008-02-17
Going to have brunch at Gram's later. Because driving two towns over to make scrambled eggs on a cruddy electric stove is the kind of thing I totally dig doing on the weekends. Bwah. Ha. Ha. Seriously, it was actually my idea to go to Gram's. I like having a grandma again. She adores me too. Plus I'm still not over the novelty of entering a roomful of in-laws and having them all go, "YAY! You're here!" Cooking on an electric stove and using the prehistoric toaster oven to make English muffins is a small price to pay for that kind of happy validation. I mean it about Gram's toaster oven. I think she bought it at the Flintstone's garage sale. That thing is so old it doesn't have heating elements, the bread is toasted by a small fire-breathing lizard. After brunch we're tootling off to Mick's school to go sledding. Uber-Sports School's campus has a wonderful sledding hill. The hill peters out onto a flat stretch of soccer field. This will be a nice change from sledding here at home, our yard's sled run dumps Wolf right at the foot of the driveway. One out of control skid and my boy is shooting out into the road. Scares me to death. He's not allowed to sled without a grown-up outside to snag him if it looks like he's heading for the road. Which is pretty much every run now that the kid's gotten heavy enough to get some real speed and frankly Mick is tired of being crashed into and I am beyond tired of waiting for the screech of brakes and a mortal thud. (Here my unruly mind wants to go headlong into a discourse on how our particular sledding circumstance is representative of the whole problem with today's world- society's precarious hover on the edge of disaster and the pervasive anxiety we live with. Nothing is fun anymore. Everything is fraught. Simple pleasures such as a child using a sled have become problematic near-death experiences and we as parents must maintain eternal vigilance only to see it come to naught when we send the child off to school to be shot dead by a whacked-out classmate. And if by some miracle the kid isn't shot, he'll be felled by the MRSA virus or a killer peanut allergy. If, somehow, the child lives to adulthood he'll be dead in a war or blown to bits by a suicide bomber and a daughter will be taken out by her demented ex-husband. And all the Frebreeze in the world won't stop it from happening.) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ That's as far as I got yesterday. We did go to Gram's. We did go sledding at Mick's school and it was a blast. The hill was an icy bobsled run. I'll bet speeds in excess of mach 1 were hit. Wolf had such a good time! I was some disappointed there weren't any other kids for him to play with, but aside from a family with a couple of pre-schoolers nobody else was using the hill. Something we thought was sad. The day was crisp and clear, the sledding conditions ideal, but outdoor activities pretty much disappeared around the time Gram's toaster oven was manufactured. See above about the wildly over-anxious state of being and parental hysteria. During all our travels yesterday we saw exactly one small scrum of kids playing outside. Man, when I was a kid on days like yesterday we were thrown out of the house and told to go play. Not just my mom either, all the kids in the neighborhood were zipped into snow clothes and given the chuck. We certainly didn't object, a fine sledding day like yesterday and only a case of double pneumonia and a couple of broken legs would have kept us indoors. Even the tiniest of inclines would have had a herd of laughing, shrieking youngins fighting for space to go whizzing down on flying saucers, toboggans, and even our butts if our snow pants were slippery enough. Sigh… sure sign of old age, that, gnarring on about 'When I was a kid…'. It's true though, the Pied Piper of Parental Paranoia has made off with all the children and has them safely tranquillized under Playstation Mountain. They might be fat and brain-dead, but dammit the kids are safe. Right?
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